Discuss the influence of press and media in shaping the publics fears about crime.

Discuss the influence of press and media in shaping the public’s fears about crime. Use examples from recent press and media coverage of crime to illustrate your answer.

One of the key aspects in the studying of Crime and Deviance is the concept of fear, that of the individual and that of society as a whole. In this era of ever changing modernisation the public are no longer required to, or would even want to, read an in-depth article in a newspaper to discover, how safe they are, or the likelihood that they will get mugged on their way home. In past decades the newspaper was the number one source of information for society, and the news being reported was more of the necessary than of the attention grabbing. With the new technology we have today, and the intense rivalry between television stations, broadsheet and tabloid newspapers etc the question to answer is, does the media exaggerate and manipulate their reporting of the news, to get the attention of their audience, and is this over exaggeration and manipulation of the truth, making the public a lot more fearful of the society in which they live, than is necessary?

There is no doubt that crime is a very big problem, and that we do need to be alerted to examples of the crimes that are being committed in and around the areas in which we live, not only to alert us to the dangers we could be facing but also to help us prepare for such events. However are the crimes that are being reported day after day, actually that likely to affect us? Or are the cases being reported purposely made to sound more gruesome and likely to affect us, in an attempt to increase viewer ratings for television news programmes and increase profits of the daily newspapers?

A person is a lot more likely to buy a newspaper, or watch a television news report, that is reporting on a crime that has an attention grabbing headline. The majority of the population of Britain would have a higher interest in the reporting of a vicious and macabre murder case, than that of a business man who managed to steal a few thousand pounds from his company. This idea of what we want to see on the news and what makes for a good news story is well presented in [1] Newburn’s “Criminology”, in the fourth chapter that deals with crime and the media, Newburn mentions a classic study into the study by Chibnall in 1977. It was a study into the presentation of the news and what is meant by the term ‘newsworthiness’ and it determined that there were eight ‘professional imperatives’ that were implicate guides to the construction of news stories. These imperatives were; Immediacy, Dramatisation, Personalisation, Simplification, Titillation, Conventionalism, Structured access and Novelty [1] The study was trying to show that for a story to be worthy of being reported it need to adhere to certain factors that would interest the public. In short, a story is more likely to be reported if it is a recent one, one that has a lot of drama and action in it, one that involves someone recognisable to the public; a celebrity- the death of pop singer Stephen Gately for example, one that involves some form of sexual scandal or that has a risqué spin to it.

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So if this is what is required to be newsworthy then what effect is this having on the public and their fear on the crimes they are hearing and reading in the news. Over the past decades it is fair to say that the content of news reported has changed dramatically, from in a table in [2] Newburn’s “Criminology”, we can see that the number or cases of rape being reported have increased dramatically over the changing decades, in the table we see that in 1951 The Sun Newspaper had absolutely no coverage of rape cases, the same a decade on, however as the decades progress so too does the coverage of the cases. In 1971 there were 10 cases reported, 32 in 1978 and 49 in 1985. [2] It would be idiotic to think the rape as a crime was not a big issue up until the 1970’s and only since then has it “taken off” so to speak. But as it became more obvious that these sort of crimes caught the attention of public and so more of these crimes will be reported. And although sex offences do make up a good proportion of the crimes reported in Britain [3] (Number of sexual offences recorded in 2008 was 51,488) [3], they do get more media coverage than other types of crime that are reported in even higher numbers [4] (it is estimated that there were approximately 2,374,000 instances of online harassment in 2008.)[4] The media’s disproportional coverage of sexual offence cases gives the general public, and women in particular, feel very vulnerable and fearful of being a victim of a sex offence crime, when statically they are more likely to be a victim of online harassment.

Another similar topic is that of the clashes between the two social groups of the “Mods” and “Rockers” in Britain in the 1960’s. There had been a development of two youth cultures, The Mods, who were suit wearing youths who chose the scooter as their vehicle of choice. And The Rockers were a dirtier and more rebel set of youths who wore leather jackets and had the motorbike as their vehicle of choice. The two groups were seen as rebellious and non-conformist by the older generations. Despite the tension between the two gangs there was little serious physical violence between them. However the two groups were heightened to near demonic status by the media after a serious of disputes in the English seaside town in 1964, in which groups from both gangs went on vacation and did not intend to find their opposing counterparts there. The disputes, despite the fact of the sheer numbers(into the thousands) caused very little serious or long lasting damage, and mainly consisted of bouts of fighting on beaches between the two groups which was stopped by police intervention.

These fairly mediocre and rather childlike disputes were however picked up by the press of the time and manipulated into the most horrific and devastating gang wars know to man. The two groups were portrayed as destructive forces hell bent on bringing British society to a standstill, with the general public in fear that they were no longer able to walk the streets for fear of being caught up in battle, when they were actually just as safe as they would have been at anytime previous to the fights. It was the over exaggeration of the brutality of the fights and dangerous now faced that cause the social panics. The public were very afraid of the groups when they in fact had not witnessed any of the fights. This is a classic example of how media intervention influenced the public fear of crime.

Another example from a more recent time of a similar case is that of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. In May 2007 a four year old child from Leicester went missing whilst on a holiday Praia da Luz, in Portugal with her parents, and to this date has never been found. The media covered the missing child case for months and months with numerous news reports on every news channel and in every newspaper. The case was covered in such a way that it was hard not to be involved in it. The case, despite being very upsetting and disturbing, was disproportionally reported on, it was an interest and an area of concern for the British public, however with its over play in the news it could possibly have lead to other deserving stories from being reported on, some would say mainly due to the fact that the story guaranteed that either the paper reporting it would be bought or the show reporting it would be watched. The story made parents all round Britain and elsewhere in the world very fearful that their children could just as easily go missing, and as more and more of the case was reported their paranoia only grew. It was and still is a very moving case and one that does strike a sense of realisation into the minds of all of us. However it was just one case of a child going missing or being suspected of being kidnapped, and yet it had the majority share of reported news for months, and other serious crimes which were just as likely to affect parents and their children were not being reported. The media’s ongoing coverage of the case heightened the public’s sense of fear in the likelihood of their children either being kidnapped or going missing, and directed it away from other dangers.

It is obvious that the media and press do have a huge influence in the shaping of the public’s sense of fear, they use a process of exaggerating statistics, reporting on crimes that they think the public will have more interest in and not reporting on less interesting ones, the use of mind grabbing headlines that have very little to do with the actual crimes to sell their stories, but by doing this they are manipulating us, possibly inadvertently, into thinking that we are in fact in a world of a lot more deadly and dangerous situations than we actually are, fearing things that have been made up by the media just to get that extra copy sold or that extra viewer for their show.

Bibliography

[1] Newburn, T. (2007), “Criminology” , Willian Publishing, Culmcott House Mill Street, Uffculme Cullompton, Devon EX15 3AT, UK, p. 85-86

[2] Newburn, T. (2007), “Criminology” , Willian Publishing, Culmcott House Mill Street, Uffculme Cullompton, Devon EX15 3AT, UK, p.88

[3] UK Cyber Report (2009), available at: , p. 16

[4] UK Cyber Report (2009), available at: , p. 11