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Media and Crime (Crime as a Consumer Spectacle (Crime and deviance has…
Media and Crime
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Agenda Setting
- Agenda Setting is where the media provide knowledge or impressions about crime and deviance to most people in society due to the limited list of crime the media reports on.
- People are only able to form opinions on crime they have been informed about through the media.
- This means peoples perceptions of crime and deviance are influenced by what the media personal chose to include or leave out .
- Therefore what is shown in the media may effect what people believe about crime and deviance, for example they may think it's worse than it is as they only here about the worst types of crimes, not the small crimes or the lack of crime.
News Values
- Greer & Reiner point out that sexual and violent crimes are particularly exciting to the general public. So often, in media, both fact and fiction, these areas or types of crimes are exploited and exaggerated in order to generate audience interest and increase the chance of consumption of the media product.
- Greer suggested it is these news values that explain why all mainstream media tend to exaggerate the extent of violent crime, and why celebrities crime, not matter how trivial, always gets massive coverage.
- Reiner suggests that media coverage of crime and deviance is filtered through the assumptions of what makes a story 'newsworthy'. These assumptions are known as news values.
- Jewkes suggests these news values include;
- simplification - easy to understand
- particularly graphic & violent
- high risk/particularly serious crimes
- child offenders or victims
- sexual and violent crimes
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Deviancy amplification, Moral Panics and Folk Devils
- Sociological studies such as Hall et al's on mugging show how the media, through exaggerating crime and deviance, can create a moral panic.
- Moral Panic: a wave of public concern about some exaggerated or imaginary threat to society
- Hall and Cohen suggest that media-generated moral panic's often appear during periods of uncertainty, such as rapid social change or economic or political crisis.
- Those defined as folk devils are then used as scapegoats for the social problems, while the general public pull together against them, which can result in heavier policing, for example.
- It is possible that this action from police and media can amplify what started as a small problem, for example by causing more arrests. This might even create deviance where there was none before, and media coverage can lead to people to play up with deviant behaviour to get more media coverage.
- Deviancy Amplification: the way the media may actually make worse or create the very deviance they condemn by their exaggerated, sensationalised and distorted reporting of events and their presence at them.
Cohen: Folk Devils & Moral Panics
- Cohen showed how the media can create a moral panic through mods and rockers. In 1964 there were minor scuffles between the to groups in Clacton, however the media released hugely exaggerated reports of Clacton being terrorised. This created a moral panic which led to mods and rockers being labelled as folk devils.
- Before these events the two groups had not been revivals, but the over exaggeration from the media led to young people identifying with one of two and an increased hostility between them.
- McRobbie & Thornton suggest the concept of moral panic is no longer useful in understanding crime as it is outdated in the age of the new media. This is because things like social media have have changed the way media is reported.
- Beck argues that in contemporary 'risk society' there are now so many risks that many things used to generate moral panic have become a normal part of daily life.
- Steve Hall criticises the idea of a moral panic as he claims the media also exaggerates the CJS's ability to solve these crimes. Therefore, public concern is generated only to be soothed by the media, so often a moral panic does not occur.
- Hall also argues that liberal sociologists don't take into account rational fears of real crime, and that the concept of moral panic is just an ideological construction of liberal sociologists.