Media

• How the Media Portrays Crime:

  > news values

  > fictional representations

  How the Media Causes Crime:

  > encourages violence and criminality

  > the media, relative deprivation and crime

  > moral panics

  > new technology - global cybercrime
• Portraying Crime - News Values (1):

  > Williams and Dickinson - British newspapers devote up to 30% of their news space to crime

  > the media give a distorted image of crime:

  > over-represent violent and sexual crime - 46% of media reports are about these, but they actually account for 3% of recorded crime

  > exaggerates police success and exaggerates risk of victimisation

  > overplays extraordinary crimes - Felson calls this dramatic fallacy
• Portraying Crime - News Values (2):

  > the media's distorted image of crime reflects that news is a social construction - Cohen and Young note that news is manufactured

  > a key element in the social construction of news is news values - if crime can be told in relation to one of the news values, it has a greater chance of making the news:

  > immediacy, dramatisation (action and excitement), personalisation, higher status people, simplification, novelty, risk (victim-centred stories), violence (especially visible acts)
• Portraying Crime - Fictional Representations of Crime:

  > fictional representations from TV, cinema and novels are important sources of our knowledge of crime

  > Mandel - from 1945 to 1984, 10 billion crime thrillers were sold, and about 20% of movies were about crime

  > Surette - fictional media follows the law of opposites (they are the opposite of statistics and similar to the news e.g. sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers, property crime is under-represented and fictional cops are successful
• Causing Crime - Encouraging Violence and Criminality (1):

  > there has been a concern that the media has a negative effect on attitudes, values and behaviour by encouraging violence and criminality - there are several ways that the media can do this:

  > imitation - provides deviant role model (James Bulger court case)

  > arousal - through viewing violent or sexual behaviour

  > desensitisation - through repeated viewings of violence (video games)

  > stimulating desire for unaffordable goods (strain theory)

  > glamourising offending (Ted Bundy, Jeffery Dahmer TV shows)
• Causing Crime - Encouraging Violence and Criminality (2):

  > Bandura - aimed to see whether aggressive behaviour could be learnt through observation by studying 36 boys and 36 girls aged 3-5

  > half watched a video of an adult role model behaving aggressively towards the doll, while the other half watched the adult play with other toys and ignoring the bobo doll

  > the children then had an opportunity to play with the toys

  > children exposed to the aggressive behaviour were much more likely to be aggressive towards the bobo doll - observation can lead to imitation of violent behaviour
• Causing Crime - the Media, Relative Deprivation and Crime:

  > Lea and Young - the media increase relative deprivation among marginalised groups

  > in today's society, even the poorest have access to the media, where they are presented with materialistic messages - this fuels a sense of relative deprivation

  > media portrays unrealistic lives as 'normal' e.g. the house in Mr and Mrs Smith
• Causing Crime - Moral Panics (1):

  > the media exaggerate the amount of violent crime and the risk of certain groups becoming victims, which promotes a fear of crime

  > this creates a moral panic - an exaggerated and irrational over-reaction by society to a perceived problem, where the reaction enlarges the problem out of proportion to its real seriousness

  > this leads to a deviance amplification spiral
• Causing Crime - Moral Panics (2):

  > Cohen - studied mods and rockers in the 1960s to demonstrate the process of the media creating a moral panic

  > not many young people identified themself as belonging to either group, but the media over-reacted to minor property damage on Easter 1964, which involved three elements - exaggeration, prediction and symbolisation
• Causing Crime - Moral Panics (3):

  > exaggeration - media exaggerated numbers and seriousness with headlines, leading to calls for a crackdown and stigmatisation

  > prediction - media predicted that more conflict would occur, which drew in more young people for further clashes

  > symbolisation - symbols associated with mods and rockers (clothes, bikes, music) were negatively labelled and differences between them were defined, so young people began to identify as one or the other, leading to confrontation and self-fulfilling prophecies = deviance amplification spiral
• Causing Crime - New Technology/Global Cybercrime (1):

  > Thomas and Loader - define cybercrime as computer mediated activities that are illegal or illicit, and are conducted through global electronic networks

  > Jewkes - the internet creates opportunities to commit both conventional and new crimes using new tools

  > cyber crime creates new opportunities and difficulties, both for criminals and law enforcement agencies
• Causing Crime - New Technology/Global Cybercrime (2):

  > Wall identifies four categories of cyber crime:

  > cyber-trespass e.g. hacking

  > cyber-deception e.g. identity theft

  > cyber-pornography

  > cyber-violence e.g. cyber bullying