Media Representations of Crime
MEDIA AND THE NEWS:
Ericson et al:
45-71% of quality press and radio news in Toronto was about deviance and its control.
Williamson and Dickinson:
British newspapers devote up to 30% of their news space to crime.
MEDIA DISTORTIONS:
Over-representation of violent and sexual crimes:
Ditton and Duffy:
46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crimes, yet these only make up 3% of all crimes recorded by the police.
Marsh:
News reporting in America of a violent crime was 36 times more likely than a property crime.
Portray victims as older and more middle class:
Felson:
Criminals and victims as older and more middle class (age fallacy).
Exaggerate police success:
Violent crime has a higher rate of clear up than property crime and so makes the police look good.
Exaggerate risk of victimisation:
Victims are shown as high status females.
Reported as series of separate events:
No underlying reporting is done in patterns of crime.
Overplay extraordinary crimes:
Crimes are extraordinary (dramatic fallacy) and carried out by clever criminals and one person has to be daring and clever (ingenuity fallacy) to solve them.
CHANGE IN PORTRAYAL IN THE MEDIA:
Schlesinger and Tumber:
In the 1960s the focus had been on murders and petty crime, but by the 1990s they were of less interest to the media.
This may be partly due to the abolition of the death penalty, and because rising crime rates meant that a crime had to be ‘special’ to attract coverage.
By the 1990s reporting had widened to drugs, child abuse, terrorism, football hooliganism and mugging.
NO CHANGE IN PORTRAYAL IN THE MEDIA:
There’s an increased preoccupation with sex crimes.
Soothill and Walby:
Newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under a quarter of all cases in 1951 to over a third in 1985.
Coverage focuses on finding a ‘sex fiend’ or ‘beast’, often by use of label (e.g the balaclava rapist).
Paints an unreal picture of psychopathic serial rapists – which are rare.
CONSTRUCTION OF NEWS:
News doesn’t simply exist ‘out there’ waiting to be gathered in and written up by the journalist. Rather it’s a process where some stories are selected whilst others rejected. Cohen and Young say news is manufactured, not discovered.
This means news is a social construction.
There are 8 key news values that decide whether a story is newsworthy:
Immediacy – ‘breaking news’.
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:
Mandel:
Estimates that from 1945 to 1984, over 10 billion crime thrillers were sold worldwide, while about 25% of prime TV and 20% of films are crime shows or movies.
Shows the media’s interest in crime is big because they know it will sell.
Fictional representations are nearer the news because:
Property crime is underrepresented, whilst violence, drugs and sex crimes are over-represented.
While real-life homicides mainly result from brawls and domestic disputes, fictional ones are the product of greed and calculation.
Fictional cops usually get their man.
Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers, not acquaintances. Fictional villains tend to be higher status, middle-aged white males.
Three recent trends worth noting:
The new genre of ‘reality’ infotainment shows tend to feature young, non-white, ‘underclass’ offenders.
There’s an increasing tendency to show police as corrupt and brutal (and less successful).
Victims have become more central, with law enforcers portrayed as their avengers and audiences invited to identify with their suffering.