Week 5: Crime and the media

Some brief thoughts about crime and the media, following on from Tuesday's lecture and seminar.

First thought: the news media like some kinds of story more than others. Sometimes an event is so big that the media have to cover it - the phone hacking scandal, the riots - but from day to day the media have a lot of choice in what stories they do and don't cover. They particularly like simple, dramatic, immediate stories, where it's easy to see who's in the wrong. This means that some kinds of crime are more likely to be covered than others - as we saw in the seminar, murder and violent crime is much more 'newsworthy' than property crime.

A question to think about: apart from criteria of "newsworthiness", are there other reasons for selecting particular crimes to feature in the news?

Second thought: measuring how media coverage of crime affects people is very, very hard to do. We can reasonably assume that the media affect people's behaviour, but to actually measure the effect you would need to have two groups of people and isolate one of them from the media - which would obviously be rather hard to arrange.

Question: is it worth asking "how people's behaviour is affected by the media", or are the media so omnipresent that the question makes no sense - would it be like asking "how people's behaviour is affected by other people" or "how people's behaviour is affected by the English language"?

Third thought: if media coverage of crime does affect people's behaviour, presumably it affects different people in different ways. A pensioner might react to news of rioting by becoming more fearful and refusing to go out; an unemployed teenager might react by going out and joining in. The news has apparently caused an increase in fear of crime and an increase in crime.

Question: would this news have the same effect on any teenager - even one who has never been in trouble before - or on any pensioner - even one who has an active social life?

Final thought: the concept of a 'moral panic', developed by the late Stan Cohen, explained how public concern about unusual or 'deviant' behaviour could blow up very quickly, in a process of 'deviancy amplification'. In a moral panic, a novel form of deviancy - unruly or disturbing behaviour - is publicised, leading it to be 'amplified' in two ways: it makes more noise and causes more concern; and it attracts people to try it out, becoming a bigger social phenomenon. Punk, the rave culture, knife crime and rioting have all been the triggers for moral panic at different times. Moral panics take hold because a new form of deviancy arouses strong feelings - for as well as against - and seems to encapsulate people's feelings about how society is and how it ought to be.

Question: is the same true of crime stories in general? Is a moral panic just a heightened and accelerated version of people's normal reactions to reading about crime? Turning it round, is there a connection between the crimes that get covered in the news and contemporary anxieties about the state of society?