The Media vs. Reality; Crime in the Information Age

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

Media is everywhere nowadays. Whether it’s billboards, radio, commercials, trailers, or product placement, the media has spent the better part of a century perfecting the ability to sway public opinion. How could this not have an impact on the Criminal Justice System? There is an old saying, perception is reality. This clearly applies to the narrative shaping abilities that the media poses. Although not explicitly resulting in an effect on Criminal Justice Policy, Communication Theorist George Gerbner proposed Cultivation Theory, also known as mean world syndrome, which refers to the phenomenon that a viewer experiences when they consume too much violent media content, where in that, they begin to perceive the world as more dangerous than it actually is.

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).

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:

There are several ways that fear of crime has a relationship with violence. In many communities have experience higher fear of crime levels? Franklin (2009) in his current research he tested the vulnerability of female and male to indicated if fear of crime was increase by age. In his finding this facts are significant since there is a higher level among age for males while females tend to reduce fear. Age also plays a big role when fear of crime is concern in the communities.

(Australian Institute of Criminology, 2009, p. 6) The media’s representation of a rapidly increasing violent crime rate is not supported by statistics which reflect that while the crime rate is rising, the rate is steady and it is believed that this number could even be fluctuated by the increase of victims reporting these types of crime to the police. According to the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2007, 74% of the respondents had quite a lot/a great deal of confidence in the police to solve crime. (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2007 p. 16-17) Although the statistics show the general trend of violent criminal offences is static, a significant proportion of our population still has the perception that our crime rates are increasing (Australian Institute of Criminology, 2010) due to media influence. Another way the media misrepresents Australia’s crime rate is by selectively reporting violent crimes whilst under reporting other offences, which are more prevalent in society.

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,

As he continues revealing information he concludes that is not our actual level of danger that has increased but our perception of danger. Glassner then proceeds to blame the news media for being the main factor of Americans’ fear. The media bombard us with stories that are meant to cat the public’s attention to increase ratings. Most television news programs are composed of stories of crime, drugs, and disaster to continue to increase their ratings; this is a strategy that the media practice to obtain more viewers. Similarly, television news magazines such as Dateline, Primetime, or 20/20 commonly report on stories that are statistically nearly impossible to happen, yet they sensationalize one account of an event, letting

The fear of crime of crime a powerful thing that most people feel at some point in their life whether they are watching TV, listening to the radio or possibly reading the newspaper or even speaking to a friend. The fear as an emotional reaction characterized by a sense of danger and anxiety. To create fear of crime, the fear must be elicited by perceived cues in the environment that relate to some aspect of crime for the person. A very common fear related to crime is the fear of gun violence and the gun controls that come along with it. The different gun laws that are provided bring a great fear to people in different ways because of the inconsistency that it comes with. Gun related fear can come in two different forms. One fear

People have fear of the truth, since the earliest of human history. Whether it is recognizing their own or others’ flaws, or simply seeing what they received on their latest test, this fear leaves many mortified and is prominently used for impact on the news. Universally, people seek the companionship of others to share the same comfort and security. Due to this human desire to find self-security, people including the media use bias to suggest danger in order to invoke the interest of an audience towards a narrow line of information and away from the full picture. Fear through bias shown in the media is what “those in power decide to use scare tactics, using fear as a tool to get us to agree with what they want to do (Sibiski, 2016).” Throughout

The public depends on the news media for its understanding of crime. Reportedly three quarters (76%) of the public say, they form their opinions about crime from what they see or read in the news (Dorfman & Schiraldi, 2001). After reviewing five hours of reality crime television shows, one is left with a very dismal look on society and a prejudice towards minorities as they are largely depicted as the perpetrators of crime. This new genre commonly referred to as reality television appears to be sweeping the nation by storm. Opinions vary, depending on whom you ask, to what extent reality plays a role versus the selling of a product. Sensationalism, advertising, ratings hype, profiling and fear all comprise the mass

One stage of the data collection is to determine the level of fear of crime and terrorism among the subjects of our previously discussed samples of households. Lee (2013) maintains that fear of crime is among the most prevalent concepts in criminological research. Explicitly, fear of crime is conceptualized as an emotional response to a perceived threat that is criminal in nature (Vauclair & Bratanova, 2017). As I established in the literature review,

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.