Faiza
Using material from Item A, and elsewhere, assess sociological views of the
relationship between crime and mass media.
As stated in Item A, there is a relationship between crime and the mass media, one
relationship is the misrepresentations of crime. On the one hand, it can be
misrepresented in non-fiction, as crime and deviance make up a large proportion of
the news coverage. For example, Richard Ericson et al’s study of Toronto found that
45-71% of quality press and radio news was about various forms of deviance and its
control, while Williams and Dickinson found British newspapers devote up to 30% of
their news space to crime. However, while the news media shows a keen interest in
crime, they give distorted images of crime, criminals and policing. For example, as
compared with the picture of crime, we gain from official statistics: such as the media
over-represent violent and sexual crime, Ditton and Duffy found that 46% of media
reports were about violent or sexual crimes, yet these made up only 3% of all crimes
recorded by the police. One review by Marsh of studies of news reporting in America
found that a violent crime was 36 times more likely to be reported than a property
crime. Secondly, the media portray criminals and victims as older and more middle-
class than those typically found in the criminal justice system. Felson calls this the
‘age fallacy’. Thirdly, media coverage exaggerates police success in clearing up
cases, this is partly because of the focus on violent crime, which has a higher clear-
up rate than property crime. Fourthly, the media exaggerate the risk of victimisation,
especially to women, white people and higher status individuals. Fifthly, crime is
reported as a series of separate events without structure and without examining
underlying causes. Furthermore, the media overplay extraordinary crimes and
underplay ordinary crimes, Felson calls this the ‘dramatic fallacy’. Similarly, media
images lead us to believe that to commit crimes and to solve them, one needs to be
daring and clever, this is called the ‘ingenuity fallacy’. Also, there is some evidence
of changes in the type of coverage of crime by the news media. Subsequently, the
distorted picture of crime painted by the news media reflects the fact that news is a
social construction. That is, the news does not simply exist ‘out there’ waiting to be
gathered in and written up by journalists. Rather, it is the outcome of a social
process in which some potential stories are selected while clothes are rejected. As
Stan Cohen and Jock Young note, the news is not discovered but manufactured. A
central aspect of the manufacture of news is the notion of ‘news values’. Key news
values influencing the selection of crime stories include immediacy, dramatisation,
personalisation, higher status, simplification, novelty or unexpectedness, risk and
violence.
On the other hand, there are fictional representations of crime, from TV, cinemas
and novels which are important sources of our knowledge of a crime, because so
much of their output is crime-related for example, Ernest Mandel estimates that 25%
of prime time TV focuses on crime and 20% of films focus crime. Also, property
crime is an underrepresented, violent and sexual crime are over-represented.
Fictional police almost always solve the case in real life, police clear less than 30%
