Celebrity Criminals: A Literature Review

Extensive researches have been conducted on the roles of celebrities in media and crime news. However, there are still only a handful of researches that have focused solely on audience empathy for celebrity criminals.

In this literature review, the scope of the topic will be expounded, beginning from crime news.

Crime is predominant in local television news, as several offer crime stories that catches the attention of viewers. This may be for the fact that crime shown in local news gives emphasis on believable visuals and emotional personal accounts (Franklin & Shanto, 2000), two elements that easily effect viewers’ judgment. However, only the selective crime news are given media attention. A starting point in this research is how reports

They say that crime news has already become a staple news item, and because of that it is imperative that the media exercises caution when presenting information to its publics (Gruenewald et al., 2009). It should be noted that while their research revolves around homicide, the aspect of how it comes to be newsworthy depending on the offender and victim is an important factor in how it will be presented to the audience. They worked under the assumption that the gender and race of either an offender or a victim are characteristics that raise or lower a news report’s newsworthiness. A study from Geer also shows that aside from criminals, the victims concerned in crimes play a large part in the visual element of crime news. Geer says that these visual elements of the news product depict immediately, dramatically, and often in full colour what it may take several paragraphs to say in words. Thus Geer coined the term, criminal victimization and provided characteristics of the ideal victim for crime news. What is the ideal victim? Researches find that the individuals that fall under the ideal victim are legitimate enough to garner sympathy from viewers; and that legitimized victims vary from important social aspects such as their status, sex, age. Typical victims shown in television are the elders and children, for they are commonly perceived as

Their study focused on how fame fluctuated (if at all) for both celebrities in the top tier of fame, and for the secondary tiered or ‘minor’ celebrities. They propose three elements of fame, including Self-Reinforcement in which individuals use various methods to create and stabilize their fame, Extreme Inequality, in which they point out just how imbalanced the allocation of fame is. Fame is mostly devoted to established celebrities and institutions, leaving little room for new comers (Rijt, et al., 2009). The third and final element they proposed was the High Mobility of fame. This element suggests that fame is ephemeral, and can be attached and detached from individuals or institutions very easily. Using these three elements, we can catch a glimpse of just how fickle fame is, even for people in higher tiers of