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How not to think about crime in the media.

Article Excerpt
Dramatizations of crime and punishment in the popular media continue to be a focus of much public fascination and anxiety. Journalistic and fictional images of crime and control, where they come from, and their social impacts have also preoccupied many social scientists. In this article I try to point out some common pitfalls in some of our research in this area. I review the literature on crime and the media and offer a series of guidelines for future research.

I will use the shorthand form "crime in the media" or "crime stories" to mean both journalistic and entertainment portrayals. Various research considers either or both. The phrases "crime in the media" and "crime stories" will incorporate not only accounts or representations of crime, but also accounts or representations of the criminal justice system.

Anxieties and ambivalences about crime in the media have often entered into popular culture (for example, in popular films such as Chicago). Such concerns have also led to a lot of public debate, most prominently with respect to violence in television and film fiction and the long-running, still-very-controversial question of whether such violence causes further violent behaviour in viewers (see, e.g., Gauntlett 2001; Freedman 2002; Potter 2003). Concerns about crime in the media have also taken other public forms--for example, entering into political debates about law and order, which have featured arguments about whether the media cause unreasonable fear of crime, most recently in relation to the heavily reported series of shootings in Toronto in 2005. Criticisms of crime in the media have been taken up all along the conventional right-left political spectrum. Conservative critics blame crime in the media for various social ills and kinds of moral decay. Liberal criminal-justice reformers have used claims about media distortions to discount public punitiveness as they strive for a somewhat more humane justice process. Other analysts operating from a more critical perspective have seen crime in the media as reinforcing a shift to more coercive modes of control by the state. The classic example is perhaps Policing the Crisis (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts 1978); a recent key example is The Culture of Control by David Garland (2001: 85-87). Not surprisingly, in the context of these concerns, social scientists have devoted extensive study to various aspects of crime in the media.

There are various consistent findings concerning crime in the media. Many content analyses have shown that the news media are saturated with accounts of crime and control (Sherizen 1978; Dussuyer 1979; Graber 1980; Garofalo 1981; Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 1991; Chermak 1995; Reiner 2002; Surette 2007). Similarly, criminal justice has also long been the most common theme of popular entertainment (Kaminer 1995: 50-52; Surette 2007). By the early 1970s the police drama had replaced the western as the predominant genre of American prime-time television fare (Sparks 1992: 27). One aspect of crime in the entertainment media that is somewhat troublesome for various analyses is a pronounced tendency to promote the lone protagonist working outside the justice system rather than official efforts at control (Sparks 1992; Rafter 2000; Reiner 2000).

A great deal of research suggests that the portrayal of crime in the news and entertainment media differs from the picture portrayed by official and other statistics (Garofalo 1981; Orcutt and Turner 1993; Perlmutter 2000). It has also been repeatedly demonstrated that the media are implicated in the construction of "crime waves" (Davis 1951; Hall et al. 1978; Fishman 1978, 1981; Voumvakis and Ericson 1984) in the absence of any statistical increase in the crime in question. This point was noted by journalist Lincoln Steffens early in the century, long before it was demonstrated by social scientists (Antunes and Hurley 1977). Similarly, media construct "new crime problems" such as "freeway violence" or "wilding" (Best 1999) or construct moral panics around particular types of crime (Cohen 2002; Jewkes 2004), although many analyses of the latter focus on the behaviour of media and officialdom, and offer little evidence the public is actually panicking.

Crime news tends to focus heavily on the details of individual crimes, without broader context (Graber 1980), although there are prominent counter-examples, such as the award-winning in-depth analyses of criminal justice policy written by Ottawa Citizen reporter Dan Gardner. A great deal of certain types of street crime is shown in both the news and entertainment media; this coverage features a high proportion of violent crime, most notably murder and sexual offences. Both forms also feature a high proportion of solved crime (Reiner 2002; Surette 2007), heavily emphasizing police success as crime-fighters.

Richard Ericson, Patricia Baranek, and Janet Chan (1991) conducted a massive analysis of the content of six media outlets in a major Canadian city over more than 30 days. Not surprisingly, the tabloid newspaper studied provided extensive coverage of violent street crime, law and order as a means of control, and what the researchers called "tertiary knowledge," or emotive and sensational accounts of deviance. Perhaps more surprising was the fact that roughly half the newspaper and television items and two-thirds of the radio items they looked at concerned crime, deviance, and control in some form. One common facet that Ericson et al. found across all media outlets is that structural-causal explanations of crime were given almost no play.

This finding concurs with more general evidence that both news and entertainment media emphasize individualistic accounts of crime and deviance (Surette 2007), although the degree to which this is true varies somewhat among outlets (Ericson et al. 1991).

Various research has...