Topic 7 – Crime and the Media:
Media Representations of Crime:
Williams and Dickenson found 33% of British newspapers are dedicated to crime
but, while the media shows a keen interest in crime, they give a distorted image of
crime, criminals and policing
The media over-represent violent and sexual crime – Ditton and Duffy found that on
coverage of crime, 46% were violent or sexual but this only made up 3% of actual
crime according to police figures
Media coverage exaggerates police success and the risk of victimisation (especially
for women, white people and the upper-class)
Crime is reported as a series of separate events – without structure and doesn’t look
at underlying causes
The media overplays extraordinary crime – ‘dramatic fallacy’, leads us to believe
that to commit or solve crime, one needs to be daring and clever (the ‘ingenuity
fallacy)
There is also evidence to suggest a change in the type of coverage of crime by news
media
o Schlesinger and Tumbler found that in the 1960s, the focus had been on
murders and petty crime, but by the 1990s this had changed to focus on
drugs, child abuse, terrorism and mugging. It changed because murders and
petty crime had become more common, so crimes had to be ‘special’ to
attract coverage
o Increasing preoccupation with sex crime – Soothill and Walby found that
newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under a quarter of all
cases (1951) to a third (1985). They also portrayed rapists as psychopathic
strangers whereas the perpetrator is known to the victim in most cases
News Values and Crime Coverage:
The news is a socially constructed process (things have to be picked and made
news) - Cohen argued news is manipulated not discovered
News values is the idea that some stories are seen as having a ‘higher value’ to the
press than others, so crime gets lots of coverage
o Immediacy – ‘breaking news’
o Dramatization – action and excitement
o Personalisation – human intertest stories about individuals
o Risk – victim-centred stories about vulnerability and fear
o Violence – especially visible and spectacular acts
Fictional Representations of Crime:
We also get a view of crime for media other than news, Mandel estimated from
1945-1984, 25% of prime TV and 20% of films released were crime related
Surette argues ‘the law of opposites’, representations are the opposite to reality
, o E.g. fictional rapes are usually by a psychopath when in reality its usually
someone known to the victim
Recently, however, three trends are worth noting
o The new genre of ‘reality’ infotainment shows tend to feature young, non-
white ‘underclass’ offenders
o There is an increasing tendency to show police as corrupt and brutal
o Victims have become more central, with law enforcers portrayed as their
avengers and audiences invited to identify with their suffering
The Media as a Cause of Crime:
In the 1920s and 1930s, cinema was blamed for corrupting youth, in the 1950s,
horror comics were blames, in the 1980s, it was ‘video nasties’ and now is rap lyrics
and video games, such as GTA
There are many ways in which the media might possibly cause crime and deviance
including:
o Imitation – provides deviant role models that are copied
o Arousal – through violent or sexual imagery
o By transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
o By stimulating desires for unaffordable goods, e.g. through advertising
o By portraying the police as incapable
However, most studies conducted on the possible negative effects of the media have
found that exposure to media violence has a small and limited negative effect on
audiences
Livingstone found that, despite this, people continued to be preoccupied with the
effects of the media on children because we want childhood to remain a time of
innocence
Fear of Crime:
Exaggerated amount in media
There is a correlation between the amount of media use and greater fear of crime
Schlesinger and Tumbler found that those who read tabloids regularly or were
heavy TV watchers had a greater fear of become victims
o This doesn’t prove cause and effect though – people who are already afraid of
going out at night may just watch more TV because they stay in more
Greer and Reiner argue that a lot of ‘effects’ research into the cause/ fear of crime
ignores the meanings that viewers give to media violence. This reflects the
interpretivist view that if we want to understand the possible effects of the media,
we must look as the meanings people give to what they see/ read
The Media, Representative Deprivation and Crime:
Left realists argue believe that the media causes relative deprivation
