NCJ Number
158537
Editor(s)
R V Ericson
Date Published
1995
Length
429 pages
Annotation
The editor has selected and presents papers that pertain to the media culture's influence on crime and public perceptions of it.
Abstract
The rationale for this book is that communication media constitute a culture because they provide contexts in which meaningful expressions are produced and received. A medium arranges, defines, and communicates meaning. As such, it has a significant bearing on formats or the logic of how subject matter is presented. The first section of papers discusses "Media Formats and Fun." These papers argue that television in particular has driven all media in the direction of entertainment and fun. One author argues that the entertainment format for crime news trivializes serious problems and fosters a trained incapacity for any action beyond consuming media-formatted accounts of dramatic crimes designed to catch the public's attention. One author argues, however, that this is not necessarily bad, since it can provide media consumers with a sense that even crime is ordered and controlled within a media format. Another cultural influence of the mass media discussed arises at the level of production. Papers on this topic are under the rubric of "Institutional Relations and Folly." These papers focus on the reality of news as being embedded in the nature and type of social relations that develop between journalists and their sources, as well as in the politics of knowledge that emerges on each specific newsbeat. A third culture of the mass media institution is "Popular Drama and Fear." These papers examine how mass communications are dramatized through evocative language, sensational visuals, and attractive personalities. Crime is dramatized as that which stimulates fear, relief that it has happened to someone else, and an interest in whether or not "evil" people will be brought to justice by representatives of the moral majority. Other papers focus on how the media molds the politics of law and order and how the media as profit-making ventures select and package their presentation of crime and criminal justice. Chapter notes and/or references and bibliographies and a name index