Media and Crime

Media Representations of Crime

Fictional Media

  • Criminals:

    • Super Villain (e.g., Moriarty)

    • Stupid criminals

    • Psychopaths (e.g., Dexter)

    • Rational/Planner (e.g., Danny Ocean)

  • Victims:

    • Female Victims: Helpless

    • Male Victims: Vigilante

    • Ethnic Majority

  • Police:

    • Super Intelligent (e.g., Sherlock)

    • Bumbling idiots (e.g., Clouseau)

    • Always get the bad guy

Factual Media

  • Criminals:

    • Under class

    • Ethnic Minorities

    • Young

    • Men

  • Victims:

    • Missing white women syndrome

    • Selective Reporting

  • Police:

    • Corrupt

    • Brutality

    • Racists

    • Incompetent

News Values

  • The Immediacy of the Story

  • Dramatisation: Action and excitement

  • Personalisation: Human interest

  • Higher Status of the focus of the story

  • Simplification: Black and white, no shades of grey

  • Novelty/Unexpectedness

  • Risk: Victim-centred stories about vulnerability and fear

  • Violence: Visual and spectacular acts

Media Distortion of Crime: Kidd-Hewitt and Osborne

  • Media reporting crime is increasingly driven by the need for a spectacle (Key value of dramatisation).

  • Spectacles are engaging because audiences are both repelled and fascinated.

Postman

  • Media coverage of crime is increasingly a mixture of entertainment and sensationalism, leading to 'Infotainment.'

Surrette (1998)

  • Law of opposites: The media shows the direction opposite to official statistics.

  • For example, the media focuses on murders and violent crime when most crimes in the UK are property-based crimes.

  • The media also shows victims to be more likely to be female when statistics show that young men aged 19-24 are more likely to be a victims of crime.

Perspectives on Media Influence on Crime

Functionalism/Pluralism

  • In reporting crime, the media helps to keep social solidarity.

  • Crimes reported tend to reflect the things people are most concerned about and most want to see reported, thus they create demand which is met by the media.

  • Different forms of media report different crimes in different ways; they are not all dominated by a single ideology or a small group of owners pushing the same agenda.

Marxism

  • The reporting of crime reflects the ideology of the ruling class, meaning:

    • The crimes of the ruling class or those at the higher end of society are under-reported.

    • The media’s emphasis on sexual and violent crime means less importance is attached to some very large and serious white collar crimes and corporate crimes, which rarely get reported.

    • Crimes of the working class are over-reported.

    • The reporting of crime is used as a way of maintaining control over powerless groups.

Feminism

  • Crime reporting reinforces the stereotyping and oppression of women.

  • Women are portrayed as victims.

  • Underreporting of violence against women, especially domestic violence.

  • They are highly critical of the reporting of sex crimes against women as a way to provide entertainment.

Interpretivists

  • The media is a social construction, as is crime.

  • Interpretivists look at the labels attached to people who are determined to be deviant and see the media as a moral entrepreneur which determines who is deviant and who is not.

Postmodernism

  • Baudrillard: The Media create reality: People have no understanding of crime, only the representations of crime they experience through the mass media.

Hypodermic Syringe Model

  • It suggests that media audiences are passive recipients of the messages from the media and that these messages are received without critical thought.

  • It argues that these messages are acted upon mindlessly by audiences.

Missing White Women Syndrome

  • The type of victim that is likely to make the news cycle or the media is a white middle-class woman, as she will fit the stereotype of what they want a victim to be.

Moral Panic

  • An instance of public anxiety or alarm in response to a problem regarded as threatening the moral standards of society.

Media as a Cause of Crime

Imitation

  • The idea that people will act out the crimes and the violence that they view via the media, for example, the College student who acted out scenes from GTA.

School of Crime

  • Watching crime shows and the news can help criminals to hone their skills and learn how to be less detectable in their crimes. It can also show them how to commit crime.

Arousal

  • The increased adrenaline and endorphins lead to people engaging in risky and criminal behaviour, for example, the increase in traffic crimes on opening weekends of the Fast and Furious films.

Desensitisation

  • Watching violence in the media can lead to the lowering of people’s level for shock value, meaning that they no longer are horrified by it and can be more likely to commit the acts themselves.

Deprivation

  • Links to the Left Realism and Strain Theory.

  • The idea that the media provides unattainable ideas of lifestyles of the rich and famous, which can lead to people committing crimes to achieve these lifestyles: e.g. Made in Chelsea Glamorisation.

Glamorisation

  • TV shows such as The Sopranos and Marco’s provide a glamorised view of the criminal lifestyle, which can lead to people wanting to emulate it and be involved.

Media as a cause of the fear of Crime

Fear of Crime Cycle

  1. Media causes fear of being a Victim of Crime

  2. Spend more time at home

  3. Consume more media

  4. Generates more fear of crime

Process of a Moral Panic

  1. An activity gains media attention

  2. Agencies of control respond

  3. Deviance becomes amplified

  4. Exaggeration Symbolisation Prediction

  5. The problem becomes redefined

Examples of modern Moral Panics

  • Black Muggings in the 1970s

  • HIV and Aids in 1980

  • Satanic Child Abuse in the 1980s

  • Video Nasties in the 1990s

  • Guns in the 2000s

  • Islamic Terrorism in the 2000s

  • Knife Crime currently

Criticisms of Moral Panic Theory (McRobbie and Thornton)

  • Frequency:

    • The frequency of moral panics has increased: They are no longer noteworthy

  • Context:

    • In the past, moral panics would scapegoat a group and create ‘folk devils’. Today, there are many viewpoints and values in society

  • Reflexivity:

    • Because the concept of moral panic is well-known, some groups actually try to create one for their own benefit

  • Difficulty:

    • Because there is less certainty about what is unambiguously ‘bad’ today, moral panics are harder to start

  • Rebound:

    • People are wary about starting moral panics as there is the possibility of it rebounding on them, e.g., John Major’s ‘family values’ campaign