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Crime and the media - Coggle Diagram
Crime and the media
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Cyber crime
- Emergence new media often triggers moral panics. Internet due to its rapid development and global scale led to fear of cyber crime
- Thomas and Loader: computer-mediated activities that are either illegal or considered illicit by some, conducted through global electronic networks
- Opportunities (Jewkes): internet creates opportunities for both conventional crimes and new crimes using new tools
Categories of cybercrime (Wall):
- Cyber-trespass (hacking, sabotage)
- Cyber-deception and theft
- Cyber-pornography
- Cyber-violence (psychological harm or inciting physical harm)
Challenges in policing cyber crime:
- Scale and resources
- Globalisation/jurisdiction
- Police culture (low priority due to lack excitement)
Opportunities for surveillance and control:
- New info and communication tech (ICT) provides states with greater opportunities for surveillance and control (Jewkes), through tools like CCTV, electronic databases, digital fingerprinting, smart identity cards, carnivores
Media representations of crime:
- Ericson et al in Toronto found 45-71% of quality press and radio news focused on deviance and its control
- Williams and Dickinson noted British newspapers devote up to 30% of news space to crime
- Over-representation of violent and sexual crime: Ditton and Buffy - 46% media reports were about violent or sexual crimes, despite these making up only 3% police-recorded crimes. Marsh - violent crime was 36x more likely to be reported than property crime in American news
- Age fallacy (Felson): media portray criminals and victims as older and more MC than they typically are in the CJS
- Exaggerated police success: media coverage overstates police's success in solving cases. Partly due to police being a major source of stories and because violent crimes have higher clear-up rates
- Exaggerated victimisation risk especially for women, white and higher status
- Fragmented reporting: crime presented as a series of isolated events, without exploring underlying causes or wider social context
- Dramatic fallacy and ingenuity fallacy (Felson): media overplay extraordinary crimes and underplay ordinary ones. Also suggest committing and solving crime requires daring and cleverness
Changes in coverage over time (Schlesinger and Tumber):
- 60s focus on murders and petty crime
- 90s this decreased due to abolition of death penalty for murder and rising crime rates requiring crimes to be special for coverage
- Coverage expanded to include drugs, child abuse, terrorism, football hooliganism and mugging
- Increased preoccupation with sex crimes: Soothill and Walby: newspaper reporting of rape cases increased from under a quarter in 1951 to over a third in 1985. Coverage focuses on identifying a sex fiend or beast, creating a distorted image of rape as primarily involving serial attacks by psychopathic strangers, when in most cases the perpetrator is known to the victim
News values and crime coverage:
- Distorted picture of crime results from news being a social construction
- Cohen and Young: news in manufactured, with certain stories selected and others rejected based on news values - criteria journalists and editors use to determine newsworthiness
- Values influencing crime stories:
- Immediacy
- Dramatisation
- Personalisation
- Higher status persons and celeb
- Simplification
- Novelty or unexpectedness
- Risk
- Violence
- Crime highly news worthy as it is considered abnormal behaviour, fitting the news focus on the unusual and extraordinary
Fictional representations of crime:
- Fiction portrayals in TV, cinema and novels are sources of crime knowledge
- Mandel estimated over 10 billion crime thrillers sold worldwide between 1945-84, and about 25% of prime-time TV and 20% of films are crime-related
- Law of opposites (Surette): Fictional representations are often the opposite of official stats and strikingly similar to news coverage:
- Under-representation of property crime: over representation of violence, drugs and sex crimes
- Homicides: product greed and calculation, real-life reuslt of brawls and domestic disputes
- Sex crimes: psychopathic strangers not acquaintances
- Villains: high status, middle ages, white men
- Police success
- Recent trends in fictional crime:
- Reality infotainment: young, non-white 'underclass' offenders
- Corrupt/brutal police
- Victim-centred narratives
Moral Panics
- Media can contribute to crime and deviance through labelling.
- 'Moral entrepreneurs' can use media to pressure authorities to act. If successful, campaigning leads to negative labelling of the behaviour and potentially legal changes, which can effectively 'cause' crime by criminalising previously legal acts
- Moral panic is an exaggerated over-reaction by society to a perceived problem, often driven or inspired by media, where the reaction inflates the problems out of proportion to its actual seriousness
- Characteristics:
- Identification of a folk devil (threat to societal values)
- Negative, stereotypical portrayal
- Condemnation
- Leads to call for a crackdown on the group. Can create SFP that amplifies the problem - deviance amplification spiral
Mods and Rockers (Cohen):
- Book folk devils and moral panics, examines media's role in creating moral panic around disturbances between two groups of WC teens at English seaside resorts from 1964-66
- Mods: smart clothes, rode scooters; rockers wore leather jackets, rode motorbikes. Initially distinctions were fluid and few youths strongly identified with either
- Minor scuffles, stone throwing, broken windows and wrecked beach huts occurred in Clacton during Easter weekend 1964
- Media over-reaction:
- Exaggeration and distortion: exaggerated numbers and extent of violence and damage, using sensational headlines like 'Day of terror by scooter gangs'
- Prediction: media regularly predicted further conflict and violence
- Symbolisation: clothing, bikes, scooters, hair, music associated with either were negatively labelled and linked to deviance. Allowed media to connect unconnected events, suggesting a broader problems of disorderly youth
Deviance amplification spiral:
- Made problem seem widespread and out of control, leading to increased calls for police and court control
- Further marginalised and stigmatised groups, leading to less tolerance
- Media's clear definitions of the groups and their subcultural styles led to more youths adopting these styles and participating in clashes, crystallising loose groupings into distinct ones
- Encouraged polarisation and SFP, youth began to act out the roles assigned to them by the media
- Media definitions are crucial as more people in large scale modern societies lack direct experiences of such events and rely on the media for info, allowing media to frame the group as 'folk devils'
Wider context:
- Context of post-war British social change. New affluence, consumerism and hedonism of the young seemed to challenge the values of an older gen
- Social change and anxiety: moral panics often occur in periods of social change, reflecting anxieties when traditional values appear to be undermined
- Boundary crisis: where there was uncertainty about the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. 'Folk devil' symbolises and focuses popular anxieties about social disorder
- Functionalist: moral panics can be seen as a response to the sense of anomie caused by change, Dramatising the threat, media reasserts social controls and reinforces collective consciousness when central values are threatened
- New-marxist (Hall et al): moral panic served to: distract attention from crisis of capitalism, divide WC along racial lines, legitimate more authoritarian style of rule
Criticisms:
- Disproportionate reaction: who decides what constitutes proportionate v panicky
- Amplifier mechanism: unclear what triggers and what deactivated
- Late modernity: McRobbie and Thornton - moral panics are routine and have less impact, Media audiences are accustomed to shock horror stories. Lack of consensus on constitutes deviance harder for media to create effective panics