Does the Media Falsely Represent Crime? Is it Biassed?

• The media has a important role of deciding what is right and what is wrong
• People rely on the media to inform them of things that they didn't know
• Media decides what they show, they often show newsworthy crimes - they choose what we see and when
• People can only have opinions and discussions about what they have been informed about - what people think about crime and deviance is from the media
• The media creates crime 'newsworthy' - makes it a good story that the audience wants - editors and journalists have values and assumptions to choose what is newsworthy which helps them to choose what to report
• Journalists include and emphasise elements of a story to make it more newsworthy
• Stories are more likely to be reported by the media if:

  • children are involved
  • violence is involved
  • celebrities are involved
  • rights of appeal (the opportunity to challenge a judicial court's decision) occurs
  • the event has occurred locally
  • the event is easy to understand
  • graphic images are involved
• Crime and deviance make up a lot of the news coverage - in 1983 Ditton and Duffy found that 46% of reports from the media were violent or sexual crimes - this only made up 3% of all the crimes recorded by the police
• How the large amount of violent crimes portrayed makes people think that it happens more often than it does and overestimates how likely it is for them to be a victim to a violent crime
• Current crime figures from the Office for National Statistics show that you are more likely to be a victim of crimes like fraud than violent crimes
• The risk of being a victim of any crime has fallen from 4 in 10 in 1995 to 2 in 10 in 2018
• The media use deviancy amplification
• Mods and Rockers in the 1960s are an example of deviancy amplification, as well as gun and knife crime but also drug use - links to moral panics which makes the issue seem bigger than it actually is - this media coverage makes certain individuals or groups as a folk devil, this means that they are a threat to society