The Effects Of Media On Fear Of Crime

CSI, Law and Order, Fox News, Making a Murderer, Nancy Grace and Cops: these shows have large audiences and high ratings, showing that western society is obsessed and mesmerized with crime and criminal activity. Crime and media go hand in hand, as the media frames crime as a major social problem, due to the lack of policy and policing certain behaviors. The media and the criminal justice system go together, like peanut butter and jelly, a sandwich of chaotic fruits and nuts. The media is quite concerned with policing, but much less about the court system, consequences, and the punishment received by the offender, devising misconceptions of the judicial processes. There are several different sociological perspectives pertaining to the media

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).

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

Weatherburn, Matka and Land (1996) reported that there is a extensive difference between the actual levels of violent crime within society and societies observations about the nature of this crime. In Australia, within the period of 1990 to 2007, the rate (per 100,000 population) of homicide incidents decreased from 1.9 in 1990-91 to 1.3, in 2006-07 (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2012) despite the public’s perception of a crime increase. This study found there were several inconsistencies between the crime television reported and the crime that actually occurred within society. Very serious crimes such as homicides, abductions, armed robbery and sieges were over-represented in the news reports. Children and the elderly were over-represented

The purpose of this paper is to explore the variables associated with the fear of crime and how serious can crime would be estimate. There are three factors that will be examined in this research. The first is that people have fear of crime by age, martial statues and education. This paper will attempt to explain these variances through literature review. The author of this paper will analyze the data from all three factors that explain the fear of crime and the seriousness. This paper will attempt to explain the seriousness of crime and the seriousness across the variables included. The three control variables that will be used are: Age of fear of crime, marital statues, and education dichotomy. The data indicates that the hypothesis is that when these three variables are included difference are among age and education when fear of crime increase.

There is a plethora of crime related movies, TV shows, video games, etc. Violent portrayals of crime are everywhere. As most Americans do not have any personal experience with the criminal justice system, public knowledge of how it operates comes mostly from the media. Dowler (2003) did a study on the relationship between consumption of such media and fear of being victimized by crime. He found that there is, in fact, a relationship and people who consume more of this media are more afraid of crime. “Regular viewers of crime shows are more likely to fear or worry about crime. Similarly, regular crime drama viewers are more likely to hold negative attitudes toward police effectiveness.” (Dowler,

Starting with Ken Dowler, Thomas Fleming, and Stephen Muzzatti, the authors of “Constructing Crime: Media, Crime and Popular Culture” (837-839) one can see how they believe the media impacts the view of crime from a public perspective. In Canada, crime is a main segment of the news and while that source would be considered informational, the subject of crime itself can also be for entertainment. Likely, North America favors the subject of crime and this can be prove true based on television content today through shows such as Chicago P.D., Law and Order: SVU, Killer Couples or Rosewood. While these shows and many others manage to hook an audience through intriguing storytelling of crime the lines between the true crime information and creative

Most people use second hand information as their core source of information about crime, this source of information usually being the media. When carrying out sample research in Birmingham, Susan Smith (1984) discovered that 52% of people obtained most of their information about crime from the media, 36% obtained it from hearsay or alleged experiences of friends and neighbours, 3% from their own experiences, and 1% from the police service themselves (cited in Jones, 2001; 8). However the media tend to exaggerate upon areas of criminal activity causing a moral panic. ‘A moral panic is a semi- spontaneous or media generated mass movement based on the perception that some individual or group,

local television news programs had the “strongest effect on fear” in cities with high crime rates.

Accordingly, the area of interest being explored here is the media's coverage of the decrease of violent crime in comparison to the decrease in non-violent crime. Does the media accurately show that there is a decrease in both? Or is the focus only on the decrease of violent crime? The medium being used for this content analysis are online Canadian news outlets. The purpose of this study analysis will be to assess what the media deems important, and what it decides to cover in relation to a decrease in crime in

Already existing data and research proves that experience higher levels of fear of crime than. The article provides evidence for this and evidence of research that states that there is a correlation between gender and the consumption of crime related media. Combining these two angles of research not only creates a platform for the author's’ argument it creates an undeniable wall of evidence for their claim. The two authors of this article provide the research, the evidence, and then combine the two to provide

Chiricos and his colleagues (1995) found that television news associated with crime was significantly related to higher fear of crime for white women between the ages 30-54 in particular. Other findings of their research, was that the only significant relationship between fear of crime and listening to Radio News is reported for both, white and black women. The TV news effects are found primarily for female, white, and the middle-age audience and those with recent victim experiences, low income, and living in disproportionately black neighborhoods. Regardless of being recent victims of crime or not and living in high income or low income neighborhoods, women showed the most significant television news effect, which concluded that other factors other than resonance was at play. Therefore, their data clearly indicate the relationship between television news and fear of crime is entirely exclusive to white women, despite the fact that they are at low victim risk, according to Chiricos (1995) and his colleagues’

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.

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.