Pictured as a ‘Window on the world’, the Media has been considered as providing an accurate and trustworthy account of events, usually as they happen. For its immediacy and efficiency of news reporting, the media has now become the most relied upon than any other news source. However, many have argued the media and its contents is significantly tampered with and controlled by media owners, in order to keep up a particular consensus in society. The picture of crime created by the media is one that’s of concern, as the public are continuously being given partial information about crime, dramatising and creating an increase in the fear of crime. From the use of spin-doctors to churnalism, many argue that most of media content is controlled and …show more content…
News values are what determine the news worthiness of the event. Providing general guidelines and criteria that determines the worth of the news story, certain crimes are often ignored. One of the news values determined by Galtung and Ruge (1970)-‘negativity’ solely focuses on stories that have tragedy, violence or death. This is incorporated with another news value they identified- ‘extraordinariness’, which focuses on events that are rare, unpredictable or surprising. This has significantly impacted the reporting of crime and the picture it paints of it in …show more content…
These being; ‘ethnic minorities as a threat’, ‘ethnic minorities as criminal’ and ‘ethnic minorities as unimportant’. With this being the main media coverage, ethnic minorities are left symbolically annihilated. In rejection to these ideas, Pluralists may argue that the media allows everyone regardless of their social class, to voice their opinions. From their perspective, media owners compete against each other in free market economies to attract most audiences. They argue that the real power holders are the consumers, who have a freedom of choice. This suggests that the picture of crime that is created in the media is the picture that the public already have. New media has introduced technological convergence, which allows information to be delivered across a range of media platforms. With this, it has introduced interactivity and choice, allowing individuals to select what they want to read about, watch or listen to, rather than be passive receivers of entertainment and knowledge like media audiences were in the