Crime And The Media Flashcards
How does media portray victims
Women, older and middle class
What does the media over exaggerate
Risk of victimisation, violent/sexual crime, police success
media changes overtime
1960- media focused on murder / petty crime
1990 - become less interested in this because of the abolition of death penalty therefore crimes must be special.
News values and crime coverance
- news is a social construct
- outcome of social process in which stories are selected
Examples of news values
Immediacy - breaking news
Dramatisation - action and excitement
Higher status - celebrities
Fictional representation of crime
TV, cinema and novels are also important sources of our knowledge of crime
Surette calls this ‘the law of opposites’ - what we see on our TV’s/in movies, is the opposite of what the official statistics say
● Property crime is under-reported
● Real-life homicides is a result of brawls, but fictional are greed
and calculation
● Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers
● Fictional police usually get their man
How does media cause crime
The media has a negative effect on attitudes, values and behaviours - in particular on the young, lower-class or uneducated
● Imitation
● Arousal
● Desensitisation
● Transmitting knowledge of techniques
● Target for crime
● Stimulating desires for unaffordable goods
● Portraying the police as incompetent
● Glamourising offending
How does the media cause crime (3 reasons)
Fear of crime
Relative deprivation and crime
Cultural criminology
Fear of crime
The media exaggerate the amount of violent and unusual crime
They exaggerate the risks of certain groups of people becoming its victims (young women and old people)
Concern that the media may be distorting the public’s impression of crime
Research had found a correlation between media consumption and fear of crime - BUT, issues with cause and effect
Relative deprivation
The mass media have disseminated a standardised image of lifestyle, particularly in areas of popular culture and recreation, which, for those unemployed and surviving through the dole queue or only able to obtain employment at very low wages, has accentuated the sense of relative deprivation
Cultural criminology
The media turn crime itself into the commodity that people desire
The media encourages people to consume crime Blurring between the images of crime and the reality of
crime
The way the media represents crime, it actually causes crime itself
State the stages of moral panics
Stage 1: The media identify a group as a ‘folk devil’ (threat to societal values).
Stage 2: media present the group in a negative, stereotypical fashion and exaggerate the scale of the problem.
Stage 3: ‘moral entrepreneurs’, editors, politicians, police chiefs, bishops and other ‘respectable’ people condemn the group and its behaviour.
4: this usually leads to a ‘crackdown’ on the group. However, this may create a self-fulfilling prophecy that amplifies the problem that caused the panic in the first place.
