Media Reporting of Crime

Media reporting of crime:

  • Media reporting of crime focuses on the role of media news agencies

  • Agenda-setting in the media leads individuals to discuss what has been presented to them

  • Based upon the decisions of editorial teams in the media selecting what they think is newsworthy

News values:

  • Galtung and Rune (1970) developed a series of news values that influenced editor's decisions on content

  • These included dramatisation, immediacy, personalisation, simplification and status

  • News is therefore selected in order to obtain viewers, rather than inform the population

  • Crimes such as terrorism and murder more likely to be selected for graphic imagery

  • Greater emphasis on the Western world due to being culturally more similar

  • Celebrity or higher-status offences are more likely to be reported

Misrepresentation of crime reporting:

  • Cumberbatch et al (1995) found that crime reporting made up between 38% - 53% of all news coverage across major media platforms

  • Williams and Dickinson (1993) found that tabloid coverage of crime was greater than that of broadsheet newspapers

  • Soothill and Walby (1991) argued that sexual crimes were over-represented in media coverage

  • Reiner (2010) argued that despite the majority of crime being property-related, this occupies little coverage

  • Marhia (2008) over-representation of success in sexual assault and attacks by strangers compared to reality

Media and moral panics:

  • The stigmatisation of minority groups through media discussion of moral panics

  • Disproportionate time given to knife crime in London compared to other cities in the UK

  • Focus on crimes by those on benefits reinforces the public perception of 'benefit scroungers'

Impacts of media reporting:

  • Reinforces stereotypical views of minority groups which leads to further marginalisation

  • Increases fear of crime - Gerbner and Gross found that increased consumption of media led to increased fear of crime

  • Reinforcing ideas of who is the victim of crime and reasserting control through positivist victimology