Crime is manufactured

• The distorted picture of crime painted by the news media reflects the fact that news is a social construction; news doesn’t simply exist waiting to be gathered and written up by the journalist. It’s the outcome of a social process in which some potential stories are selected while others are rejected. As Cohen and Young note, news isn’t discovered but manufactured.
• A central aspect of the manufacture of news is the notion of 'news values'. News values are the criteria by which journalists and editors decide whether a story is newsworthy enough to make it into the newspaper or news bulletin. If a crime story can be told in terms of some of these criteria, it has a better chance of making the news.
• One reason why the news media give so much coverage to crime is that news focuses on the unusual and extraordinary, and this makes deviance newsworthy almost by definition, since it is abnormal behaviour.