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Media, Crime, Law and Order

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Media, Crime, Law and Order OUTLINE

• Media-crime debate: desubordination or discipline?

• Content of media• Consequences of media representation• Causes of media representation• Changing content since 1945• Conclusions: late modernity and the

individualisation of crime

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Media-crime debate

• Long history of ‘respectable fears’ (Pearson) about criminogenic consequences of media: the desubordination thesis.

• Liberal/radical concern about media distortion of crime bolstering support for authoritarianism: the discipline thesis

• Research on production tends to support a more complex view: ‘liberal pluralism’ (Chris Greer)

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Content analysis: health warnings

• Most content analysis within positivist paradigm• ‘objective and quantitative estimate of certain

message attributes’ (Dominick 1978)• But categories for counting reflect particular

theoretical conceptions of significance• Items deemed as same by analyst may have very

different meanings to audiences• Cannot infer consequences (or causes) from content,

though inferences usually made• Must interpret reflexively and cautiously

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Content analysis: a summary

• Results vary between huge number of studies, according to period, media, market, methods, and whether study of ‘factual’ or ‘fictional’ representations

• Nonetheless broad convergence of results: the ‘established model’:

• Prominence of crime stories: News and fiction crime stories prominent in all media, throughout media history (though increasingly so). Variations by medium, market and method.

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Content Analysis (continued)

• ‘Law of opposites’ (Surette):• overwhelming overemphasis on serious

violent crime against individuals; • risks of crime exaggerated quantitatively

and qualitatively, though property crime relatively downplayed;

• concentration on older, higher status victims and offenders;

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Content analysis (continued)

• generally positive image of the effectiveness and integrity of policing and criminal justice e.g. most cases cleared-up, little focus on corruption or abuse (though increasing criticism)

• Most stories about individual cases, not trends, analysis etc.

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Consequences of media representations

• Huge volume of research on ‘effects’• Positivist paradigm: experimental and control group

exposed to media content, measured before and after for ‘effects’

• Agnosticism: ‘for some children, under some conditions, some television is harmful. For some children under the same conditions, or for the same children under other conditions, it may be beneficial. For most children, under most conditions, most television is probably neither particularly harmful nor particularly beneficial’ (Schramm et al 1961)

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Consequences (continued)

• Some criminogenic effects likely: media figure in most theoretical accounts of crime; ‘field’ studies suggest effect (e.g. Hennigan et al 1982 econometric study of US spread of TV); measurable direct effects of media small.

• ‘The study of enculturation processes, which work over long time periods, and which are integral to rather than separate from other forms of social determination, would not ask how the media make us act or think, but rather how the media contribute to making us who we are’ (Livingstone 1996).

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Consequences (III) Sources of Information About the Police (%)

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Consequences (IV)

• Media principal source of information about crime and criminal justice for most people

• Frames debate about ‘law and order’, in conjunction with politicians’ campaigning and broader shifts in culture, social structure, political economy

• Fluctuations in public concern follow media and political campaigns (Beckett 1997), not crime trends (e.g. Nixon 1968; Thatcher 1970s; ‘reassurance gap’ 1990s- )

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Causes of media representation

• Political ideology; patterns of ownership: Most media organisations large corporations; owners predominantly c(C?)onservative; specialist crime reporters in past tended to be police groupies (Chibnall) – but not now. ‘Watchdog’ ethic.

• ‘Newsworthiness’; values of good story: ‘Dramatisation, personalisation, titillation, novelty’ (Chibnall); clarity and closure.

• Structural pressures of production: police, courts reliable story sources, become ‘primary definers’; safety and other constraints lead to ‘embedding’.

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Changing Content Since 1945

• The prevalence of news crime stories•  Increase in prominence of crime news after the

mid-1960s. Until then the overall percentage of home news stories that were primarily about crime averaged about 10% in Times and Mirror. Since late 1960s doubled to around 20%. The proportion of stories about the criminal justice system also increased after the late 1960s in both papers (from around 3% to 8%).

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TABLE 1: MULTIPLE CRIME STORIES 

Consequential Crimes (as % of all principal crime reports)  1945-64 1965-79 1981-91   16 22 22  

Contextual Crimes (as % of all principal crime reports)  1945-64 1965-79 1981-91   19 32 44   (N=211) (N=243) (N=203)  

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TABLE 2: PRINCIPAL CRIMES IN NEWSPAPER STORIES   PRINCIPAL CRIMES IN THE MIRROR   % 1945-64 1965-79 1980-91  Homicide 29 28 31 Violence 24 28 24 Property 16 8 9 Fraud 5 2 4 Against State 10 7 6 Public Order 5 6 4 Drugs - 4 8 Sex 7 4 8 Traffic - 5 5  N=112 N=166 N=140  

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 PRINCIPAL CRIMES IN THE TIMES   % 1945-64 1965-79 1980-91  Homicide 44 29 37 Violence 16 38 25  Property 21 5 5 Fraud 10 22 8 Against State 13 4 3 Public Order 6 6 5 Drugs - 3 3 Sex 3 1 6 Traffic 4 - 1  N=99 N=77 N=63 

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Who are the victims? Victims have become increasingly prominent in newspaper crime stories.

Between 1945-64 the 112 Mirror crime stories we analysed gave details of 86 victims, but between 1981-91 the sample of 140 stories yielded accounts of 171 victims.

In The Times the corresponding figures were 59 victims in 99 stories between 1945-64, and 56 in 63 stories 1981-91.

Whilst in the earlier period it was common for crime stories (most of which were about crimes against the person) to contain no account at all of the victim’s characteristics, by the 1980s this was rare, and indeed in The Mirror in particular there were frequently portrayals of several victims in each story.

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POLICE SUCCESS AND INTEGRITY NEWSPAPER STORIES (1945-91) 

A) CLEARING-UP CRIME% of principal crimes reported as cleared-up 1945-64 1965-79 1981-9  73 63 51

B) POLICE DEVIANCE IN NEWSPAPERS 1945-91 % of all crime stories primarily concerning police deviance 1945-64 1965-79 1981-91  10 12 19  

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Cinema Crime Films 1945-91 (%) 1945-64 1965-79 1979-91

Principal CrimeHomicide 50 35 45Property 32 20 5Sex crime 3 10 15Drugs 2 10 5

Pain/suffering victim 2 20 40

Protagonist

Police 9 50 40Amateur/PI 36 5 -Victim 13 - 25

Police

Violate due process 11 80 67 Excessive force 3 44 25 Honest 89 67 77

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Changing Discourse of Crime News

Quantitative changes indicate deeper qualitative transformation in public discourse about crime. Crime news inherently bad news: reports proscribed activity. From late 1960s representation of crime as increasingly threatening and out of control; symptomatic of wider social crisis and ever more serious and pervasive in its impact on ordinary people that readers were invited to identify with.

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Changing Discourse (continued)

• Accentuate the negative

• Victim culture: crime as a zero-sum game  

• It’s Not Business, It’s Personal

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Late Modernity and the Individualisation of Crime

• Crime is now reported as a much greater risk than before; more common; represented in much more highly charged emotional terms: serious threat to ordinary people that the reader is invited to identify with.  

• Much greater individualism underlying narratives. Crime problematic not because it violates the law but because it hurts individual victims with whom the reader is led to empathise. Offenders portrayed not as parts of social relations but as pathologically evil. Attempt to understand them seen as insensitive to the suffering of their victims.

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Late Modernity (continued)

• Decline of deference. Crime wrong not because of legal authority but because it causes personal harm. The police and other authorities are portrayed as increasingly immoral or irrelevant, except as heroic individuals.

• Aspects of broader transformations of political economy and culture: combination of free market economics and increasing individualism since the 1970s.

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Late Modernity (continued)

• Shift in crime news from stories about the breaking and enforcement of a generally respected law, through the politicisation of law and order, to an orchestration of hate and vengefulness against individual offenders supposedly on behalf of their victims in what sometimes amount to virtual lynch-mobs.