The media and the social construction of crime and deviance

Crime as consumer spectacle

Infotainment - crime is packaged to entertain

Hayward & Young (2012) - advertisers have turned images of crime & deviance into tools of selling products in the consumer market, e.g. video games combine images of criminality and gang culture

Agenda setting

Issues that people think about discuss are based on the agenda that media reports tell them about

'Involves the power management which issues are to presented for public discussion and debate and which issues are kept in the background

People perceptions of crime and deviance in society are influenced by what media personnel choose to include or leave out.

News values

Greer & Reiner (2012) - stories of sexual and violent crimes excites and captures popular imagination

Media over exaggerate, sensationalise, and over-report some crimes out of proportion to generate audience interest.

Reiner (2007) - media coverage of crime & deviance is filtered through the values and assumptions of crime-thriller writers of what they think is worth telling...these are NEWS VALUES

The backwards law: public perceptions and the distortion and exaggeration of crime

CSEW - people base their knowledge of crime and the CJS on the media

Surette (2010) - there is a 'backwards law' with the media constructing images of crime and justice which are an opposite version of reality.

Greer (2003) and Greer & Reiner (2012) - this is done by the media in the following ways:

Over-exaggerating sex, drug, and serious violence related crimes

Portraying property crime as far more serious and violent then most recorded offences

Over exaggerating police effectiveness in solving crimes

Exaggerating the risks of becoming victims faced by higher-status white people, older people, and women and children

Emphasising individual incidents of crime, rather than providing any understanding or analysis of crime patterns or the causes of crime.

The hyperreality of crime

Baudrillard (2001) - media does not reflect reality but actively creates it.

Flately et al. (2010) - although crime in E & W had been falling , between 3/4 and 2/3 of the population wrongly thought it was rising

The media as moral entrepreneurs

These are people, groups, or organisations with the power to create or enforce rules which define deviance.

Media establishes itself as the 'self appointed guardians of national morality' by labelling and stereotyping certain groups and activities as deviant, social problems, and a threat to society.

Media stories can demonise as folk devils, and sensotise the public to such an extent that it is encouraged to take action against them.

Deviance amplification, folk devils and moral panics

Hall et al. (1978), in their study of mugging, and Cohen (2002), show how the media can whip up a moral panic

Moral panics tend to appear during periods of social uncertainty, such as periods of rapid social change or political and economic crisis.

Those defined as deviant are easy scapegoats to blame for a range of social problems.

The way the media may actually create or make worse the very problems they condemn is known as deviance amplification.

How relevant is the concept of a moral panic?

Hunt (2003) - the boundaries separating moral and immoral behaviour have become blurred.

Postmodernists - people are more sceptical of media platforms, and are less likely to believe them.

McRobbie & Thornton (1995) - moral panics are no longer useful for understanding crime because new media technology, and sophisticate audience etc. have changed the reporting and reaction to, events that might have caused a moral panic.

Beck (1992) - in a contemporary 'risk society' there are now so many risks and uncertainties that many of the things that used to generate moral panics have now become a norm.

Steve Hall (2012) - there is no such thing as a moral panic.

The headlines reflect a real sense of exasperation felt by many

Media also overaggerates the CJSs ability to solve these crimes

Public concern is generated only to be soothed by the media in a way that increases the publics faith in the CJS - the opposite of panic.

Does the media cause crime?

Greer & Reiner (2012) - there has been a very long history of what Pearson (1983) called 'respectable fears' about the media causing crime & deviance.

They identified several ways that the media does this

Labelling, moral entrepreneurship and deviance amplification

Motives for crimes

Knowledge and learning of criminal techniques

New means of committing crimes

The reduction of social controls over crime

Providing targets for crime