Media Representations of Crime

Question 1

Describe official statistics on the crime portrayed in the media

Answer 1

• The media over-represent violent and sexual crime. Ditton and Duffy found that 46% of media reports were about violent or sexual crimes
• Marsh found that the news was 36 times more likely to shoe violent crime over property crime
• Felson argues the media portrays criminals and victims as older and more MC.
• Media coverage exaggerates police success
• Exaggeration of victimisation, especially against women, white people and higher status people

Question 2

Describe evidence for the changes in the type of coverage

Answer 2

• Schlesinger and Tumber found that in the 1960s the focus had been on murders and petty crime, but by the 1990s this wasn’t an interest
• The change came partly because of the abolition of the death penalty for murder and the rising crime rates meant that a crime had to be ‘special’ to attract coverage
• By the 1990s, reporting also widened to include drugs, child abuse, terrorism, football hooliganism etc.

Question 3

Describe evidence for increasing preoccupation with sex crimes

Answer 3

• Keith Soothill and Sylvia Walby found that newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under a quarter of all cases in 1951 to over a third in 1985.
• They also note that coverage consistently focuses on identifying a ‘sex fiend’ or ‘beast’. This leads to a distorted picture of rape as an attack by a psychotic stranger, while in most cases, the perpetrator is known to the victim

Question 4

How is news a social construction?

Answer 4

• The distorted picture of crime painted by the news is a social construction. This is because news is the outcome of a social process in which some potential stories are selected while others are rejected
• Cohen and Young note, news isn’t discovered but manufactured

Question 5

What is ‘news values’?

Answer 5

• A central aspect of the manufacture of news is the notion of ‘news values’. News values are the criteria by which journalists and editors decide whether a story is newsworthy enough.
• Key news values influencing the selection of crimes include: immediacy (‘breaking news’), dramatisation (action and excitement), personalisation (human interest stories about individuals), higher-status (persons and ‘celebrities’), simplification (eliminating shades of grey), unexpectedness (a new angle), risk (victim-centred stories), violence.

Question 6

Describe fictional representations of crime

Answer 6

• Fictional media also has a huge emphasis of crime. Mandel (1945-84) estimates that 10 billion crime thrillers were sold worldwide and about 20% of films are based on crime
• Surrette suggests most of what we watch is based on the law of opposite: violent and sexual crime overrepresented, sex crimes committed by psychopath strangers, fictional cops usually ‘get their man’