LA6024 - Crime and Criminality: How Media Distorts Reality of Crime

This essay examines the media's role in distorting the reality of crime, focusing on selective reporting, moral panics, exaggeration, and the over-representation of certain crimes. It argues that the media significantly influences public perception of crime, deviants, victims, and law enforcement. The essay highlights how news values such as threshold, predictability, simplification, individualism, risk, sex, celebrity, proximity, violence, children, and language shape crime reporting. It references Stan Cohen's work on moral panics and discusses how the media exaggerates the degree of aggressive crime, potentially influencing public agendas, views, policies, and laws. The essay uses references to support arguments on media distortion in crime reporting.

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

MEDIA AND CRIME 4
polite society. In addition, celebrity and criminality is another news values where the celebrity as
a criminal offered new impetus to the press as a lecturer of morality. Proximity is another form
of news values that is similar to threshold that relates to the criminality at various levels of
reporting that can be at local, regional or national level. Violence as a news values has been
taken to be integral to crime reporting through providing both spectacle and drama towards
fictional crime drama. Children as a category are other news values where the involvement of
children is crime is normally taken to be of high newsworthiness. Language is the other news
values category utilized in the modern press to describe juvenile offenders, where it takes in
conservative ideology and political diversion. The press constantly advocate for the need for
more police powers, and more prisons (Han, 2014).
In addition, Croall (2011) established that nearly all media are obsessed to overstate the
degree of aggressive crime. Accordingly, the sensationalist “red top” magazines are normally
looking for out of the ordinary narratives, such as sexual assault, or killings-with reconstructions
providing a chilling insight into a crime. Consequently, this emphasize on the spectacular part of
the crime is a regular characteristic on television programs or movie and news reports that
presents a false beside misleading impression of the actual degree of these crimes. In many
instances, the media creates a mortal panic that entails the exaggerated overreaction by society to
a professed challenge, normally motivated by the media in which the response overstates the
challenge out of its actual seriousness (Jewkes, 2004). This is clearly seen in the “Folk Devils
and Moral Panics” by Stan Cohen. Cohen’s work concentrated on the slight disagreement in
Clacton, 1964. In this case, the media exaggerated in three influential means. First, the media

MEDIA AND CRIME 5
overstated the figures that were caught up and the degree of violence through headlines such as
“day of terror by scooter gangs” (Treadwell, 2013).
In conclusion, the media report crimes that have value to the public that they enjoy. The
public will not take in news that they perceive are not of importance, which means news that do
not have news values will be consumed. In fact, it is crucial to be informed of news headlines.
However, one should recognize that this does not reflect actual degree of crime (Young, 2007). It
is evident that the current media distort news that regard to crimes. These distortions through the
media in line with crimes along with criminals have plays and perhaps more probable to carry on
to play a primary task in the prospect of several criminal justice systems. Therefore, these false
forecasts and portrayals by the media on crimes have the influence to set public agendas, create
public views, as well as even alter policies besides laws.

MEDIA AND CRIME 6
References
Covert, T. J.A. & Wasburn, P.C. (2007). Measuring media bias: A content analysis of Time and
Newsweek coverage of domestic social issues, 1975-2000. Social Science Quarterly,
88(3), 690-706.
Croall H. (2011). Crime and Society in Britain (2nd Edition). London (Longman).
Dowler, K., Fleming, T & Muzzatti, S. (2006). Constructing Crime: Media, Crime and Popular
Culture.Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice. 48(6): 837-65.
Han, H.E. (2014). Media Construction of Crime. Daily Sabah. [Accessed November 6, 2018].
Jewkes, Y. (2004). Media Representations of Criminal Justice in Muncie, J and Wilson, D. (eds)
Student Handbook of Criminology and Criminal Justice. London: Cavendish.
Jewkes, Y. (2011). Media and Crime. London: Sage.
Jones, S. (2009). Criminology. Butterworths.
Treadwell, J (2013). Criminology: The Essentials. Sage Publications.
Williams, K.S. (2008). Textbook on Criminology. Oxford: OUP.
Young, J. (2007). The Vertigo of Late Modernity. London: Sage.

MEDIA AND CRIME 7