Media Influence: The Cause of Copycat Crimes

Meanwhile, media has it advantages and disadvantages dealing with criminal cases, but it also effects the way the criminal justice system is viewed. On the other hand, interaction with social media allows opportunities to solve crimes, creates more ways to commit crimes, and create bias within our American society. In general, the word

School shootings have become well known around the world due to the coverage by the media. . These shootings are a serious concern and have parents constantly concerned about their child’s safety when they are at school and also have students thinking twice about any unusual or suspicious behavior. The media appears to play a large part in school shootings and it is important to analyze the deviant behaviors of the shooters in these horrific instances and the fear they create in schools. Does the media play a large part in school shootings or does the media play a large part in the sensationalism of school shootings and the fear they create both in schools and with parents?

This nationwide panic of school shootings and juveniles synonymous with “folk devils” can be shown using the five features presented by Goode and Ben-Yehuda (Steeves and Milford, 2015). There was initial concern, as several high profile incidents occurred within a period from late 1997 until the Columbine shootings on April 20, 1999 (Burns and Crawford, 1999). The media played a key role by describing the horrifying accounts after each shooting to the public, while they also advertised the funerals of victims throughout social media, radios, and televisions (Burns and Crawford, 1999). Much of the concern is depicted through the actions taken, by “hiring additional security guards”, “installing metal detectors in schools”, and creating “school lockdown procedures” (Burns and Crawford, 1999, p. 152) to name a few. Next was hostility, shown through the “punitive and restrictive responses”, implemented and directed towards “juvenile delinquents” (Burns and Crawford, 1999, p. 153). It became a felony to “expose children to books, movies, and video games that contain explicit sex or violence” (Burns and Crawford, 1999, p. 152). Fueled by the words of Juvenile Magistrate Deborah Robertson, Reverend Mark Clark, and

Since people are mostly only able to participate in catastrophes such as this mass shooting at a distance, news media is the primary source of information, which therefore creates the audiences’ reality of the events that occur.(Wheeler 80) With this, the mass media has the control of what people are exposed to, and the choice to amplify awareness to what they choose as important. In an interview conducted with Sarah, an undergraduate student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, she recalled her exposure to the news of the shooting: “The only reports I had access to, was what I saw in the news”. When asked how she thinks the media had an effect on her perception of the shooting, she stated: ”Well I believe that since the only information I was able to get was from news sources, what I saw in the news is what I believed. So I really do think the media had a strong effect since I was exposed to mainly what they chose to present to me.” With this, media messages, such as the reporting on the Las Vegas shooting, exert a strong influence on audiences and the cultivation of people’s perception. The frequent exposure to these stories of mass shootings and the use of descriptors based on race are fed to the audience and become a common knowledge. Ultimately, the promotion of racial stereotypes through the disproportionate representation of perpetrators of mass shootings influences public opinion and perception.(Lankford) With the strong effect that media has on the people, it is

Throughout my research I found that the book Criminology A Sociological Understanding, did a great job of listing the way media overdramatizes crime. The first way that the media does this is through something called crime waves. These crime waves pay close detail to a small number of multiple crimes which leads to a public panic that the crimes may keep occurring (Barkan, 26). One example in local media is something I saw on the local news tonight. 2 bodies were found today in Omaha in separate parts of the city

Assess sociological explanations of the role of the mass media in creating moral panics about crime and deviance:

Summer is over and school has started. Students across the U.S. re-enter the educational buildings once left behind in the grade level prior. Many things are shared in the safety of a class room, to include: laughing, notes, questions, and resources. These learning platforms foster a contagion for knowledge and contribution that will spread from generation to generation. Parents expect curriculum to be followed in the school systems and for any type of contagion to include nothing more than the common cold, not mass shootings. Homicides gain abundant media attention and therefore stem copycat shooters. The Media should not be allowed to report on stories of mass shootings, as the likelihood of a second or copycat killer immediately after

The allure of crime for the general public is the deviant behavior itself. Crime brings about multiple questions that crime dramas answer. Why would a person commit such a crime? Why was that person a victim? What are the surrounding circumstances? These are questions arise for most violent crimes in society, but in the news media not much is reported as the police must keep investigations under wraps. Resulting in an area of intrigue between the action and the courtroom that primarily focuses on the action itself and the extenuating circumstances of the action. This is where television dramas fill the void by quenching the public’s thirst for insight into the social taboo of violent Mala Prohibita crimes. In order to do this though cable companies have to make the crime shows

Media today plays a big part in the mass shootings believe it or not. “Media contagion” is largely responsible for the increase in these often deadly outbursts”(Media Contagion). By showing the number

For this current event, I chose to read the article titled, Widespread media coverage contributing to rise in mass shootings, say psychologists, by Jess Staufenberg. In this article Jess elaborates on the idea proposed by psychologists that giving mass shooters the fame they desire in the media is contributing to their rise.

their motives for the shooting are different from the protagonist in the middle and high school cases, who broadcast threats in advance to try to reverse their negative reputations and become notorious for the purpose of attracting friends, we found that many high school shooters were ambivalent about following through on their threats, hoping the threat alone might help improve their image in the eyes of their peers. The college shooters are bent on notoriety, but they appear less ambivalent about the attack. This is critical because it impacts the lead up to the shooting. Because high school shooters are looking to attract attention, they let off warning signals that could at least potentially enable those who are within earshot to notify

Television news coverage of crime, and the visualness of the newscast, can have unintended influence

Different forms of media, such as television, films, books, and newspapers, have similar ways of portraying the criminal justice system. The media constructs representations of crime and justice and in doing this, it presents an often dramatized representation of the criminal justice system; and this does not just influence on the public’s lay view of crime but also for criminal justice experts (Marsh, 2014). In the media it is commonly known that they are a business, and businesses need to make a profit. Because of this, the media’s portrayal of the criminal justice system has been very negative. With the news, their main purpose is to produce what sells. So many of them would edit the information they have gathered and make a story that will sell. Also the media does not show the full process of the criminal justice as a quick process, while in fact it is not. For example, last year, Netflix released a short series called “Making A Murderer”. Most people claimed that they feel like they can solve a crime when they finished watching a series. While that series is very factual, it does not hit every single step of the criminal justice process.

In an ever-increasingly mediated society, mass media has become inseparable with the production of everyday life. Media is now a platform for members of society to connect with global events and other people beyond their own personal experience. For many, the media is a major source of information and “accounts of violence, as presented by the mass media, are the primary medium by which the average person comes to know crime and justice” (Barak, 1994). The following essay will explore the theories of both cultivation analysis, as established by George Gerbner, as well as agenda setting, reputable to Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw. These concepts will demonstrate how the recent Santa Barbara Shooting is a major media event that reflects a

Over the course of the semester, I have learned about numerous aspects of Mass media and crime. We have broken these aspects into nine major topics based on what they focused on. The nine major topics includes theorizing media and crime, construction of crime, media and moral panics, media construction of children, media misogyny, police, offenders, and victims in the media, crime and prison films, role of the internet in crime and crime and surveillance culture. The topics that I found most interesting to me would be media and moral panic, construction of crime news and children and police, offender and victims in the media. I chose these four topics, because they play a role to the overall information that I have been paying close attention to in regards to how the media presents the information and how our Criminal Justice system addresses the concerns in the media. For our final exam, were asked to pick and discuss a topic that interested us, because of my curiosity of those four major topics I decided to pick a historical case that touched basis with all four topic areas. My topic being the historical case of Brown v. Board of Education. My goal of this essay is to give you the back story of the case, explain why I chose this case, discuss how the case is considered newsworthy and how it links to broader social structures.