Crime reporting in contemporary society has biased double standards in deciding what is covered, despite the fact that Newsweek covered a story that said, "The crack nation includes all sizes, classes, and hues" (lee & solomon 241). This sentence is contradictory to the cover photograph that is printed with it. No whites were in the photo, only Afro- Americans and Hispanics in handcuffs, stretched on the ground, and placed against a wall. While another story in Newsweek titled "White-Collar Shame" was written in as less harsh and demeaning tone about big money swindlers.
American society is consumed, mesmerized, and persuaded at times by media coverage. Jeffrey Reiman, a professor at American University said, "We have a system shaped by economic bias from the start. The dangerous acts of crimes unique to the upper-middle class are either ignored or treated lightly while for the so-called common crimes, the poor are far more likely than the well-off to be arrested and charged, and if convicted, sentenced to prison. The media reports criminal acts of the poor daily, while the people who commit white-collar crimes go unnoticed.
According to attorney Gerry Spence, "the cost of corporate crime in America is over ten times greater than the combined larcenies, robberies, burglaries, and auto-thefts committed by individuals". To prove Spence's statement, last month The New York Times reported that burglaries in New York City have drastically declined within the past ten to fifteen years. However, this does not mean that other crimes, like selling drugs, have declined, According to the story, the selling of drugs has increased.
According to Lee and Solomon, the magnitude of a crime has little correlation to the amount of media reporting. the media just simply reports crime, especially murder, This point reinforces the suggestion that corporate crimes that do not result in harm, injury, or death need not be reported. For example, a story in Time Magazine titled "There Are Not Children Here" reported a murder, which was allegedly committed by an 11-yr old boy as a means of a gang initiation.
Why was this one murder singled out and reported in Time?
This story is a typical example of biased crime reporting because the subject deals with minorities and gang violence, but whats most disturbing is that a child is suspected of committing a murder. The reporter refers to the Chicago area suburb of as the "crime-ridden, gang infested Roseland community." This example proves the media's stereotype that crime only occurs in the poor neighborhoods rather than good neighborhoods, and for this reason the story was reported.
Crime reports are expressing to the public that the average citizen's greatest danger is from someone below him/her economically, never though from someone well off. For every one murder committed in the United States, two people die as a result of unsafe workplace conditions, But these workplace deaths are not reported, nor are they considered murders by the media. According to Lee and Solomon, Professor Reiman said that the word crime is not used "to name all or the worst of the actions that cause misery and suffering to Americans." The label crime is reserved or saved for the Poor’s dangerous and criminal actions.
The American judicial system encourages the media's reports of the criminal actions of a selected few, while well-off others are overlooked purposely. In one respect, today's journalists are reporting what our judicial system considers relevant.
Journalist Kirk Johnson monitored and studied 3,200 news stories from two daily newspapers, three television news broadcasts, and one radio station in the Boston area. Johnson concluded that the media in two mainly black sections of Boston reported only crime and violence. Eighty-five percent of the media's coverage "reinforced negative stereotypes of blacks as drug dealers, users, thieves, or victims or perpetrators of violence". The results of this study differed greatly from the black media's coverage, which focused on the black communities' desire for education, work opportunities, and better living conditions. The difference between the two media coverages of the same city only reinforces the stereotype of the media's eagerness to report crime in poor communities. The two coverages offer dissimilar depictions of reality.
Why do stereotypes occur in crime reporting?
According to author Gaye Tuchman, ethno-methodology is the study of the methods of people and how stereotypical meanings come to be attributed to the acts of other people. Reflexivity and indexicality are two features studied in ethno-methodology. Both features are "integral components of the transformation of occurrences into news events and are components of both public character of new and of the news work itself" (Tuchman 189).
News stories shape the public definition of what is happening in the news by focusing selectively on only specific details; what the editor or publisher wants covered and how they want to cover it. This point goes back to what type of crime is being reported in contemporary society. According to Tuchman, news stories are usually presented indexically meaning apart from the context of their production.
In conclusion, biases still occurs today in the media's coverage of criminal actions. Stories are reported not only not objectively but many other aspects of crime go unnoticed and are ignored daily.