Why does television cover crime

Search Menu. Article Navigation. Close mobile search navigation Article Navigation. Volume Is Crime News Coverage Excessive? Graber Doris A. Computer services were made available through the Computer Center at the University.

The support of these organizations is gratefully acknowledged. Oxford Academic. Google Scholar. Cite Cite Doris A. Exactly how much depends on several factors, which you will have to consider.

We usually assume that more serious crimes are more newsworthy. A murder is more important than an armed assault, which is more serious than a break-and-enter, which is more serious than a parking offence. In terms of money, the bigger the amount stolen, the more important the crime.

Remember, however, that money has a different value to different people. The more unusual crimes are generally more newsworthy. A break-and-enter at a school may be more newsworthy than a break-in at a home, but a burglary at a crocodile farm may be more newsworthy still. Crimes are usually viewed as more important by smaller communities. If you are a journalist on a big city newspaper, an ordinary car theft may not be newsworthy at all. If you are a journalist in a small community, a car theft may be the biggest news of the week.

Everybody may know the owner - they may all know the car. It is a sad fact that quite horrible crimes do not make the news in a big city because they are so common and because the chances are small of readers or listeners knowing the victims or caring about them.

Crimes become more newsworthy if they involve people who are themselves newsworthy. An ordinary person attacked on the street may not be big news, but if that person is a local chief, that will be very newsworthy. A fraud case becomes more important when it involves a leading politician. A robbery becomes bigger news when police reveal that the robber was an escaped prisoner with convictions for murder and rape. It is generally true that a crime becomes more newsworthy if there is a strong chance of it happening again - usually because the criminal is known and likely to strike again.

This is the end of the first part of this four-part section on crime. If you now want to read on, follow this link to the second section, Chapter Reporting crime. A quick way to find what you're looking for in The News Manual is through the Index. It has more than links to concepts throughout the manuals.

Click here:. The media can cause crime and deviance through labelling. Moral entrepreneurs may use the media to put pressure on the authorities to do something about the problem.

This can lead to negative labelling of the behaviour and a change in law. Thereby acts that were once legal become illegal. Part of this is the creation of moral panic — an exaggerated overreaction by society to a perceived problem, usually driven by the media where the reaction enlarges the problem out of all proportion to its real seriousness.

His initial work focused on the minor confrontation in Clacton, The media overreacted in three seminal ways. Secondly, the media regularly assumed and predicted that further violence would result.

And finally, the media used symbolism; the hairstyles, clothes, bikes and scooters, the music of Mods and Rockers, were all labelled and associated with violence.

The media portrayal of events produced a deviance amplification spiral by making it seem that the problem was spreading. This leads to calls for greater activity by the police and courts, and further labelling and marginalisation of Mods and Rockers. The media further amplified the deviance by defining the subculture, therefore many youths joined these groups and were involved in future clashes in what became a self-fulfilling prophecy of escalating conflict, due to polarisation.

Individuals reading and seeing these reports felt that they were at risk from all young people who dressed as Mods or Rockers. However McRobbie and Thornton say moral panics are so frequent that they have little impact on the audience.

They suggest that the concept of moral panic as used by Cohen in the case of the Mods and Rockers is now outdated and no longer a useful concept in the contemporary world. This is because new media technology, the growing sophistication of media audiences in a media-saturated society, and intense competition both between different types of media and media companies, have changed the reporting of and reaction to events that might once have caused a moral panic.

There is now a diverse range of media reports and interpretations of events and of opinions and reactions to these events by the public. Then my closest friend died of a gunshot wound. Grief-stricken, I cancelled my trip to Paris and only recently was I able to bring myself to visit this beautiful city for the first time.

The memories of violence are devastating, and they last far longer than a news cycle. They can last a lifetime. Goldstein Tom, ed. Kurtz Howard, Pippert Wesley G. Check if your institution has already acquired this book: authentification to OpenEdition Freemium for Books. You can suggest to your institution to acquire one or more ebooks published on OpenEdition Books. Do not hesitate to give them our contact information: OpenEdition - Freemium Department access openedition.

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Desktop version Mobile version. Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle. Violence commise, violence subie : figures et enjeux dans les progr Search inside the book. Table of contents. Cite Share. Cited by. Television News Media Susan Ruel. Text Bibliography Notes Author. Full text. Author Susan Ruel. Department of English, University of Delaware, U. This digital publication is the result of automatic optical character recognition.

Violence commise, violence subie : figures et enjeux dans les programmes dram Read Open Access. Freemium Recommend to your library for acquisition. RUEL, Susan. Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, generated 13 novembre ISBN: