NCJ Number
179182
Date Published
1998
Length
365 pages
Annotation
The portrayal of crime in the mass media distorts the amount of crime that exists, types of crime being committed, and the reality of common crime.
Abstract
Images used by the media to describe crime tend to increase fear and shape perceptions of who commits crime and what crimes are social problems. Sensational and violent crimes lead local newscasts, sell newspapers and magazines, and provide plots for television programs and movies. Context is often ignored so that an incident can be woven into a theme generated through an entirely different process. Crime is stripped of the particulars to fit the theme generated by the demands of the medium. Crime images portrayed by the media are analyzed in this collection of papers that focus on whether public interest is determined by the amount of exposure given to a story by the media, whether public interest is the key factor predicting exposure, what the filtering process excludes, what determines the information to be included in a story, and who benefits and who is harmed. Fifteen papers deal with such topics as moral panics, media constructions of crime, the ideology of crime waves, fear and loathing on reality television, the gang initiation rite as a motif in contemporary crime discourse, the presentation of drugs in the news media, the social construction of alcohol problems, and fear of crime. References, notes, tables, and figures