Media, Crime, Law and Order
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Media, Crime, Law and Order
OUTLINE
• Media-crime debate: desubordination or
discipline?
• Content of media
• Consequences of media representation
• Causes of media representation
• Changing content since 1945
• Conclusions: late modernity and the
individualisation of crime
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Media-crime debate
• Long history of ‘respectable fears’ (Pearson) about
criminogenic consequences of media: the
desubordination thesis.
• Liberal/radical concern about media distortion of
crime bolstering support for authoritarianism: the
discipline thesis
• Research on production tends to support a more
complex view: ‘liberal pluralism’ (Chris Greer)
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Content analysis: health warnings
• Most content analysis within positivist paradigm
• ‘objective and quantitative estimate of certain
message attributes’ (Dominick 1978)
• But categories for counting reflect particular
theoretical conceptions of significance
• Items deemed as same by analyst may have very
different meanings to audiences
• Cannot infer consequences (or causes) from
content, though inferences usually made
• Must interpret reflexively and cautiously
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Content analysis: a summary
• Results vary between huge number of studies,
according to period, media, market, methods, and
whether study of ‘factual’ or ‘fictional’
representations
• Nonetheless broad convergence of results: the
‘established model’:
• Prominence of crime stories: News and fiction
crime stories prominent in all media, throughout
media history (though increasingly so). Variations
by medium, market and method.
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Content Analysis (continued)
• ‘Law of opposites’ (Surette):
• overwhelming overemphasis on serious
violent crime against individuals;
• risks of crime exaggerated quantitatively
and qualitatively, though property crime
relatively downplayed;
• concentration on older, higher status victims
and offenders;
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Content analysis (continued)
• generally positive image of the
effectiveness and integrity of policing and
criminal justice e.g. most cases cleared-up,
little focus on corruption or abuse (though
increasing criticism)
• Most stories about individual cases, not
trends, analysis etc.
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Consequences of media
representations
• Huge volume of research on ‘effects’
• Positivist paradigm: experimental and control
group exposed to media content, measured before
and after for ‘effects’
• Agnosticism: ‘for some children, under some
conditions, some television is harmful. For some
children under the same conditions, or for the
same children under other conditions, it may be
beneficial. For most children, under most
conditions, most television is probably neither
particularly harmful nor particularly beneficial’ 8
(Schramm et al 1961)
Consequences (continued)
• Some criminogenic effects likely: media figure in
most theoretical accounts of crime; ‘field’ studies
suggest effect (e.g. Hennigan et al 1982
econometric study of US spread of TV);
measurable direct effects of media small.
• ‘The study of enculturation processes, which work
over long time periods, and which are integral to
rather than separate from other forms of social
determination, would not ask how the media make
us act or think, but rather how the media
contribute to making us who we are’ (Livingstone
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1996).
Consequences (III)
Sources of Information About the Police (%)
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Consequences (IV)
• Media principal source of information about crime
and criminal justice for most people
• Frames debate about ‘law and order’, in
conjunction with politicians’ campaigning and
broader shifts in culture, social structure, political
economy
• Fluctuations in public concern follow media and
political campaigns (Beckett 1997), not crime
trends (e.g. Nixon 1968; Thatcher 1970s;
‘reassurance gap’ 1990s- )
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Causes of media representation
• Political ideology; patterns of ownership: Most
media organisations large corporations; owners
predominantly c(C?)onservative; specialist crime
reporters in past tended to be police groupies
(Chibnall) – but not now. ‘Watchdog’ ethic.
• ‘Newsworthiness’; values of good story:
‘Dramatisation, personalisation, titillation,
novelty’ (Chibnall); clarity and closure.
• Structural pressures of production: police, courts
reliable story sources, become ‘primary definers’;
safety and other constraints lead to ‘embedding’. 12
Changing Content Since 1945
• The prevalence of news crime stories
• Increase in prominence of crime news after the
mid-1960s. Until then the overall percentage of
home news stories that were primarily about crime
averaged about 10% in Times and Mirror. Since
late 1960s doubled to around 20%. The proportion
of stories about the criminal justice system also
increased after the late 1960s in both papers (from
around 3% to 8%).
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TABLE 1: MULTIPLE CRIME STORIES
Consequential Crimes (as % of all principal crime reports)
1945-64
16
1965-79
22
1981-91
22
Contextual Crimes (as % of all principal crime reports)
1945-64
1965-79
19
32
44
(N=243)
(N=203)
(N=211)
1981-91
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TABLE 2: PRINCIPAL CRIMES IN NEWSPAPER STORIES
PRINCIPAL CRIMES IN THE MIRROR
%
1945-64
1965-79
1980-91
Homicide
29
28
31
Violence
24
28
24
Property
16
8
9
5
2
4
Against State
10
7
6
Public Order
5
6
4
Drugs
-
4
8
Sex
7
4
8
-
5
5
Fraud
Traffic
N=112
N=166
N=140
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PRINCIPAL CRIMES IN THE TIMES
%
1945-64
1965-79
1980-91
Homicide
44
29
37
Violence
16
38
25
Property
21
5
5
Fraud
10
22
8
Against State
13
4
3
Public Order
6
6
5
Drugs
-
3
3
Sex
3
1
6
Traffic
4
-
1
N=99
N=77
N=63
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Who are the victims?
Victims have become increasingly prominent in newspaper crime stories.
Between 1945-64 the 112 Mirror crime stories we analysed gave details of 86 victims, but
between 1981-91 the sample of 140 stories yielded accounts of 171 victims.
In The Times the corresponding figures were 59 victims in 99 stories between 1945-64, and 56 in
63 stories 1981-91.
Whilst in the earlier period it was common for crime stories (most of which were about crimes
against the person) to contain no account at all of the victim’s characteristics, by the 1980s this
was rare, and indeed in The Mirror in particular there were frequently portrayals of several
victims in each story.
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POLICE SUCCESS AND INTEGRITY NEWSPAPER
STORIES (1945-91)
A) CLEARING-UP CRIME
% of principal crimes reported as cleared-up
1945-64
1965-79
73
63
1981-9
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B) POLICE DEVIANCE IN NEWSPAPERS 1945-91
% of all crime stories primarily concerning police deviance
1945-64
10
1965-79
12
1981-91
19
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Cinema Crime Films 1945-91
1945-64
(%)
1965-79
1979-91
50
32
3
2
35
20
10
10
45
5
15
5
2
20
40
9
36
13
50
5
-
40
25
80
44
67
67
25
77
Principal Crime
Homicide
Property
Sex crime
Drugs
Pain/suffering victim
Protagonist
Police
Amateur/PI
Victim
Police
Violate due process
Excessive force
Honest
11
3
89
19
20
21
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Changing Discourse of Crime
News
Quantitative changes indicate deeper qualitative
transformation in public discourse about crime.
Crime news inherently bad news: reports
proscribed activity. From late 1960s representation
of crime as increasingly threatening and out of
control; symptomatic of wider social crisis and
ever more serious and pervasive in its impact on
ordinary people that readers were invited to
identify with.
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Changing Discourse (continued)
• Accentuate the negative
• Victim culture: crime as a zero-sum game
• It’s Not Business, It’s Personal
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Late Modernity and the
Individualisation of Crime
• Crime is now reported as a much greater risk than
before; more common; represented in much more
highly charged emotional terms: serious threat to
ordinary people that the reader is invited to
identify with.
• Much greater individualism underlying narratives.
Crime problematic not because it violates the law
but because it hurts individual victims with whom
the reader is led to empathise. Offenders portrayed
not as parts of social relations but as
pathologically evil. Attempt to understand them
seen as insensitive to the suffering of their victims.25
Late Modernity (continued)
• Decline of deference. Crime wrong not because of
legal authority but because it causes personal
harm. The police and other authorities are
portrayed as increasingly immoral or irrelevant,
except as heroic individuals.
• Aspects of broader transformations of political
economy and culture: combination of free market
economics and increasing individualism since the
1970s.
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Late Modernity (continued)
• Shift in crime news from stories about the
breaking and enforcement of a generally respected
law, through the politicisation of law and order, to
an orchestration of hate and vengefulness against
individual offenders supposedly on behalf of their
victims in what sometimes amount to virtual
lynch-mobs.
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