media

• Crime and deviance make up a large proportion of news coverage
• Richard Ericson et al's (1991) study of Toronto found that 45-71% of quality press and radio news was about various forms of deviance and its control
• Williams and Dickinson (1993) found British newspapers devote up to 30% of their news space to crime
• The news media give a distorted image of crime, criminals, and policing compared to official statistics
• The media over-represent violent and sexual crime compared to official statistics
• Ditton and Duffy (1983) found that 46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crimes, yet these made up only 3% of all crimes recorded by the police
• One review by Marsh (1991) found that a violent crime was 36 times more likely to be reported than a property crime
• The media portray criminals and victims as older and more middle-class than those typically found in the criminal justice system
• Felson (1998) calls the portrayal of criminals and victims as older and more middle-class the 'age fallacy'
• Media coverage exaggerates police success in clearing up cases
• The media exaggerate the risk of victimisation, especially to women, white people, and higher-status individuals
• Tumber (1994) focused on murders and petty crime and found that media coverage exaggerated the penalty for murder
• By the 1990s, media coverage focused on child abuse and sex crimes
• Crime is reported as a series of separate events without structure and without examining underlying causes
• The media overplay extraordinary crimes and underplay ordinary crimes
• Felson calls the overplaying of extraordinary crimes and underplaying of ordinary crimes the 'dramatic fallacy'
• Media images lead us to believe that sex crimes are the most common type of crime
• News media coverage of crime has changed over time
• In the 1960s, news media focused on murders and petty crime
• By the 1990s, murder and petty crime were of less interest to the media
• Changes in crime coverage were influenced by the abolition of the death penalty for murder and rising crime rates
• By the 1990s, news reporting had widened to include drugs, child abuse, terrorism, football hooliganism, and mugging
• There is an increasing preoccupation with sex crimes in news media
• Newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under a quarter of all cases in 1951 to over a third in 1985
• News media often focuses on identifying a 'sex fiend' or 'beast' in sex crime cases
• The distorted picture of crime in news media is a social construction
• News values influence the selection of crime stories in the media
• Key news values influencing crime story selection


  • Immediacy
  • Dramatisation
  • Personalisation
  • Higher-status persons and 'celebrities'
  • Simplification
  • Novelty or unexpectedness
  • Risk-victim-centred stories about vulnerability and fear
  • Violence
• News media focuses on the unusual and extraordinary, making deviance newsworthy
• Fictional representations from TV, cinema, and novels are important sources of knowledge of crime
• Fictional representations of crime influence public perceptions
• Section 60 is named after the section giving police the power to stop and search
• Even counter-cultures are packaged and sold
• Graffiti is the marker of deviant urban cool, but corporations now use it in a 'guerrilla marketing' technique called 'brandalism' to sell everything from theme parks to cars and video games
• Companies use moral panics, controversy and scandal to market their products
• Media causing crime and deviance through labelling

  Moral entrepreneurs disapprove of some particular behaviour and use the media to pressure authorities to 'do something' about it. This can result in negative labelling of the behaviour and possibly a change in the law
• Moral panic creation


  An exaggerated over-reaction by society to a perceived problem, usually driven or inspired by the media, where the reaction enlarges the problem out of proportion to its real seriousness
• Characteristics of a moral panic

  • The media identify a group as a folk devil or threat to societal values
  • The media present the group in a negative, stereotypical fashion and exaggerate the scale of the problem
  • Moral entrepreneurs, editors, politicians, police chiefs, bishops, and other 'respectable' people condemn the group and its behaviour
  • This usually leads to calls for a 'crackdown' on the group, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that amplifies the problem
• Setting up special drug squads led the police to discover more drug taking, creating a deviance amplification spiral
• Stanley Cohen's book 'Folk Devils and Moral Panics' is the most influential study of moral panics and the role of the media