Crime and the Media

Crime and the Media

‘Well, hello there. Who are YOU? Based on your vibe, a student. Your blouse is loose. You're not here to be ogled, but those bracelets, they jangle. You like a little attention. Okay, I bite. You search the books. Fiction, "F" through "K." Now… Hmm, you're not the standard insecure nymph hunting for Faulkner you'll never finish Too sun-kissed for Stephen King. Who will you buy…’

You (2018) - Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble

Crime and the Media

Today we live in a media saturated society.

Media is always around us and is often obsessed with crime.

The media has become our main source of knowledge about crime.

What we know - or think that we know - about crime is heavily influenced by the media’s representation of it.

3 Main Areas:

1. Media Representations of Crime
2. Media as a Cause of Crime
3. Moral Panics

Media Representations of Crime

Ericson et al. (1991) found that in Toronto 45-71% of quality press and radio news was about deviance and its control.

Williams and Dickinson (1993) found British newspapers devote up to 30% of their news space to crime.

Although the media has a keen interest in crime, it often gives us a distorted image of crime, criminals and policing. Compared to official statistics:

• The media over-represent violent and sexual crime - eg. Ditton and Duffy (1983) found that 46% of media reports = violent/sexual crimes; only 3% of all crimes recorded are violent/sexual crimes. Additionally, Marsh (1991) found that violent crimes were 36% more likely to be reported than a property crime in America news.
• The media portray criminals and victims as older and more middle-class than those typically found in the criminal justice system. Felson (1998) calls this ‘age fallacy’.
• Media coverage exaggerates police success in clearing up cases. Police want to present themselves in a good light. Media also over-represents violent crime, which has a higher clear-up rate than property crime.
• The media exaggerate the risk of victimisation, especially to women, White people, and higher status individuals.
• Crime is reported as a series of separate events without structure and without examining underlying causes.
• The media overplay extraordinary crimes and underplay ordinary crimes - Felson calls this the ‘dramatic fallacy’. Similarly, media images lead us to believe that to commit crime (and to solve it) one needs to be daring and clever - the ‘ingenuity fallacy’.

Types of news coverage of crime have also changed over time. Schlesinger and Tumber (1994) studies this and found:

• 60s focus = murders and petty crime.

• 90s focus = drugs, child abuse, terrorism, and football hooliganism.

• This change partly came around due to the abolition of the death penalty for murder.

• Also partly due to a significant rise in crime meant that for it to be covered by the media, it has to be ‘special’.

There is also evidence of increasing preoccupation with sex crimes. Soothill and Walby (1991) found:

• Newspapers reporting of rape cases increased from under 1/4 of all cases in 1951 to over 1/3 in 1985.

• Coverage consistently focuses on identifying a ‘sex fiend’ or ‘beast’ by use of labels.

• This distorted picture of rape is one of serial attacks carried out by psychopathic strangers.

• These cases are the exception rather than the rule - in most cases the perpetrator is known to the victim.

News Values and Crime Coverage

The distorted picture of crime painted by the news media reflects the notion that news is a social construct.

Cohen and Young (1973) note that news is not discovered, it is manufactured.

‘News Values’ (criteria for journalists and editors on whether a story is newsworthy) influence this:

• Immediacy - ‘breaking news’

• Dramatisation - action

• Personalisation - human interest

• Higher-status - person or celebs

• Simplification - eliminates shades of grey/grey areas

• Novelty or Unexpectedness - new angle

• Risk - victim-centred story on vulnerability.

• Violence - mostly visible and spectacular

Fictional Representations:

Fictional representations from TV, cinema and novels are also important sources of our knowledge of crime.

This is because so much of their output is crime-related.

Mandel (1984) estimates from 1945-1984 over 10 billion crime thriller novels were sold worldwide. While about 25% of prime time TV and 20% of films are crime shows or movies.

Fictional representations of crime, criminals and victims follow what Surette (1998) calls ‘the law of opposites’ (of official statistics) but similar to news coverage:

• Property crime is underrepresented, violence is overrepresented.

• Real-life homicides are often results from accidents or fights, fictional ones are out of greed and calculation.

• Fictional sex crimes are committed by psychopathic strangers, not acquaintances.

• Fictional cops usually ‘get their man’.

Male fictional criminals are often overly sexualised and romanticised (eg. You and American Psycho). Most serial killers are not like this!

The Media as a Cause of Crime

Media as a Cause of Crime:

• The young, lower-class and uneducated are the most susceptible groups in society.

• In the 20s and 30s, cinema was blamed for corrupting the youth.

• In the 50s, horror comics were held responsible for moral decline.

• In the 80s, video games were said to cause ‘video nasties’

• In contemporary times, rap lyrics and computer games such as Grand Theft Auto have been criticised for encouraging violence and criminality (cf. Arnot).

There are numerous ways in which the media might possibly cause crime and deviance, including:

• Imitation - providing deviant role models, resulting in copycat behaviour - eg. serial killers.

• Arousal - through viewing violent or sexual imagery - eg. child abuse.

• Desensitisation - through repeated viewing of violence - eg. violence.

• Transmitting Knowledge of criminal techniques - eg. prisons, muggings.

• As a target of crime - eg. theft of TVs

• Stimulating Desires for unaffordable goods - eg. through advertising; eBay

• Portraying the police as incompetent - racism

• Glamourising Offending - eg. TV show You, murder.

These issues caused thousands of studies to be done on the effects of media and their audiences.

Most studies have tended to find that exposure of media violence has at most a small and limited negative effect on audiences.

Schramm et al. (1961) says that it can be harmful to some, but beneficial to others depending on their condition.

Livingstone (1996) notes:

• Despite these findings, people still preoccupy themselves with the effects of media on children.

• This is due to our desire to protect childhood.

• Children must have uncontaminated innocence in the private sphere.

Fear of Crime:

• Gerbner et al. - heavy users of television (4 hours+ a day) had high levels of fear of crime.

• Schlesinger and Tumbler (1992) - correlation between media consumption and fear of crime, with tabloid readers and heavy users of TV expressing greater fear of becoming a victim, especially of physical attacks and muggings.

Evaluation:

Might not be cause, instead could be a result of - eg. avoiding going out may lead to increased TV screen time.

The Media, Relative Deprivation and Crime

It is important to note that it is not always media representation of crime that causes crime. An alternative approach is to consider how far media portrayals of ‘normal’ rather than criminal lifestyles might also encourage people to commit crime.

Lea and Young: Relative Deprivation

• Left realists argue that the mass media help to increase the sense of relative deprivation - the feeling of being deprived relative to others - among poor and marginalised groups.

• ‘Mass media have disseminated a standardised image of lifestyle… for those unemployed and surviving through the dole queue or only able to obtain employment at very low wages, has accentuated the sense of relative deprivation.

• Even those who are in the poorest group have access to media, the media present everyone with images of a materialistic ‘good life’ of leisure, fun and consumer goods as the norm to which they should conform.

Merton:

• Pressure to conform to the norm can cause deviant behaviour when the opportunity to achieve by legitimate means is blocked.

• In this instance, the media are instrumental in setting the norm and thus in promoting crime.

Cultural Criminology, the Media and Crime

By contrast to relative deprivation, cultural criminology argues that the media turn crime itself into the commodity that people desire.

The media encourages them to consume crime, in the form of images of crime.

Hayward and Young: Hyperrealism and Crime

• Late modern society as a media-saturated society, where we are immersed in the ‘mediascape’ - an exer-expanding tangle of fluid digital images, including images of crime.

• There is a blurring between the image and the reality of crime (cf. Baudrillard - Hyperrealism).

• For example, police car cameras don’t just record police activity; they actually alter the way the police work, with the US police forces for example using reality TV shows like Cops as promo videos.

Media and the Commodification of Crime

Further feature of late modernity - emphasises consumption, excitement and immediacy in crime.

Corporations and advertisers use media images of crime to sell products, especially in the youth market.

For example, ‘gangster’ rap and hip hop combine images of street hustler criminality with images of consumerist success. Similarly, leading hip hop stars parade designer chic clothing, jewellery, champagne, luxury cars and so on.

Fenwick and Hayward (2000):

• ‘Crime is packaged and marketed to young people as a romantic, exciting, cool, and fashionable cultural symbol’

Hayward and Young:

• Car ads - street riots, joyriding, suicide bombing, graffiti and pyromania.

• Fashion industry - advertisers trade on images of the forbidden (with brands such as Opium, Poison and Obsession), ‘heroin chic’, sadomasochism and violence against women, and the retailer FCUK ‘brands’ transgression into its name.

• Graffiti is the marker of deviant urban cool, but corporations now use it in a ‘guerilla marketing’ technique called ‘brandism’ to sell everything from theme parks to cars and video games.

• Ironically, designer labels valued by young people as badges of identity, now function as symbols of deviance. Eg. Some places refuse entry for individuals wearing a certain brand - Bluewater shopping centre has banned the use of hoodies. Brands become tools of classification for constructing profiles of potential criminals.

Moral Panics

Moral Panics:

• A further way in which the media may cause crime and deviance is through labelling.

• Closely associated with interactionists and social action theory.

• Moral entrepreneurs may demonise particular behaviours and pressure the government to do something about it.

• If successful, the result is negative labelling of behaviour and perhaps change in the law.

A moral panic is an exaggerated over-reaction by society to a perceived problem - usually driven or inspired by the media - where the reaction enlarges the problem out of proportion and seriousness.

In a moral panic

• Media identify a group as a folk devil (cf. Cohen: Folk Devil) or threat to societal values.

• Media present the group in a negative stereotypical fashion exaggerating the problem.

• Moral entrepreneurs condemn the group and its behaviour.

This ends in a ‘crackdown’ on that group which may create a self-fulfilling prophecy that amplifies the very problem that caused the panic in the first place.

Eg. Petrol crisis (2021), COVID panic buying (2020), BLM protests (2020)

Cohen: Mods and Rockers (Media Representation of a Gang Conflict)

Nothing too bad happened in the attack, but the media created a moral panic in the public. Cohen says this moral panic contained three things:

1. Exaggeration and Distortion - of the numbers and actions eg. headlines read ‘Youngsters beat up town’ etc.

2. Prediction - media assumed conflict would result.

3. Symbolisation - their clothes, bike, music etc. were all negatively labelled.

Deviance Amplification Spiral:

Cohen argues that the media’s portrayal of events produced a deviance amplification spiral by making it seem as if the problem was spreading and getting out of hand.

This produced further marginalisation and stigmatisation of the mods and rockers as deviants, and less and less tolerance of them, and so on in an upward spiral.

Wider Context:

Cohen puts the moral panic about the mods and rockers into the wider context of change in post-war British society. This was a period in which the newfound affluence, consumerism and hedonism of the young appeared to challenge the values of an older generation who had lived through the hardships of 1930s and 1940s (evaluation).

Other sociologists have also used the concept of moral panics. For example, Stuart Hall et al (1979) adopt a neo-Marxist approach that locates the role of moral panic over ‘mugging’ in the British media in the 1970s serves to distract attention from the crisis of capitalism, divide the working-class on racial grounds and legitimate a more authoritarian style of rule.