Media and crime

The media as a cause of crime

● Imitation:

○ The media provides deviant role models, which results in copying their behaviour.

● Arousal:

○ Viewing violent or sexual imagery.

● Desensitisation:

○ Repeated viewing of violence.

● Transmission of knowledge of criminal techniques

● Stimulating desires for unaffordable goods.

○ E.g through advertising. ● Glamourising offending.

The distorted image of crime

● Overrepresentation of sexual and violent crime.

● Exaggerates police success.

● Exaggerates the risk of victimisation.

● Overplay extraordinary crimes.

Surette - Fictional representation of crime

● Fictional representations of crime follow the ‘law of opposites’, meaning they are opposite to official stats.

● Property crime is underrepresented, while violence, sex and drug crimes are over-represented.

● Fictional sex crimes are caused by psychopathic strangers, whereas most sex crimes are committed by acquaintances.

● Fictional villains are higher status, middle-aged, white males.

● Functional police usually catch criminals.

Cohen - moral panics

● Mods and rockers:

○ Cohen examined the media's response to disturbances between working-class teenagers (mods and rockers) in the 1960s. Cohen revealed that although this disorder was relatively minor, the media amplified and exaggerated this, producing a deviance amplification spiral. This resulted from:

■ Exaggeration and distortion - exaggerated the numbers involved, the extent of violence and damage

■ Prediction- assumed and predicted further conflict

■ Symbolisation- the symbols of the mods and rockers defined them

○The media cause moral panics nowadays with issues such as acid attacks and terrorism.

Cohen and Young - News Values

● News is not discovered, but it is manufactured. A central feature of manufactured news is the concept of ‘news values’, these are criteria in which journalists and editors decide whether a story is newsworthy enough to make it into the news. Key news values include:

○ Immediacy - ‘breaking news’

○ Dramatisation - action and excitement

○ Personalisation - human interest stories about individuals

○ Higher status - celebrities

○ Simplification - eliminating shades of grey

○ Risk - victim-centred stories about vulnerability and fear

○ Violence

Lea and Young - the media, relative deprivation and crime

● The media present everyone with the image of a materialistic ‘good life’, which is the norm in which everyone should conform.

○ However, this stimulates the sense of relative deprivation and marginalisation felt by groups who cannot afford these goods.