Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
Topic 7- Media Representation of Crime - Coggle Diagram
Topic 7- Media Representation of Crime
Official Statistics and media
While the news media shows a keen interest in crime, they give a distorted image of crime, criminals and policing. For example as compared with the picture of crime we can gain from official statistics:
1) Media coverage exaggerates polices success is clearing up cases This is partly because the police are a major source of crime stories and want to represent themselves in a good light
2) The media exaggerate the risk of victimisation especially to women, white people and higher status individuals
3) The Media portrays criminals and victims as older and more middle class than those typically found in the criminal justice system. Felson calls this the age fallacy
There is some evidence of the changes in the types of coverage of crime by the news media. Schlesinger and Tumbler found that in the 196-s the focus had been on murders and petty crime however in the 1990, murder and petty crime were of less intrest to the media.
The changes came partly because of the abolishment of the death penalty for murder and rising crime rate meant that crime had to be special to attract media. The media had widened to drugs, terrorism and mugging.
News values and Crime coverage
News values are the criteria by which journalists and editors decide whether a story is newsworthy enough to make it into the news. If a crime story can be told in terms of some key criteria it has a better chance of making the news
Key news values include
Immediacy- Breaking news
Dramatisation - action and excitement
Personalisation- Human interest stories about individuals
Higher status persons and celebrities
On reason why the news media gives some more coverage to crime is that news focuses on the unusual which makes deviance newsworthy sine is abnormal behaviour
Fictional Representation of crime
Fictional representation of crime are also important sources of our knowledge of crime because so much of their output is crime related. Fictional representations of crime, criminals and victims follow what Surette calls 'the law of opposites' meaning they are opposite of the official stats but similar to news coverage.
Property crime is under-represented while violence, drugs and sex crimes are over-represented
While real life homicides mainly result from brawls and domestic disputes, fictional ones are the product of greed
Fictional cops usually get their man
However three recent trends are important.
1) The new genre of reality informant shows tend to feature young, non white underclass offenders
2) There is an increasing tendency to show police as corrupt and brutal as well as less successful
3) Victims have become more central with law enforces portrayed as their avengers and audiences invited to identify with their suffering