The TV Crime Dram Skewed Perception Of Popular Media

One thing I have always been interested in in my life is the way that media, or general portrayals of something can greatly skew views or opinions. This interest accounts largely for the reason I am majoring in marketing in college. During my reading I found something that caught my eye in the book “The TV Crime Drama”. It caught me in the section of the book labeled “Truth or Lies?” the quote is from criminologist Ray Surette, “Popular media is entirely responsible for a skewed perception of crime and the criminal justice system.” I can absolutely see how relevant this is in the world we live in today and with the creative story lines of these shows and how we relate them to real life situations. This not only applies to the scripted television

Its really not too often that we find two police cars ambushed on a highway, or an accidental murder from a SWAT team inside an apartment complex. These shows make it so easy to have a negative opinion on the police because it is so easy to be angry at the characters when they accidentally kill a father. We see all the events transpire from the time they are in the vehicles, to the demotion of the man in charge we see how no good comes from these situations. When something bad happens in the real world this makes it much easier to get angry because we know so much less about the situations. It is also important to spot the differences that separate the show from reality: largely the use of complex language and gunfire/explosive scenes that have been amped up for dramatic effect. We become numb to this because we see guns and violence in TV shows and in the news very often. So when it happens in a city near us or our neighborhood it becomes startlingly real and we don’t know how to react since we were watching these same events as entertainment on TV. When it is close to home it is an entirely new set of emotions, this is why it is important to be able to distinguish real situations from the fantasy ones we watch for an hour or two when we have nothing better to