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.