Media

• Give a statistic proving that the media over-represent violent and sexual crimes

  Ditton and Duffy (1983) found that 46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crimes yet this only accounts for 3%
• How does media distort representation of crime?

  • Overrepresent violent and sexual crimes
  • Media portray criminals and victims as older and more MC
  • Media coverage exaggerates police success
  • Media exaggerates risk of victimisation
  • Crime is reported as many separate events
  • Media overplay extraordinary crimes
• How does media present victims as older and more MC

  Felson (1998) calls this age fallacy
• How does media overrepresent police success?

  This is because police are a major source of crime stories and want to be presented in a good light and partly because media overrepresents violent crimes which have a higher clear-up rare than property crime
• How does media exaggerate risk of victimisation?

  Especially for white MC women
• What does Felson call the overplay of extraordinary crime?

  Dramatic fallacy
• What are the key news values which influence the selection of crime stories

  • Immediacy
  • Dramatisation
  • Personalisation
  • Higher status
  • Simplification
  • Novelty
  • Risk
  • Violence
• What ways can media cause crime?

  • intimidation
  • arousal
  • desensitisation
  • transmitting criminal knowledge
  • target for crime
  • stimulating a desire of unafforable goods
  • portray the police as incompetent
  • glamorising crime
• Materialism


  • media presents images of everyone with a perfect lifestyle causing relative deprivation
  • Links to Mertons strain theory
  • eg. Kim Kardashian TV show then gets robbed