Crime and the media

• Sociologists are interested in four aspects of the relationship between the media and crime
• Four aspects of the relationship between the media and crime

  • How the media represent crime, both in fiction and non-fiction
  • The media as a cause of crime and of the fear of crime
  • Moral panics and media amplification of deviance
  • Cybercrime
• Media representations of crime

  • Crime and deviance make up a large proportion of news coverage
  • The news media give a distorted image of crime, criminals and policing
• Distortions in media representations of crime compared to official statistics

  • The media over-represent violent and sexual crime
  • The media portray criminals and victims as older and more middle-class than usually found in the criminal justice system
  • The media exaggerate police success in clearing up cases
  • The media exaggerate the risk of victimisation, e.g. to women
• Dramatic fallacy


  The media overplay extraordinary crimes
• News values


  The criteria that journalists and editors use in order to decide whether a story is newsworthy enough to make it into the newspaper or news bulletin
• Key news values influencing the selection of crime stories

  • Immediacy
  • Dramatisation-action and excitement
  • Personalisation-human interest stories about individuals
  • Higher-status persons and 'celebrities'
  • Simplification-eliminating shades of grey
  • Novelty or unexpectedness-a new angle
  • Risk-victim-centred stories about vulnerability and fear
  • Violence-especially visible and spectacular acts
• Fictional representations of crime

  • Fictional presentations follow Surette's (1998) view of opposite: they are the opposite of the official statistics-and strongly similar to news coverage
  • Property crime is under-represented, while violence, drugs and sex crimes are over-represented
  • Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers, not acquaintances
  • Fictional cops usually get their man
• Recent trends in fictional representations of crime

  • Reality shows tend to feature young, non-White offenders
  • There is an increasing tendency to show police as corrupt, brutal and less successful
  • Victims have become more central, with police portrayed as avengers and audiences invited to identify with their suffering
• The media as a cause of crime

  Several ways in which the media might cause crime and deviance, including imitation, arousal, desensitisation, transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques, stimulating desires for unaffordable goods, and glamourising crime
• Studies have tended to find that exposure to media violence has at most a small negative effect on audiences
• Fear of crime


  The media exaggerate the amount of violent crime and exaggerate the risk of certain groups becoming victims, e.g. young women, old people
• The media exaggerate the amount of violent crime and the risk of victimisation


  This causes fear of crime
• Research evidence supports the view that the media cause fear of crime
• Relative deprivation


  The media present images of a materialistic good life as the goal to which people should aspire, stimulating a sense of relative deprivation and social exclusion felt by marginalised groups who cannot afford these material goods
• Moral panics


  Exaggerated and national over-reaction by society to a perceived problem, where the media enlarge the problems out of all proportion to its real seriousness
• Moral panics


  1. The media identify a group as a folk devil or threat to societal values

  2. The media negatively stereotype the group and exaggerate the problem

  3. Moral entrepreneurs, editors, politicians condemn the behaviour of the group and call for a 'crackdown'

  4. This may create a self-fulfilling prophecy, amplifying the very problems that caused the panic in the first place
• The mods and rockers


  • The media's response to disturbances between two groups of teenagers, the mods and the rockers, created a moral panic
• Deviance amplification spiral


  The media's portrayal of events produced a deviance amplification spiral by making the problem appear to be getting out of hand, leading to increased control responses, and by defining the two groups and emphasising their supposed differences, leading more youths to adopt these identities
• Moral panics are a result of a boundary crisis, where there is uncertainty about where the boundary is between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in a time of change
• Cybercrime


  Computer-mediated activities that are either illegal or considered illicit, and are conducted through global electronic networks
• Categories of cybercrime


  • Cyber-trespass, e.g. hacking
  • Cyber-deception, e.g. identity theft
  • Cyber-pornography
  • Cyber-violence, e.g. cyberbullying
• Policing cybercrime is difficult partly because of the sheer scale of the internet and because its globalised nature poses problems of jurisdiction
• Surveillance ICT provides police and state with greater opportunities for surveillance and control, e.g. through CCTV cameras, electronic databases, digital fingerprinting