Misrepresentation Of Media

Crime is a commodity, a product used to generate money for the media. Those in the media benefit from feeding Americans sensationalistic stories of crime and violence fostering an environment of fear and anxiety. The outcome of such fear mongering is this misinformation gives the public a skewed version of reality and the public has a knee-jerk reaction to the misrepresentation of facts. The misrepresentation of facts includes topics such as juvenile crime, the exploitation of workplace violence, sabotaging of Halloween candy, and even stranger danger, to name a few. The media is a business and this incites the controversy whether or not we have an accurate portrayal of national and world news and the perceptions the public gains, even

One of the examples of this is the misrepresentation of juvenile crime. Violence of any kind has a strong effect on society and juvenile crime in the schools is particularly troubling. The community should take necessary precautions when it comes to school bullying and other violence, however, the issue is exploited and the public is misinformed when the media makes unjust claims. The unfortunate events that involved school shootings prompted a media explosion regarding killer kids started in the 1990 's and continues to recent media reports. What was not mentioned is how juvenile crime rates have actually decreased substantially over the last several years. The FBI Uniform Crime Reports tracks crime statistics over the course of several decades and define violent crime as including murder, manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, and robbery. The FBI reports that juvenile crime arrests decreased since the 2001 reports by 3.0 percent (See Table 36) and of those who were arrested 14.9 were under the age of 18 (See Table 41). The result of the media misrepresenting information is leaving the community with a sense of unease and creating fear and this leads to an increased risk of escalating

Teen mother also get a bad rap in the media as being the core of social instability by having children out of wed lock and inflating the poverty numbers. These mothers, who have been accused of breeding criminals, actually have a tendency to work harder to support their children in what Joan Moore, an expert of delinquent girls, calls “a conversion to conventionality” (The Culture, 1999). Oddly, the father of these illegitimate children rarely get bad press for the role they play in the epidemic of unwed teen