Does the media affect people's fear of crime?

Authors Avatar by corneliat (student)

The following will discuss the influence of the press and media in shaping the public’s fears about crime and will use examples from recent press and media coverage of crime to illustrate how newspaper headlines and media reporting can make the public fearful of crime in society. Newburn (2007) says that television, radio, newspapers and the internet all play a significant role in our lives. They carry stories about crime, provide us with information about crime and are a potentially important influence on the way in which we see the world.  This essay will look at the following areas: defining what  fear of crime is, media representations of crime, newsworthiness and moral panics. The conclusion will focus on whether people’s fears are influenced by the role the press and media have in today’s society.

Garofalo (1981:840)  defined fear of crime as an:

‘emotional reaction characterized by a sense of danger and anxiety…produced by the threat of physical harm…elicited by perceived cues in the environment that relate to some aspect of crime’

Lee and Farrall (2009:153) state that ‘the mass media and interpersonal communications are obvious sources of second hand information about crime. They say that it seems unlikely that people’s representations of risk stem from their own personal, first-hand experience of criminal incidents. By contrast, according to Lee and Farrall,  a good deal of research suggests that hearing about events (via the mass media) plays a stronger role in raising the public’s fears of crime’.

Lee (2007:187) says that when it comes to news coverage there is little doubt that the old adage of ‘if it bleeds it leads’ remains largely accurate. Lee also states that when it comes to crime reportage there is no doubt that crime involving violence makes good ‘bad’ news stories. Most importantly specific stories can become discursively connected to the broader arguments around ‘crime’ and law and order. Lee uses the example of the panic in Britain in 2005 around incidents of ‘happy slapping’, the identification of ‘hoodies’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’.

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Reiner (2012:262) writes that news content is generated and filtered primarily through reporters’ sense of news-worthiness – what makes a good story that their audience wants to know about. In a classic early study Chibnall (1977  cited in Newburn 2007:86) eight ‘professional imperatives’ were identified as implicit guides to the construction of news stories. They were: Immediacy, Dramatisation, Personalisation, Simplification, Titillation, Conventionalism, Structured Access and Novelty. Hall et al (1978) in their study of moral panic surrounding mugging argued that violence played an important role in determining the newsworthiness of particular events. They (1978:67-8) argued that any ‘crime can be ...

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