Crime and Media

• How does the media impact crime?


  Stories provide sources of spectacle and mass entertainment

  Tv shows have dramatised crime

  People have direct or indirect experiences of crime and turn to the news

  News in selective with information

  Encoruages fear and fasicnation of crime
• What are the news values?


  Risk

  Children

  Violence

  Spectacle and graphic image

  Celebrity or high status people

  Simplification

  Conservatism

  Proximity
• What is the backwards law?


  Surette (2010) the media constructs images of crime which are an opposite or backwards of reality of what really happens as they tend to exaggerate violence based on crime fiction
• What are the effects of media exaggerating crime?


  Feeds the fear factor for people

  Sensationalise reportings as crime against young women are rare but mostly covered in the news

  TV programmes like crimewatch dramatise insights of crime
• What is a moral entrepreneur?

  Individual or group who influences society's moral values and norms. The media is one as they establish themselves as self-appointed guardians of national morality by labelling and stereotyping
• What is a moral panic?


  A wave of public concern about some imaginary or exaggerated threat to society generating growing public concern
• What is a folk devil?


  An over-simplified, ill-informed generalisations of particular people/social groups who moral entrepreneurs wish to demonise
• How can moral panic affect crime?


  It can sensitize the police, courts and other agencies of social control which can leader to harsher sentences against folk devils which may lead to self-fulfilling prophecies and deviance amplification
• How can moral entrepreneurs affect crime?


  Media stories can demonise those in activities as folk devils and sensitize the public to such an extent that support action is encouraged against them
• In what ways do the media cause crime according to Greer and Reiner (2012)?

  • Labelling, moral entreupreneurship and deviancy amplification
  • Motive for crime
  • Knowledge and learning of criminal techiques
  • New means of committing crimes
  • Providing targets for crime
  • The reduction of social controls over time
• How relevant are fold devils and moral panics in today's world?

  It is outdated as the media has changed since

  People have become more skeptical

  Wider diveristy of media reports

  Moral and immoral behaviour are blurred

  Stories have shorter 'self-lives'