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.