Media's Representation of the Nature and Extent of Crime in Britain
There is continuous debate on the effectiveness of media reporting
with regards to informing the public about crime. The media have
motive, methods by, which they distort information, and evidence of
the affects of their misinforming the public. However the media do
inform the public with regards to problems in our society, without the
media we would know nothing. The public also need to be thought of
when trying to decipher whether the media does in fact misinform them.
There are certain motives, which may suggest that the media do in fact
misinform the public with regards to the nature and extent of crime.
The Marxist ‘mass manipulation’ models suggest that the excess of
crime stories are there as a way to divert attention away from the
real problems in a capitalist society. They see media manipulation and
distortion as a way in, which the upper classes control and extend
their power out over the lower or working classes. Through diverting
attention away from central issues the upper classes are able to
retain their power and the established social hierarchy. ‘The class
which has the means of material production at its disposal has control
at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby,
generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental
production are subject to it’[1]. The Marxist ‘mass manipulation’
model also proposed the idea that the media orchestrate moral panics
in order to legitimise the introduction of greater social control
measures. So Marxist theorists therefore felt that the media
misinforms the public with re...
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...ondon:
Routledge and kegan Paul.
Tierney, J. (1996), Criminology Theory and Context, London: Prentice
Hall.
Williams, K. (1997), Textbook on criminology, 3rd edn., London:
Blackstone Press.
Young, Jock (1974), ‘Mass Media, Drugs and Deviance’, in Paul Rock and
Mary McIntosh (eds), Deviance and Social Control, London: Tavistock.
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[1] Marx & Engels: The German Ideology, cited in Curran et al. (1982:
22).
[2] Soothill and Walby, 1991: 72.
[3] Schlesinger and Tumber 1994: 234-40.
[4] Chibnall, 1977: 102
[5] Box, 1981: in Katherine. S Williams, 1997:51
[6] Smith, 1984: 289.
[7] Katherine S. Williams, 1997: 53.
[8] Gerbner, 1994: 133
[9] Cohen: Folk Devils and Moral Panics: 1972.
[10] Young 1974: 72.
Gina Marchetti, in her essay "Action-Adventure as Ideology," argues that action- adventure films implicitly convey complex cultural messages regarding American values and the "white American status quo." She continues to say that all action-adventure movies have the same basic structure, including plot, theme, characterization, and iconography. As ideology, this film genre tacitly expresses social norms, values, and morals of its time. Marchetti's essay, written in 1989, applies to films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark and Rambo: First Blood II. However, action-adventure films today seem to be straying farther away from her generalizations about structure, reflecting new and different cultural norms in America. This changing ideology is depicted best in Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), which defies nearly every concept Marchetti proposes about action-adventure films; and it sets the stage for a whole new viewpoint of action in the '90's.
In 1761, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, England’s population consisted of 6.3 million inhabitants whereas 80 years later the population rose to 14.9 million, rising even with war and emigration transpiring. 1 The industrial revolution was a big step for Great Britain but not all benefitted, especially the poor and working class. One of the biggest negative side effects was poverty which increased the amount of street peddlers in the city streets. As that number grew many people grew upset complaining that they were blocking shops and taking up space, forcing street traders to move out to country borders, giving them less business and forcing them deeper into poverty. 2 With the beginning of the industrial revolution in the late 1700’s came the Crime Wave of the 1780’s where city prisons were filled to capacity and the amount of crime pushed forward policing levels and prosecution rates. This was only the beginning of a whole new era of criminal reform. 3 As the industrial revolution took its course throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the negative effects such as varying food prices and gruesome working and living conditions spurred rising crime rates, especially in property crime, leading to numerous police reforms and acts. Although these changes were not very effective in curbing the high crime they did end up laying a foundation for more successful reforms in the future.
Young, J. (1981). Thinking seriously about crime: Some models of criminology. In M. Fitzgerald, G. McLennan, & J. Pawson (Eds.), Crime and society: Readings in history and society (pp. 248-309). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Some of the governing models of moral panics include Jock Young (1971) and Stanley Cohen (1972). Stanley Cohen fabricated the idea of moral panics in his book Folk Devils and Moral Panics (1972), whilst Jock Young concentrated more on the correlation of deviance amplification and drug taking. The main feature of a moral panic is deviance amplification; this was looked at in more detail by Stanley Cohen (1972) in what he called the deviancy amplification spiral. Some examples of media moral panics include; internet pornography, violence in video games, immigration, single parents etc… Moral panics can affect the public’s perceptions of crime in many ways, making the ext... ... middle of paper ... ...
The ‘common sense hierarchy of immorality’ is that crimes of intention are more immoral than those of indifference. It can be argued that corporate crimes or crimes of indifference are the real crimes that cause the most human suffering due to official crime statistics. The media can be said to keep the real stories hidden from the public in order to keep it appealing and keep it’s users in fear so that they can maximise their number of users and profit. In my opinion, I believe that the way we view crime through this ‘common sense hierarchy of immorality’ is wrong we are afraid of things that can be said, we have a 90% chance of dying from. We have more of a chance to die from crimes of indifference than those of intention. It can be said that our minds have been constructed to believe that crimes of indifference are less harmful and most of the time mistakes but, it can be argued that when someone does something and has no concern to whom they are harming is more of a problem than someone who intentionally commits a crime. The ‘common sense hierarchy of immorality’ needs to be changed around and base crimes of indifference at the top and intentional crimes at the bottom. It can be argued that in order to start to change people’s way of thinking the media needs to stop portraying the intentional
What makes the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons so funny and memorable? Of course, the explosions, hits and falls the Coyote takes while in pursuit of the Roadrunner. Pediatrics, a pediatrician read magazine, wrote an article on the influence violence, such as that in cartoons and other forms of media, has on children from ages 2-18 titled “Media Violence.” “Although recent school shootings have prompted politicians and the general public to focus their attention on the influence of media violence, the medical community has been concerned with this issue since the 1950s,” says American Academy of Pediatrics, the author of the article in November of 2001. The article calls for a need for all pediatricians to take a stand on violence in the media and help to make sure their patients are not influenced negatively mentally or physically by violence in the media, using multiple statistics from many publications. “Media Violence” fails to be persuasive, however, due to its failure to show any evidence that its statistics are true.
Bang! Bang! Little children running and screaming; terrified that they are going to die. The shooter walks into the room heavily armed, with a crazed look in his eye. There’s a women near a closet and small group of 1st graders behind her. He starts to go toward the little room to finish what he started. Then the young woman steps in front of the unstable gunman to shield the students from harm. A fatal shot is fired and the young teacher lies dead. That woman was Victoria Soto, a hero in the Sandy Hook Shooting, who risked her life to save her students from that delusional man, Adam Lanza. The horrific incident that took place on December 14, 2012 took the innocent lives of 26 students and teachers. Lanza did have a mental illness, but that isn’t all to blame. The shooter was known to play and watch violent movie and games (Aliprandini and Finley). This shows that media violence can be linked to aggressive behavior and that violent media can affect the minds of some young children and teens. Studies in the past decade have helped prove that sometimes the media can be bad for kids. The outcome of playing first-person shooter games could end up in innocent lives dying like in Newtown.
During the 1970’s to the early 1990’s there had emerged two new approaches to the study of crime and deviance. The discipline of criminology had expanded further introducing right and left realism, both believe in different areas and came together in order to try and get a better understanding on crime and prevention. There were many theorists that had influenced the realism approaches such as; Jock Young (Left Wing) and James Wilson (Right Wing).
A moral panic can be defined as a phenomenon, frequently initiated by disquieting media and reinforced by responsive laws and public policies, of embellished public concern, angst or anger over a perceived danger to societal order (Krinsky, 2013). The media plays a crucial role in emphasizing a current moral panic. In Jock Young’s chapter Images of Deviance (1971), he comments on the phenomenon of deviance magnification, he deems dramatic media coverage of deviant behaviours to be ironic, owing to the fact that it unintentionally increases rather than restrains the apparent deviance. In hind sight the media create social problems, owing to the fact that they can present them dramatically and are able to do it swiftly (Young & Cohen, 1971: 37).
Drawing from tenets of Marxist theory, critical criminology believe that crime results from the mode of production by capitalist and the economic structures they have created. Social classes have been divided into two: those whose income is secured by property ownership; and those whose income is secured by their labor. The resultant class structure influences the opportunities of an individual to succeed in life and his propensity to engage in crime. Although it encompasses the macro-economic factors that are rarely included in micro-economic analysis of crime, it does not substitute those macro factors, like unemployment, to micro factors, like being jobless. However, it combines the macro and micro factors in analyzing how micro factors of crime are integrated into the macro structures.
In recent years, the subject of crime has become an increasingly important theme of political, academic, and public debate. In particular, the media today is more focused on victims than it has ever been before. Through media representations of the ‘ideal victim’, this essay will subsequently show how the media are able to construct and re-affirm pre-existing traditional ideologies within the public realm. In effect, this assignment will critically assess the concept of an ‘ideal victim’ and show how the media have used this when describing crime.
Crime is an irrelevant concept as it is tied to the formal social control mechanism of the State; deviance is a concept that is owned by sociology thus our study should be the sociology of deviance, rather than criminology
...it is the advent of television media that have sparked debate over the integrity of reliable news making. Print media was factual, although sometimes sensational, while electronic media made use of the technologies, such as videotapes and live footage to enhance and exaggerate the drama of the event even further. Many research studies have been conducted to show the effects of the media coverage on crime and how it influences the publics of fear of crime. Mass media has perpetuated a notion that crime is on the increase by portraying events and tragedies in the headlines that are sensational. The public buys into that idea, despite statistical accounts that reflect stable or low crime rates. The more stories people read and watch about crime, the more likely they are to think that crime is out of control. Politicians may then enact legal reforms to sooth the public’s outcry for crime control and prevention. As easy as it may be to hold the media accountable for barraging us with images and ideas that affect our views and beliefs, it important that the public take responsibility for the information that we consume. After all, there is always the “off” button on the remote control.
What research shows is that media and crime are intertwined and that there is an effect on the criminal justice system and its policies. Surette discusses the two tenets concerning criminal justice and the media. The first is the “backwards law” which states that anything the media portrays is in fact the opposite of what is really happening (2010, p. 182). He goes on to explain that this distortion is due to how news is presented in either an episodic format, the following of a single incident or case, or thematic format, a flowing of trends, and how both formats only show a small fraction of the reality (p. 183). The other is the “rule of immanent justice.” Surette defines immanent justice as “the belief that a divine higher power will intervene, and reveal and punish the guilty while protecting the innocent” (p. 186). He argues that the media perpetually illustrates that criminality is inborn and that society seeks immanent justice and supports crime fighters, such as police, in helping combat the issue of crime (pp. 186-187). While...
a hefty price. If only we could change the old cliché to, "no news is