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Media Representations + Causing Crime - Topic7 - Coggle Diagram
Media Representations + Causing Crime - Topic7
Media Representations of Crime
Often distorting the image of crime.
The media over-represents violent and sexual crime
- The media reports 46% were about violent, sexual crime but they only make up 3% of crime.
The media represents criminals and victims as older and more MC
- In reality, victims are usually WC, minorities and young people.
Media coverage exaggerates police success in clearing up cases
- The police wants to present themselves in a good light to gain the publics trust and raise confidence.
The media exaggerates the risk of victimisation
especially towards women, white people and higher status individuals.
Crime is reported as a series of separate events
when they're usually connected.
The media overplay extraordinary crime and underplay ordinary crime
misrepresenting the nature of crime.
Dramatic fallacy
The media images lead us to believe that committing crime involves someone being clever - ingenutity fallacy.
News Values + Crime Coverage
News is socially contructured undergoing a social process where potential stories are selected and others are rejected.
News is manufactured, where journalists and editors decide whether a story is newsworthy.
Immediacy
- Breaking news, since it's happening live, people are more likely to watch.
Dramatisation
- Action and excitement.
Personalisation
- Human interest stories about individuals.
Higher status person's and celebrities
Simplification
- Illuminating shades of grey
Novelty or unexpectedness
- A new angle of the story provided.
Risk
- Victim centred storeys about vulnerability and fear.
Violence
- Especiallu visible spectacular apps.
Fictional Representation of Crime
Fictional representations from TV, cinema and novels, so we get images from crime from other places beside the news media.
Fictional representations have the "law of opposites" - being the opposite stats and strikingly similar to news coverage.
Property crime is underrepresented, while violence, drugs and sex crimes are overrepresented.
Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers, not acquaintances. When in reality, you would know them.
Fictional villans tend to be high status, middle aged white males.
Fictional cops usually get their man, in reality this doesn't happen very much.
AO3
New genres of shows feature young, non-whte underclass offenders.
There's a rising tendency to show police as corrupt, brutal and less successful.
Victims have become more central.
Media Causing Crime
There's been a concern that the media has a negative effect on attitudes, values and behaviour, especially towards groups that are more suspectible to influence.
Recently, rap lyrics and computer games have been criticised for encouraging violence and criminality.
Imitation
- Promoting deviant role models, resulting in copy cat behaviour e.g. Columbine shooting in 1999.
Arousal
- Through viewing violent and sexual imagery, crime is exciting.
Desensitisation
- Through repeated viewing of violence, it's normalised.
By transmitting knowledge of criminal techniques
A target for crime
e.g. theft of TV's.
Stimulating desires for unaffordable goods
e.g. through advertising creating relative deprivation.
Portraying the police as incompetent
- More inclined to commit crime.
Glamorising offending
AO3
People are preoccupied with the effects of the media on children because of our desire as a society to regard children as a time of uncontaminated innocense in the private sphere
Fear of Crime
The media exaggerates violent and unusual crime, and they exaggerate the risks of certain groups becoming victims.
This distorts the publics impression of crime and causing an unrealistic fear of crime.
There's a correlation not a causation.
People with a higher intake of media have a greater fear of becoming a victim.
The Media, Relative Deprivation and Crime
- Media portrayls of crime and deviant lifstyles lead viewers to commit crime themselves.
How far the media portralys of normal rather than criminal lifestyles, might also encourage people to commit crime.
In today's society, the poorest of groups have media access to a materalistic life as the norm.
This creates relative deprivation and social exclusion felt by marginalised groups.
The media are an instrument in setting the norm and thus promoting crime.
Cultural Criminology
The media can turn crime itself into a commodity that people desire.
The media encourages them to consume crime, in the form of images of crime.
Late modern society is a media saturated society = 'mediascape', creating a blur between image and reality of crime where the two are no longer distinct.
Media + Commodification of Crime
- Crime has become commodified.
Advertisers use media images of crime to sell products e.g. hip-hop, rap culture combine images of street hustler criminality with images of consumerist success.
Hip-hop, rap culture parade chic clothing, jewllery, luxury cars etc.
The fashion industry trades off on image of the forbidden and inobtainable.
Designer labels valued by young people as badges of identity (nike idenitites), symbols of deviance.