The media and crime

News values

- News is manufactured people make decisions- the gatekeepers on what to report and also what not to report agenda setting

- They determine what is 'newsworthy' amongst these are things like how dramatic they are, how unusual and do they involve a sense of risk and excitement

- Crime often meets these values which is why it is constantly reported in the media- certain types of crime are also more likely to get reported e.g violence

Greer

- All media tend to exaggerate the extent of violent crime. These types of crime represent a smaller percentage in the OS or victim surveys most crime is routine, trivial

Williams and Dickinson

found 65% of crime stories in ten national newspapers were about violence. In the same year (1989) the British Crime Survey (Crime Survey in England and Wales) reported only 6% of crimes involved violence.

Distortion and exaggeration

• Under-reporting property crimes by the media, despite this type of crime constituting the majority of crimes reported to the police and in victim surveys

• The media exaggerates the risk of being a victim of crime, this is particularly true for women and those from higher status backgrounds.

• The media exaggerates police success in tackling crime, this is despite some types of crime, such as property crime, having a lower clear up rate.

•  Postmodernist idea of hyperreality which suggests that the media do not reflect reality but actively create it, as most people's only knowledge of crime is through media created images which have little connection with the real world.

Cohen- moral panics

• The media acts as a moral entrepreneur by labelling and stereotyping certain groups and activities as deviant and suggest they are a threat to society which should be condemned.

• Stanley Cohen (1972) and others showed how agents of social control, particularly the police, 'amplified' deviance. They also demonstrated the media's role in this process.

• Cohen argues that this targeting (heavier policing, more arrests) can actually amplify the problem. The deviancy spiral. The presence an attention of the media might encourage people to act up for the cameras.

• Mods and Rockers

• Hall et al- muggings in the 70s

 

Evaluation of moral panics

Postmodernists argue there is now such a huge diversity of media reports that people today are much more sceptical of mainstream media reports and less likely to believe them. This means it has become more difficult for the media to define issues or events in such a way that they can develop into a moral panic.

This is also made more difficult by the way news is reported and updated by both social media and mainstream news organizations on an ongoing, almost minute-by-minute basis, 24 hours a day- difficult to sustain a moral panic

Motives for crime- Merton

The media's promotion of consumerist culture through images of affluent lifestyles creates crime by intensifying relative deprivation in what Young called a bulimic society (Left Realism), or generating the strain Merton identified.

Young: late modern society is media saturated and we are immersed into the mediascape an ever expanding tangle of fluid digital messages including images of crime

Imitation and desensitization- Bandura

 through images of crime and violence encouraging people to commit crime by imitating (copycat behaviour) what they pick up from the media, or by desensitizing them to violence (they begin to see such behaviour as ‘normal’ and they are socialised into accepting deviant behaviour).

Bandura’s bobo doll study

Newson + Jamie Bulger

New means of committing crimes

• The new media and media technology, like the internet, provide new opportunities for cybercrimes and the organization of transnational crime and terrorism.

• Yvonne Jewkes (2003) : Identifies 4  categories of cyber crime:

  • Cyber- trespass: crossing boundaries in others’ cyber property: is spreading viruses

  • Cyber-deception and theft: identify theft, ‘phishing’

  • Cyber- pornography: Pornography (sexual abuse) including minors, minors accessing it

  • Cyber-violence: inciting harm e.g. stalking

  • Global cyber-crime: the sheer scale of the internet makes it difficult to police

The reduction of social controls over crime- Greer and Reiner

Even if people are motivated to commit crime, they may not do so if there are effective internal controls, through self-control and conscience, and external controls,

• By stories mocking the police and criminal justice system, and/or suggesting they are corrupt, ineffective and inefficient. This undermines external controls by reducing both public cooperation in controlling crime and the perception by potential offenders of the risks they face of getting caught.

 

• By stories and images which undermine internal controls by presenting crime sympathetically, or as glamorous, exciting and seductive, or which desensitize people to the use and effects of violence.

Romanticizing crime through the media

Hayward and Young (2012) argue advertisers have turned images of crime and deviance into tools for selling products.

Commodification of crime: emphasis on consumption, excitement and immediacy crime and deviance becomes a style to be consumed