Chapter 3: Media and Crime

Introduction: Why should criminologists study media content?

  • Although media may not offer a thorough or acurate depiction of crime and justice, it’s important to examine ideas and images they produce

  • The term media is used in the broad sense to include the range of mass communication products people use

    1. To find out what is happening in their community and in the world

    2. For entertainment purposes

    3. To share ideas, news, photos, etc.

  • Media shapes and is shaped by public understanding about crime and justice

  • The public’s main source of knowledge about crime

3.1 THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CRIME, MEDIA, AND THE PUBLIC

  • Newsworthiness Criteria: features that stories that become news usually carry

    • Stereotypes - comforms to existing racial and/or gender sterotype,

    • Simple - easy to understand

    • Out of the ordinary - unexpected, rare, and unique stories favoured

    • Human appeal - appleas to human characteristics (humour, sadness, etc.)

    • Dramatic - can be portrayed in a sensational way

    • Proximity - geographically or culturally close to the audience

    • Spectacle - presentation can include graphic imagery

    • Recurrent theme - part of similar to an existing story

    • Violence - brutality or link of sex and violence

    • Elite People - involves celebrities or powerful people/nations

    • Negative Consequences - negative events (such as crime) favoured over postive ones

    • “Ideal Victim” - sympathetic victim who conforms to “perfect victim” stereotype (ex:child)

Market Model

  • Suggests that the basis for deciding which stories become crime news is market demand

  • Premised on the idea that media are a business and their focus is on profitability

Public Sphere/Social Responsibility Model

  • Argues that the media should give the publc what it needs

Propaganda Model/Manipulative Model

  • Argues that the media owners may select stories according to what serves their best interests; present a distorted version of reality to shape public views

Organisational Model

  • suggests that neither market demand, nor social responsibility, nor media ownership can have as much influence on the content of news as the routines of the day-to-day news production

  • habit of favouring stories thta have already been reported upon is connected to the use of simplification, personalisation, and stereotyping

  • Hierarchy of Credibility: the idea that some sources of information are seen as more trustworthy or authoritative than others (often due to their position of power)

    • Primary Definers: the authorities that have the main influence in how issues are understood by the public

    • Secondary Definers: those who’s voices are included but usually as a response to the ways the primary definers have established the story (community organizations, protestors, victims’ rights advocates, criminals)

Cultural Studies Perspective:

  • Interested in how some people come to be constructed as dangerous or risky and how some issues come to be constructed as one type of prolem rather than another

  • Moral Panic: when a condition, episode, person or group emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests

    • Based on heightened concern about an issue/group,

    • Increased hostility toward those portrayed as responsible for the problem,

    • A rapidly emerging consensus about the problem

    • The disproportionality between the perceived threat and the actual threat posed, and the volatility in that panic subsidies quickly without any necessary resolution

    • Folk’s Devil: refers to people or groups presented om media as deviant outsiders and the cause of social problems

    • Moral Entrepreneur: Refers to individuals or groups who attempt to draw attention and impose their moral perspective on behaviours they deem deviant or criminal in order to advance their own interests or political agendas

      • Divided into 2 groups:

        1. Rule creators who advocate for legal change to gave their moral views reflected in law

        2. Rule enforcers who work to ensure the new laws are followed, such as police and enforcement agencies

3.2 HOW MEDIA FRAME PORTRAYALS OF OFFENDERS, VICTIMS, AND POLICE

Framing

  • Framing: to select some aspects of a perceived reality to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, or recommendation

  • Sets the limits of what you can see and not necessarily know the context outside of what appears on the image in the frame

Crime, Criminal Offenders, and Deviant “Others”

  • Rarest crimes receive the most coverage, while the most common crimes rarely recieve corage

  • Crimes that are particularly dramatic, sensational, or bizzare are more likely to be covered in media

    • Leaves the audience with a distorted picture of crime that’s practically the opposite of reality of crime occuring in our society, called the backwards law

  • Crime is portrayed in the media out of proportion to its actual occurence in society, but is also emphasised on particular offenders and victims

  • Racialisation of Crime: raises the idea that when racial minorities are responsible for crimes, the cause of their criminality is linked to their cultural origins, whereas white people’s crimes are not blamed on their whiteness

Crime Victims

  • Ideal Victim: perceived as weak, engaged in respectable activities, could not have possibly blamed, etc.

Law Enforcement

  • The police and media have a mutually beneficial relationship that allows police to be primary definers of crime news

  • Their views will be presented first, more regularly, and with authority

3.3 FUTURE DIRECTIONS

  • Traditional/Legacy Media: encapsulates newspapers, magazines, radio, television, films, as well as books and music recordings from new media

  • New media shifts the role of the audience from passive consumers to active participants and producers of media content

  • Looping: recycling media content in different formats, different contexts, and different outlets