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The Crime Is An Act Essay

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Western society is infatuated with criminal behaviour and the concept of crime itself, wither it is known through personal experience or daily conversations or more accurately through the media e.g. from films, newspapers and books etc. Media production goes through a process of mediation in which professional producers select and reject which stories are news worthy or not. Crime is very newsworthiness as it gets people talking, although the word crime itself can be hard to be defined as some people interpret crime in different ways which means that one criminal act may not be seen as a crime to another person. According to the oxford dictionary “crime is an act (or sometimes a failure to act) that is deemed by statute or by the common law to be a public wrong and is therefore punishable by the state in criminal proceedings.” (Oxford Dictionary of Law,2012:140) Crime and deviance make up a large proportion of news coverage and most of the time they give a distorted imago of crime, criminals & policing. In this essay I will examine through examples how the media influence public knowledge about crime.

According to Wykes, “A contrasting concern about media representations of crime has worried liberals and radicals”(Wykes 2001) (Morgan,Rodney,Reiner and mike maguire.The Oxford Handbook Of Criminology. Fifth ed. OUP,2012 p246) The Media can be seen to give individuals a higher fear of crime as they feel what they see on the news happens to those very similar to themselves and

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