Media and Crime: Does the Media Distort the Reality of Crime?

Running Head: Crime and Criminality
Nguyen Hong Linh
Student Number: 1823314
University of East London
Subject Name: Crime and Criminality
Subject Code: LA6024
Subject Period & Year: Autumn Term 2018
Lecturer: Dr Jane Pickford

MEDIA AND CRIME 2
Does the media distort the reality of crime?
The mass media along with individuals have a fascination with crime; bookstores, as well
as libraries are packed with crime books, magazines along with newspapers dedicate around 30
percent of their entire coverage to crime news. The society is enthralled with justice and crime.
The media plays a leading function in the creation of criminal along with the criminal justice
system (Jewkes, 2011). Thus, the people’ opinion of crimes, deviants, victims, as well as law
enforcement officers is hugely dictated by the portrayal of media. Studies have demonstrated that
the mainstream of public understanding regarding crime in addition to justice is obtained through
the mass media (Williams, 2008). The paper will argue that the media distort facts on crimes
through selective, reporting, moral panics, exaggeration, and over-representation of certain
crimes.
The mainstream media in the modern society plays a leading function towards agenda
setting in line with deviance along with crime. Agenda setting in this context entails the media’s
influence on issues or other objects by importance which individuals attach more significance.
The media influence the way crimes are reported to the public. The media report crimes that they
perceive the public needs more. In addition, the media report objects like violent crimes that are
of importance to the public. Thus, the media apparent cannot report each and every crime or
deviant act, which happens in the society, and media employees, such as journalists are
essentially very selective in the happenings that they select either to report or reject (Jones,
2009). According to Covert & Wasburn (2007), the media coverage on media along with
deviance is selected via reporter’s logic of what makes the occurrence newsworthy-an excellent
account that mass media clients long to make out. In addition, the motivation behind is the idea

MEDIA AND CRIME 3
of “new values”, where these values and presumptions maintained by the news editors along
with reporters direct them in selecting what is remarkable plus what to report on along with what
to reject from their news and the way to present these news (Covert & Wasburn, 2007).
With crime exclusively, Jewkes (2011) recommend that these news episodes have been
should be considered to the public to be important enough to be reported. The author provides 12
news values that shape crime. Threshold is the primary news values that need the situations of
crime to be contain the element of significance or have dramatic effect, where the threshold
would remove widespread and minor crimes form having any news values except at the local
level. “Predictability” is the next news values of Jewkes’ news values that entail the utilization of
crime statistics towards permitting the media to organize in the future while taking into
consideration covering kinds of crime narratives (Jewkes, 2011). The third group of news values
is simplification that depends on lowering crimes to the lowest number of themes plus is the
main objective of criminologists. For example, relating two matters like drugs and crime entail
simplification (Jewkes, 2004). The fourth category of news values is individualism in crime
reporting that depends on the simplest description of criminality, where the explanation of crime
and individual reactions are reduced to political differences.
Risk is the most vital news values described by Jewkes that is the most exaggerated
aspects of news narratives on crime misrepresent the risk of individual being a casualty of a
criminal activity. This is where the viewer and reader are offered a view of crime as random, and
unpredictable. Sex is another category of news values that is misrepresented aspect of crime
reporting and resulted in deformed perceptions of crimes in the society. Sex crimes give the
journalist with the chance to explain in detail sexual deviance that cannot be deliberated in a