Newsmaking Criminology: Responding to a Mediated Fear of Crime

Dr. Chris McCormick
Department of Sociology
Acadia University

The headlines read: "most people don't believe statistics that show crime is declining"; "confidence in justice system drops"; "fear becomes a campaigning issue"; "fear stokes debate on release of sexual offenders"; "citizens put crime at top of fear list"; "women haunted by fear of violent crime"; "violent crime reports have women in fear"; "widespread fear detected in survey," and so on.(1)

Everywhere we are inundated with news about rising crime rates. However, not only do Canadians think that crime is increasing, but that the character of crime is changing.(2) Witness the debate over the increasing incidence of crime by youths, new forms of urban crime, home invasions by armed gangs, carjackings, the killing of tourists, serial killers, mass murders, and random drive-by shootings. This news and the attendant increase in the fear of crime fuels demands for the indefinite incarceration of sexual offenders, dangerous offenders petitions, public notification of the release of offenders, longer sentences, minimum mandatory sentences, and so on. 

On the other hand, the media has been sensitive to the criticism of sensationalism and has published articles chiding us for our fear - you feared crime because of media misrepresentation, well get a grip and relax, it's not as bad as you thought. Justice Minister Allan Rock urges us not to panic over crimes, and to realize that "every day in courtrooms across the country justice is being served." The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court urges judges not to cave in to pressure to get tougher on crime, and criminal justice experts tell Canadians not to be conned into believing crime is escalating.(3) So the media might inflame fear, but it's the public's fault if they don't see throught the hyperbole.

In this paper I overview some of the research which criticises the media's portrayal of crime. Assuming that media portrayals of crime are relatively homogeneous, which is not in itself unproblematic, I consider the grounds for a criminology, as the discipline shifts from the traditional emphasis on the causes of crime to the symbolic representation of crime, theory itself can no longer treat discourse as merely representational of reality, but as part of the recursive constitution of social relations.(4)

More specifically, I examine the theoretical claims put forward for "newsmaking criminology," an approach which seeks to actively intervene in the media to make it more responsible and accountable in its reporting on crime. There are empirical grounds for its claim that the media misrepresents the character of crime, and there is a hope that criminology could provide more accurate accounts of crime. However, the moral grounds of newsmaking criminology rest on a higher appeal to social justice. It is legitimate in its appeal to our social conscience-perhaps only if we accept its underlying premises in the first place.
 

Media Crime Tropes

A dominant perception is that the media simply reports crime, bringing us commentaries on the day's events from near and far, routing them to us in the comfort of our homes, offices, subway cars or wherever we read, listen to, or see the news. This could be called the naive approach, althought by naive I do not mean ignorant. The perception that the media simly reports crime is based on the assumption that the world is a literal event and that crime news is a passive medium orientation that the world is a literal event and that crime news is a passive medium orientated to how best to relay information about the world to us.

A more analytical perspective that we could bring to bear in an examination of crime news is that the world is one of variety, and that the media in all its complexity sorts throught various possibilities to bring us a scenario rather than a simple snapshot of that reality. This is a more constitutive position, based on the assumption that the media filters the world for us, and that we are extralocal consumers of that information. Techniques used in the news media become an extension of social control, virtual representations of order.(5) 

The question which immediately arises is how well the media does that job of filtering. It might do a judicious job as would an editor, picking and choosing the best items from among a sea of flotsam and jetsam; or alternatively it might act on the basis of hidden biases and prejudices and select the worst, the trivial, and the irrelevant. But even to admit that the media selects what is published and broadcast is a radical shift from the naive version that the media simply reports crime.

This position is cynical in that we no longer trust the media - we suspect its veracity, but it is a better position in the sense that we no longer uncritically accept the media's framing of events, but how is it better? Is it morally superior, intellectually enlightened? Whatever the answer to these deeper questions might be, it has become the vogue in sociology, with numerous studies showing the extent of media misrepresentation in portraying crime.(6)

The most famous examples of research on media distortion are those of the social panic school, the name of which has become a model for criticising the media.(7) The idea of the social or moral panic has become a metaphor for media exaggeration, passing into common language. This perspective is sometimes loosely framed within a social constructionist perspective.(8) Government reports as well as academic analyses have documented the distortion.(9) The starting point for such analyses in general is to compare the media representation of crime with official statistics. This form of "contextual social constructionism" takes official statistics as the objective standard, explicitly expecting that the media will represent crime proportionately.(10) As might be expected, such analyses readily show how the media tends to misrepresent violent crimes in comparison to government and police statistics.

For example, in a recent analysis of USA Today, the authors sought to determine if statewide coverage of crime in that national newspaper was related in any way to population size and official crime rates.(11) In using content analysis to examine 26, 301 news summaries on 250 different items in all issues of the paper for 1990, they found that the five most populated states had the highest number of reported crimes but did not rank highest in crime-related reporting. On the other hand, the states with the lowest UCR Index crime rates ranked highest in news summaries. They were forced to conclude that there seemed to be no relationship between reporting of major crimes and official crime rate; and furthermore, that a major factor in whether a crime was reported in the news was not the crime itself but the circumstances surrounding the crime, the public nature of the offender or victim, or the humourous nature of the incident - that is, the newsworthiness of the incident.

The conclusion that crime news might operate on different rules should not be surprising. However, on a more subtle level, if the complaint that the media will misrepresent crime so as to focus on individual offenders and away from corporation violence as crime is true, that highlights a more fundamental problem in the media.(12)

Newsmakings Criminology

"Any account of social life is necessarily partial." So begins a recent account of newsmaking criminology.(13) The author argues that journalists implicitly side with agents of social control, contributing to a hegemonic portrayal of crime. And as another author points out academics compound the crime, in that "critical scholars are aware of the media's misleading images of crime... but the norm is to point out the problem without pointing to any methods of using the media to present more accurate portrayals."(14) The evidence offered of media distortion by newsmaking criminology is slight and one-dimensional, so in this sections will explicate a media critique more fully.

In the original article on the topic, Barak outlines the need for more critical advocacy in criminology.(15) He say that "a newsmaking criminology invites criminologists and others to become part of the mass-mediated production and consumption of 'serious' crime and crime control. It requires that they share their knowledge with the general public."(16) Because the media is said to be a part of the system of 'manufacturing consent,' criminologists as part of the 'intellectual elite' have a responsibility to subvert those hegemonic processes.

Barak's evidence for the sweeping claim that media workers are part of the hegemonic elite is based on secondary data from a larger study of elites from 1979 and 1980, which he says shows that the media elite...serves the conservative rights by helping to sustain the structural relations of privilege and inequality...the collective viewpoint of the mass media is closely collateral to the hegemonic relationships existing in advanced capitalism."(17) The obstacles to advocacy journalism are the growing media monopolies and the one-sided nature of media communication: "mass media coverage has contributed to the construction of one-dimensional images of crime and criminals."(18) On the other hand, the mass media is not monolithic and its hegemony is not absolute. It is possible for the criminologist to disrupt those dominant images of crime which inspire so much fear.

Barak suggests countering the notion that crime is individual by showing that much crime is the result of corporate in/action. Rather than simply criticising the crime news themes favoured by the mainstream news media Barak advocates exploiting ideological schisms in the media and becoming part of the public voice, capable of participating in the struggle over which moral rules and which definitions of social reality will prevail."(19) Because of the media's orientation to isolated news 'themes', the challenge is to locate crime within larger social contexts.

In another article, Henry assumes the facticity of media distortion, and proceeds to present his idea of newsmaking criminology as 'replacement discourse'. He offers several problematic propositions: "that journalist's accumulated constitutive work permeates the very relationships they purport to describe;" that "journalists form alliances with agents of social control;" and that to "transcend our passive constitutive process."(20) All these assumptions are problematic: first, to say that reporters are biassed is merely to offer an observation on social life; second, a conspiracy theory purporting collaboration between journalists and social control agents doesn't capture the organizational dynamics of media work; and third, any putative passivity on the part of criminologists doesn't in itself justify a moral claim to activism.

However, the argument for a "replacement discourse" is based on that idea that it is important to deconstruct privileged structures of meaning replace them with more adequate, alternative ones. The emancipatory promise embedded in this sentiment contains a faint echo of an earlier, more radical criminology which argued for a political economy of criminal action, and the creation of "a society in which the facts of human diversity...are not subject to the power to criminalize."(21) The intention of a newsmaking criminology seems more modest, to work within the system to affect change on a symbolic level.

Based on criticisms of the media similar to those outlined above, Henry says that it is important to move beyond the domains of traditional academic discourse to make an active intervention in social affairs. With this in mind he advocates several ways to improve upon the dominant discourse of crime usually found in the media: first, disputing the data; second, challenging journalists; third, self-reporting criminological work; and fourth, confronting the media.

Taking each of these in turn, the advantage of 'disputing the data' is that criminological research can be used to confront journalistic interpretations of crime. The problem is that it is essentially reactive, occurring within a frame controlled by the journalists. Similar, in 'challenging the journalist's the criminologist can take over the authorship of crime news, but again usually in reaction to prevailing journalistic frames. In self-reporting or 'the criminologist as subject', the criminologist can initiate news stories but has little control over long-term news threads, risking trivialization or ghettoisation as a disputing expert. In the last, confronting the media as an educative provocateur, the professed aim is to get the media to assess its own role through subjecting it to critique. This language of 'transpraxis' seeks to be non-reificatory, reflexively aware, and emancipatory for marginalized voices. This develops outside the media frame initially, but again runs the risk of being seen as an isolated opinion piece, which does little to challenge the dominant understanding of crime.

In his metatheoretical article on whether newsmaking criminology is pratically possible, Greek advocates using the work of professional media consultants to tailor criminological research to a modern media audience.(22) He offers little more than the assertion that the media is sensationalist in its treatment of crime and the criminal justice system, and that criminology can offer a more realistic image.

Whether through countering the media's traditional focus on street crime, or by participating in organizations which are in a position to influence policy and thus public opinion, Greek stresses the complexity of working with the media. He mentions that there is a tendency for the media to use experts selectively and the possibility that a message will be misconstrued, but becoming more sensitive to how different media organizations are structured and what their news needs and deadlines that enable tailoring messages which actually have a change of success. Above all, he suggests avoiding being too-winded, boring, or quoting too many statistics, a challenge which might be too much for many academics!

Such an approach trades upon changes of thinking in criminology as well, as we incorporate more political economy into our analyses of crime. In comparing corporate crime with street crime, in looking at the extent of harm caused by corporations than by individuals, and in examining the class based character of crime, for example, we acquire a critical edge missing in both traditional criminology and dominant crime news. By challenging prevailing crime myths we can 'enlarge' the public discourse on crime, and exploit the fact that there is no monolithic ideology of crime.

The point of the theoretical position summarized above is that misrepresentation occurs and has undesirable effects, such as increasing the fear of crime, or creating prejudicial attitudes toward criminals and the legal system.(23) The proportion of violent crimes is exaggerated, and the underlying economic basis for property crime is de-emphasized.

However, the empirical evidence newsmaking criminology offers in its critique of the media lacks systematic detail, even thought there is some basis for the claim that crime news is distorted. The more important point, that something should be done about the media is based on an unexplicated moral position, and the evidence offered for the efficacy of criminology taking on the role of changing the media is anecdotal. In the next section, both the problem of what is wrong with the news and why something should be done about it will be spelled out in more detail.

Analysing Crime News

In 'this day and age' it seems that the need for a critical newsmaking criminology has never been more apparent as various crime thematics become more dominant in the media, such as the predator criminal the mis/depiction of sexually violent crimes against women, and the portrayals of high-profile of police-citizen encounters.(24) The pervasiveness of these themes means that they need no longer be legitimated, they have become a taken for granted format for crime news.

Among the mainstream perceptions are that crime has risen, and that the threat is from criminals on the street engaged in random violence or drive-by shootings. These have become virtual truisms in our society, given that most people's information about crime comes from the media has to offer. A 'mean-world view' develops with its own momentum, contributing to a push for retribution and punishment.(25)

As Barak says, "the crimes that dominant public consciousness...are not common ones, but the rarest ones." The problem with the exaggeration of isolated violent crimes is that it constructs "a social reality of crime that is...rooted in failure rather than social ills." In seeing a media representation of crime which situates stranger-related crime in an urban environment "the public comes to 'see'...predation between strangers [as] a normal way of life." This breeds a sense of fatalism and cynicism about human nature. Furthermore, the media reproduces gender myths in its portrayal of sexual violence against women, reinforcing traditional attitudes about good and bad victims; the media use a police slant for giving an authoritative context to crime reports; and the underlying message is that support for social control is necessary to counter the eternal threat of crime.(26)

The missing element is all of this media mis/representation is 'contextualization,' which criminologists are ideally suited to provide given their analyses of crime and its relationship to ideology. "Criminologists can interrupt 'the smooth passages of 'regimes of truth,' disrupt those forms of knowledge about crime which have assumed a self-evident quality, and engender a state of uncertainty in those responsible for servicing the network of power-knowledge relations."(27) If criminologists adopt a critical perspective they can disrupt the quasi crimino-administrative knowledge which is so keenly sought by those in power.(28)

In a Canadian example, news stories about youth crime were examined which appeared in Toronto newspapers. A sample of 113 articles from the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, and the Toronto Sun from a two month period in mid-1995 were selected and examined. As the author reports, 94% of the stories about youth crime appearing in those papers involved cases of violence. Youth court statistics, however, showed that fewer than 25% of youth court cases involved violence.(29) After concluding that there was a serious misrepresentation of the extent of youth crime, a public perception survey showed that 80% of the public erroneously believed that the YOA was too lenient, and concluded that this could adversely affect public policy. The media thus appears to be an important force in the evaluation of youth crime and the legislation affecting it, a factor which has been shown to have a bearing on the public perception that the courts are too lenient in general.(30)

Rather than a homogeneous effect, however, the evidence shows that the media does not in any simple way always increase fear or prejudice in the public. Instead of unilaterally creating a more jaundiced view of crime, the effect is mediated by such factors as proximity of exposure and personal victimization. For example, attitudes toward crime prevention in general remain positive, despite a preponderance of stories which emphasize personal victimization and downplay prevention.(31) This would go a long way to explaining the positive ideological acceptance of such programmes as Crimestoppers in the Maritimes where rewards for providing crime information are often declined. However, research which shows either a positive or an ambiguous effect on the part of the media seems to be in a minority.(32)

In one very specific case, the very highly sensationalized and publicized trial of Paul Bernardo in Ontario, there was a positive association between exposure to publicity and an opinion of guilt. Those exposed to the heavy media publicity around the case were more likely to prejudge the defendant guilty. However, the deleterious effect of pretrial publicity was virtually nullified by actual trial information, casting in doubt some of the assumptions of a negative media position.(33)

In fact, there were probably more newspaper articles, editorials, columns, television shows and other media stories on the media ban itself in the Homolka/Bernardo cases than on the actual crimes. When the Buffalo News covered the story and the Toronto Star published a front-page photograph the Ontario attorney-general investigated to see if there had been a violation of the ban. Libraries debated whether to display copies of the newspapers containing banned information, and in some cases actually clipped out the offending pieces until they received legal advice that shelving the papers did not constitute publication. Details of the crimes were posted on the Internet faster than newslists and discussion groups could be shut down, inadvertently contributing to the spread of rumours.

And as if the details of this case weren't complex enough, while a December 1993 poll done by Angus Reid reported that despite the media ban 25 percent of Ontario residents had learned banned details of the trial, 35 percent weren't even aware of the case at all!(34) So a glib assertion that the media prejudices opinion requires many qualifications.

Media, Crime, and Representation

However, the question which is glossed in all this research is why there would be an expectation that crime rates should match crime reports in the first place - why should we expect that the "cultural products of mass media [would] reflect the social reality of crime?(35) What is the basis for assuming that there should be a moral correspondence between the way in which crime is reported in the media and what is known about crime in criminology?

As Sutherland said in 1950, "fear is produced more readily in the modern community than it was earlier in our history because of increased publicity..."(36) The increasing power of the media to project myths, when twinned with an increasing concentration of power in the media decreases the power of people to deconstruct the stories of crime presented to them. At the same time identity is increasingly formed extralocally, in venues not subject to subjective control.

Some types of crime especially invoke the threat of danger and helplessness many feel in modern urban society. Child abduction, for example, is a fear many parents have as they hear accounts that 1.5-2.5 million children are missing in the United States each year. In reality it is estimated that more than 95% of missing children are teen runaways, with most of the remaining being abducted by a parent in violation of a custody order.(37)

A similar pattern of exaggeration can be found with serial murder, where the media representation distorts the likelihood of the crime, creating a fear of strangers, public places, and random violence. The estimate that from ten percent to two-thirds of the unsolved murder category of the Uniform Crime Reports was the responsibility of serial killers results in an oft-quoted estimate of 4000 serial murders in U.S. annually. This estimate is probably off by at least a factor of twenty, with a more accurate estimate fixed at 200 per year, or 1% of all American homicides annually. However, the idea of a roaming killer preying on helpless innocents is fuelled by television specials on the likes of Ted Bundy and Charles Manson, or media controversy around Clifford Olsen in Canada.(38)

Not only are specific crimes exaggerated, but the perception that crime is out of control overall is a dominant thread in contemporary popular culture. Crime is perceived to be increasing, especially violent crime involving stranger-related interpersonal violence. According to a time opinion poll in 1994 14% of Americans regarded crime as the nation"s most serious problem, can increase from 4% a year earlier.(39) In Canada, 46% of those surveyed in 1993 felt that crime had increased in their own neighbourhoods in the past five years.(40)

However, in qualifying those results the FBI, in fact, reported a 3% decline in violent crime in 1993 based on all crimes known to the police.(41) And in Canada the General Social Survey found that overall rates of victimization had either remained the same or decreased between 1988 and 1993.(42) Similar, the U.S. National Crime Victimization Survey reported that personal crimes decreased 25.3% between 1973 to 1991, and that less than 10% of the population is victimized by crime, with a victimization rate of 31.3 per 1000 households.(43)

As mentioned above, the dominant theme in the criminological literature is that crime is cover-represented in the media. The way this is measured is to compare official statistics on the rate and incidence of crime with the 'dimensions' of crime reported in the media. Such studies might focus on how much space is devoted to crime as compared with other issues, or a more complex content analysis might focus on placement, headlines, the dominance of voices of authority, the slant of stories, the stage of criminal investigation being reported, and so on. A basic approach would be to compare the content devoted to a rare crime such as homicide to that spent on a far more prevalent crime such as sexual assault. Furthermore, using modern victimization studies it is now possible to triangulate official statistics, media accounts and public survey data to estimate the scope and extent of the media misrepresentation of crime.

Crime has always been a staple of media news. As research shows, "crime takes up 20 percent of all local television news shows, 13 percent of all national news shows, and 25 percent of the column inches in newspapers."(44) "Murder constitutes only 0.2 percent of all crimes reported to the police, yet it occupies 25 percent of newspaper reports about crime."(45) There is clearly an exaggeration of major proportions when it comes to the media reporting of serious violent crimes such as murder, resulting in an increased fear of crime in the elderly, for example.(46)

In a particular crime such as sexual assault the disparity between different sources of information, and the role the media might have to play in propagating misinformation can be seen in more detail. To begin with, in 1992 34,352 sexual assaults were reported to the police for an official rate of 124 per 100,00. Moreover, based on a national victimization survey it is estimated that 572, 000 women 18 years and over had experienced sexual assault in 1993, but that only 6% of sexual assault were reported to the police.(47) Of the official reports filed with the police in 1992, 14% were unfounded, and of these only 59% were cleared by charge. Further research pegs 34% of reported cases going to court, with 12% resulting in a plea of finding of guilt.(48)

However, despite the overall feeling in the research that the media exaggerates crime, we find a different but no less consequential distortion in media coverage of sexual assault. In 1990 approximately 28,000 sexual assaults were officially reported in Canada, but the seven major Canadian dailies polled by the Canadian News Index carried only slightly more than 200 stories. This is the equivalent of only one news story for every 140 reported cases. If we consider sexual assaults that may be estimated to have occurred but which were not reported, there was only one news article for every 2,333 assaults, or 0.04% of assaults were reported in the news.(49) This is not exaggeration or sensationalism, but a silence around sexual assault. This is an important qualification of the social panic literature in that we find not an exaggeration but an invisibility of this very extensive crime against women.

Research also shows that the reporting of sexual assaults tends to focus more on the initial crime rather than the trial or outcome, especially in cases where the assailant is a stranger. In their analysis of more than forty years of newspaper coverage, Soothill and Walby describe the privileged or preferred readings of rape found in the news and how these have the effect of increasing fear. The focus on the sex fiend reproduces the rape as sex myth, distorting the crime for both (potential) victims and assailants. (50) And in her classic work in the area, Helen Benedict shows how the press is sympathetic to victims as long as they conform to the stereotype of the good victim, but as soon as a case becomes equivocal, all the traditional ways of blaming the victim and legitimating the offense become embedded in media accounts.(51)

What all these examples show is that the media distorts the character of crime, which is hardly a novel suggestion. Criminology has often suggested in the past that the media is an inadequate source of crime information, inadvertently affecting attitudes and ideas writ large about crime.(52) The research literature in the area focuses on the exaggeration of crime, but as shown above there is important research to be done on the silences and absences as well: silences around violence against women, an absence of coverage of corporate crime, a lack of news on crimes committed against society by the powerful in any systematic form. If we accept the starting point that police records and victimization surveys provide more objective information than that found in the media, then the latter is found wanting. However that is not an unproblematic assumption: police statistics and crime victimization surveys need to be quizzed on the veracity and reliability was well.
 

Conclusion

Newsmaking criminology is based on three central ideas, bluntly stated: that the news media does not get it right when it comes to crime coverage; that criminologists have a more objective sense of crime and thus are uniquely poised as experts to correct popular perception; and, furthermore, that they are morally obligated to educate the media in this matter.

The evidence for the first proposition is fairly unequivocal - there is substantial distortion in crime news coverage. However, it is not as simple as exaggeration or sensationalism; and we still haven't addressed the question of why there should be a correspondence between crime and the news in the first place. The evidence supporting the second proposition, that criminologists have more accurate information on crime is difficult, only because no one source of information on the extent and cost of crime that we use is without its problems - the best solution might be a form of triangulation analysis, where different sources of information balance off each other.

For the third proposition, arguably the most problematic, the evidence from the accounts of the news criminologists on whether academics can effectively influence the media's coverage of crime is anecdotal and not systematic. My own ironic experience shows that offering one's skills to educate the media is not always possible or appreciated!

The underlying moral justification for the enterprise is not very explicit, although it seems that it should be. Henry says that it is 'necessary' for criminologists to intercede in order to overcome passivity, while Greek says that criminologists can only avoid being 'subject' to social biases in the media through trying to influence that selfsame news coverage. Barak suggests that newsmaking criminology is the only way to 'demystify' crime, and that criminology must participate "in the struggle over which moral rules and which definitions of social reality will prevail." He says that "newsmaking criminologists represent...the only significant alternative source for defining crime and justice."(53) Hubris aside, it is in this idea perhaps that we find a challenge to the normative consensus on crime so pervasive in the media. Surely this expresses an interest in social justice.

‹‹ RETURN TO SOCIAL JUSTICE

© 2007 Atlantic Human Rights Centre, St. Thomas University