Sociology Media and Crime Essay
Soothill and Walby – newspaper reporting of rape crases increased by under a quarter in 1951 to over another in 1985; coverage constantly focuses on discovering a ‘sex fiend/beast’ by simply use of product labels News beliefs and crime coverage Altered picture of crime decorated by the press reflects the very fact that news is a sociable construction – the outcome of any social procedure in which potential stories will be selected and others are rejected Cohen and Young – news is usually manufactured The media as being a cause of offense Concern the fact that media possess a negative effect on attitudes, ideals and behavior for prone and important groups e. g. youthful, lower classes and unfounded Ways in which the media may cause crime and deviance Anxiety about crime Matter that the media may be distorting the public’s impression of crime and causing an unrealistic anxiety about crime Proof to some extent supports the view there is a link among media work with and anxiety about crime Gerbner et ing (USA) – heavy users of television (over four hours a day) had higher levels of anxiety about crime Schlesinger and Tumber – located a relationship between mass media consumption and fear of offense – tabloid readers and heavy users of TELEVISION expressing greater fear of to become victim – especially physical attack and mugging Presence of this sort of correlations doesn’t prove that mass media viewing causes fear.
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It could be that those who are already scared of going out at nighttime watch even more TV mainly because they stay in more Sparks – multimedia effects study ignores the meanings that viewers share with media violence – may give different connotations to violence in cartoons, horror films and reports bulletins (interpretivist view that if we want to know the possible effects of the media, we have to look at the connotations people give what they observe and read) Media, family member deprivation and crime How far media portrayals of ‘normal’ rather than criminal lifestyles may also encourage individuals to commit offense Left realists argue that the mass media speed up the perception of comparable deprivation between poor and marginalised cultural groups In today’s world, the press present everyone with photos of a materialistic ‘good life’ of leisure, fun and consumer goods and the norm where they should comply with. The result is to stimulate the sense of relative deprivation and interpersonal exclusion experienced marginalised organizations who perhaps have been hit by the recent economic climate and are unable these goods Merton – pressure to conform can cause deviant actions when the chance to achieve by legitimate means is clogged (ie the media happen to be instrumental in setting typical and thus to promote crime) Moral panics Mods and Rockers Cohen – examines the media’s response to disturbances among two groups of largely working-class teenagers Mods – wise dress and rode scooters; Rockers – leather jackets and rode moterbikes Initial fights started with scuffles, stone throwing, cracked windows and wrecked seaside huts Multimedia over-rated the confrontations which has been minor.
Cohen uses the analogy of the disaster in which the media produce and inventory of what happened containing: Exaggeration and bias – multimedia exaggerated amounts involved plus the extent with the violence Prediction – multimedia assumed and predicted even more conflict and that violence will result Symbolisation – symbols of mods and rockers were almost all negatively labelled and linked to deviance – medias use of the emblems allowed them to link unconnected events Cohen argues the media’s portrayal of events produced a deviance amplification spiral by looking into making it appear as if the challenge was growing and getting beyond control. Lead to necessitates an increased control response from the police and courts.
Developed further marginalisation and stigmatisation of the mods and rockers as deviants and less threshold of them Press further amplified the deviance by defining the two groupings and their subcultural styles – youths adopting the styles – media crystallised two distinct identities, pushing polarisation, setting up a SFP of escalating issue Cohen records that multimedia definitions with the situation are crucial in setting up a moral anxiety as most individuals have no direct experience of the actions of the doj themselves and therefore have to count on the press. This allowed the press to represent them because folk devils – major threats to public order and sociable values Cohen argues that moral panics often take place at times of social modify, reflecting the anxieties persons feel when accepted ideals are eroded; moral panic was a result of a boundary crisis – uncertainty about where the border lay among acceptable and unacceptable conduct Functionalist point of view – moral panics seen as ways of answering the sense of anomie created by simply change. Simply by dramatising the threat to society, the media increases the communautaire consciousness and reasserts social controls once central ideals are vulnerable. Hall – neo Marxist approach picking out the role of moral panics in the context of capitalism (distracted attention through the crisis or perhaps capitalism) CRITICISMS – Assumes which the societal effect is a extraordinary over effect (relates to left realist view that peoples dread or crime is rational) McRobbie and Thornton – moral panics are now program and have fewer impact; at the end of modern society there is little consensus about what can be deviant Global cyber-crime Net has been charged of undermining public values and messing the the fresh due to the velocity with which is usually has developed as well as scale – almost 1 / 2 the world’s population is definitely on the internet Thomas and Loader – arrival in the internet has resulted in fears of cyber-crime defined as computer-mediated activities – either illegitimate or illicit Jewkes – internet made opportunities to dedicate conventional criminal activity – fraudulence – and new criminal activity using new tools – software piracy Wall – four categories of cybercrime
