Media

• Representation of crime - distortion

  • Over-represent violent and sexual crime
  • Exaggerates police success
  • Exaggerates risk of victimisation
  • Crime is reported as a series of separate events and doesn't acknowledge underlying causes
  • Overplays extraordinary crimes and underplays ordinary crimes
• Representation of crime - coverage

  Selection of crime stories covered relies on:

  • Immediacy
  • Dramatisation
  • Celebrity involvement
  • Simplification
  • Unexpectedness
  • Risk
  • Violence
• Representation of crime - influence of fiction

  • Surette - 'the law of opposites' is when fiction provides people with opposite information than the official statistics
  • Property crime under-represented and violence over-represented
  • Fictional villains tend to be middle-aged, white males
  • Fictional cops tend to typically catch the bad guy
  • Counter - rise in true crime and rise in presenting police as corrupt
• Media causing crime - fear

  • Gerbner - heavy users of TV had higher levels of fear of crime
  • Counter - not necessarily the media that causes it, those who are already afraid of going out at night watch more TV just because they stay in more
• Media causing crime - relative deprivation (Lea and Young)


  • Left realists argue that the mass media help to increase the sense of relative deprivation to others, causing a rise in utilitarian crime
  • Merton - pressure to conform to the norm causes deviant behaviour as the opportunity to achieve legitimately is blocked
• Media causing crime - culture criminology

  • The media turns crime into a commodity that people desire
  • Hayward and Young - image and reality of crime is blurred
  • Gang assaults are staged and released as 'underground fight videos'
  • US police forces use reality TV shows like 'Cops' as promo
• Media causing crime - commodification (Hayward and Young)


  • Crime and its thrills become commodified as corporations use it to sell to young people
  • Hip hop combines images of the street hustler criminality with consumerist success
  • Graffiti is the mark of deviant, urban and cool behaviour, brands use it as a marketing technique
• Moral panics - overview

  • The media identify a group as a folk devil or a 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 and other 'respectable' authorities condemn the group and its behaviour
  • Leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy where the group live up to their label and more arrests are made
• Moral panics - Mods and Rockers (Cohen)


  • Scooter and motorcycle gang that the media depicted as a gang war
  • Exaggeration and distortion - numbers of those involved inflated and extent of violence were dramatised
  • Prediction - assumed and guessed further conflict would arrive
  • Symbolism - their clothes, vehicles, and music were negatively labelled and associated with deviance
• Moral panics - deviance amplification spiral (Cohen)


  • Media reporting led to calls for an increased control response from the police
  • Produced further marginalisation and stigmatisation of folk devils
  • Defining the 2 subculture's style made them appealing to young people, who joined the groups and materialised the media's depiction of a large gang war
• Moral panics - wider context (Cohen)


  • Often occur at times of social change, reflecting the anxieties many people feel when accepted values seem to be undermined
  • Also a result of a boundary crisis, where the line between acceptable and unacceptable had become blurred
• Moral panics - criticisms

  • McRobbie and Thornton - moral panics are now routine and have less impact
  • In late modern society, there is little consensus about what is classified as deviancy, lifestyle choices such as being a lone parent or homosexual are looked down upon by some but others support it
  • Modern news sources are so diverse in formats and viewpoints that it is impossible to get every outlet to support the same story
• Cyber-crime (Wall)


  • Cyber trespass - hacking or sabotage
  • Cyber deception and theft - identity theft or piracy
  • Cyber pornography - videos involving minors or allowing minors to view normal porn
  • Cyber violence - bullying, sending unwanted nudes or hate speech
  • Global cyber crime - terrorist groups or organising trafficking