Media and the Public Perception of Crime

People are prepared to talk and make presumptions about crime that they have seen i.e. inspiration from the media. This outcomes in the individual's impression of crime and deviance in society which is being “affected by what media staff incorporate or forget”. (Oyza and Edwin, 2015, p.7)

Pop culture media, like Law and Order, has a way of showing people how crime is portrayed. Case (2013), mentions that past studies about the representation of crime in the media has increasingly shown fear to the public and portraying unrealistic standards of how crime is in the real world. Media likes to exaggerate how things truly are in the real world, which is why people believe what the media portrays. People will believe that everything they see in a television show can truly happen in the real world, which certain things can happen but not everything. If people end up believing in how the media portrays crime then people will be living in fear of their society being more violent than it actually is (Case, 2013).

Fear of crime, especially random violence and new wave of "superpredators" by young Americans, is among the nation's greatest concerns (Lacayo 28). It has served as the motivation for countless numbers of people to change their lifestyles, take self-defense classes, install home security

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

According to the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) done by the FBI in 2012, the number of violent crimes increased 0.7 percent from the previous year, and does not show signs of stopping (UCR 2012). In addition, studies by the FBI in 2012 show that the murder rate stands at 4.7 murders per 100,000 people, significantly higher than most other wealthy nations (UCR 2012). Criminal historians agree that the United States far exceeds other nations in the number of crimes committed by an industrial nation. Whether people choose to commit acts of embezzlement, robbery, or homicide, people have started to look at criminality as a shortcut to success. Through time and the changing atmosphere of society, the pursuit of the American Dream has become extremely distorted and a chilling nightmare for many, as misguided people are willing to commit detestable crimes in an effort to fulfill the ‘revised’ American Dream.

Many citizens believe that there is more and more crime occurring in the United States each year. However, evidence suggests that, for the most part, the United States’ crime rate is decreasing while the rest of the world’s crime rates are increasing. The rate of both violent crimes and property crimes have significantly decreased in the past two decades. In 2014, there were 9.4 million crimes reported, which is a drastic improvement from the 13.8 million crimes that were reported in 1995. Even though these are only statistics for the number of crimes that were reported to the authorities, the trends of victimization also support the idea the crime rates are declining.

According the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Uniform Crime Report and the contrasting Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, both reports show a steady reduction in violent crimes over the past two decades. Both reports are released annually and are comprised of statistical data of reported crime or victimization surveys of sample populations from across the country (Karmen, 2016). Though the information contained in both reports as statistically accurate as possible, a figurative spin can be placed on the information and data can be skewed to misrepresent the true picture of crime, so according to (Karmen, 2016), all statistical data but be viewed with some scientific scrutiny. Even though the data from both annual

My research topic is misrepresentation of crime and the criminal justice system in the media. My thesis is that there is a misrepresentation of crime in the media due to a fear of crime, perceived police effectiveness, and distortion of coverage of crime in the media. Studies on crime and the criminal justice system in the media show that the media misrepresents crime and criminals. They also show that the effect the media has on people is based on how people interpret the information. The media influences public opinion about crime and the criminal justice system due to the disproportionate coverage of crimes, criminals, and victims.

For the past of couple of years the country has experienced tragic events in which society can see the disparity between races. When it comes to criminal acts, society distinguishes white and black offenders because of how they have been portrayed by the media. The media is in charge of informing the community of daily news. However, the media is also the cause of why black people are perceived as “bad people” due to their race and how the media describes their criminal acts. Blacks are linked with criminality more than whites (Dixon, 2008). The media is the prime contributor of why crimes committed by black people are seen more dangerous than those committed by white people, even if the crime by both race is of a same scale. During these four

The news media as most other print, radio, and television media are in a constant competition for ratings. A direct result of this rating competition is the sensationalizing of the media reports received by the general public. One of the most significant problems resulting from the news media’s misrepresentation of crime is the mistrust it creates between the general public and the criminal justice system. If the public were only to believe what is reported by the various news media, then the assumption would have to be that all the crime in this country is at the felonious level in which someone is usually killed with a gun. According to Bohm and Haley (2011), the distribution of police calls indicates that the majority of crime is anything

A total of 28,765,000 newspapers were sold Australia wide between Dec ’16 to Dec’17.” (Roy Morgan Survey, Australian newspaper readership December 2016-December 2017. http://www.roymorgan.com/industries/media/readership/newspaper-readership) The way crime is reported in the media influences the way people think about crime. The media tends to focus on violent crime rather than other crimes such as property crime, because it influences the audience into thinking they and their community are at risk.

The mass media is a vehicle for delivering information and to entertain. But implications that the media do more harm than good concerning its practices and its effects on the public. The two main categories of mass media are print media and electronic media. Although they overlap in some areas, they differ mostly in the subject matter they cover and in their delivery methods. Research had been conducted in using both these forms to gauge the impact that each one has on the public. Print media tends to be more factual based whereas electronic media tend to focus more on visual aids to help relay the information. The public’s fear of crime has an impact on the public agenda of policy makers. Fear of crime not only affects individual but may

The importance given to certain crimes in the daily newspapers and other media sources shows us proof to the fact that crime is a topic that has the public’s interest and is a focus of their worries (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001). It goes on to discuss the fact that crime as reported on by the media increases the public’s levels of fears and that there is little or no correlation to actual levels of violent crime in our society today.

In the political world, media has both a positive and negative affect. Americans as a whole are engrossed with crime whether it be a fictional representation on a person’s favorite television show, or a true story the nightly news. The entertainment media influences our lives in consciously and subconsciously, day in and day out, playing a critical and constantly cultivating role in the criminal justice system and the conduct of politics.

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.