ipl-logo

What Is The Media's Fear Of Crime

1996 Words8 Pages

The media plays a very significant role when it comes to the public’s fear of crime due to its large availability to the public , it's ability to “construct” crime, and also the way they prime and frame their stories in order to draw in and influence their viewers. Although overall crime rates in the United States have reached its lowest point in 40 years , the public's fear of crime is still increasing. Over the years, the media has started becoming more and more accessed due to technological advances. With the media being probably one of the only outlets that informs the public about crime, a lot of the public’s opinions and information will be influenced from the media. With that being said, the media doesn’t give all the facts and covers …show more content…

With mass media being geared more towards entertainment in today's society, their focus is more on interesting, fear evoking stories that will get them a larger audience. The combination of all of these lead to a misinformed public who’s fears of crime has stayed high while crime rates have reached an all-time low.

The media must go through a very long and complex process before they are finally ready to present their story to the public. This process includes prioritization before it is passed through the working conditions and environments of journalists and editors. Since the media is a business, the process must be cost effective. By focusing on certain sources that produce “reportable” crime, they are narrowing insight and information about the actual crime, never giving the “whole” story. After selecting the crime to write the story on, they start to pay attention to smaller details such as the heading of an article or choosing specific words to use over other ones. Every little thing is made to catch the attention of the reader during this process. Words that often evoke different emotions are often used in order to …show more content…

Framing specifically focuses on how information is selected, organized and presented to the public. It places a heavy importance on exactly how the information flows, visual editing of what goes where in the presentation and also the experience felt by the viewers. The most important part out of all of this is all the information that the media decides to leave out when framing. This type of power makes the media an extremely influential part of society. An example of how the media can influence the public's view is by simply labeling an issue differently. By choosing to label gun laws as a public safety issue rather than a criminal justice issue can have a huge impact on the way the public views gun laws. Using the power of language strategically, mass media is able to sway public opinion on certain topics just by changing a couple of words. In today's society, framing plays a huge role in the media which is focused on entertainment and drawing the public in with stories about crime they

Show More
Related
1237 Words | 5 Pages

(2004, March 14). Impact of media on fear of crime? Retrieved February 11, 2018, from http://www.svj.hvu.nl/mediahype/risk4/page2.htm Garden City Police Department. (n.d.). Clutter Family Murders.

Read More
917 Words | 4 Pages

Malcolm X famously said, “The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power, because they control the minds of the masses”. Although the modern media is powerful, it is always changing not only technologically, but in the way journalists report and act. Commentary over the last several years has centered on the negative changes of the media that journalists are unethical, stories are approval driven, and opinion is included in the news. Many Americans as well as journalists are concerned in the apparent decline in moral of the media.

Read More
1398 Words | 6 Pages

In the 2007 National Finals of the Public Forum Debate, a competitive debate tournament in which teams are assigned sides of an issue to debate in front of a panel of judges in order to persuade them that the affirmative or negative side is correct. The topic of this debate was whether or not handguns should be banned for private use in the United States. This issue is easily debatable because of the amount of information and statistics on each side of the argument. I analyzed the affirmative team in the debate, where Thao Le and Alyssa Tharp argue their position. Le and Tharp stand resolved that private gun ownership of handguns should be banned in the United States.

Read More
1451 Words | 6 Pages

Jacqueline Sheehan, a New York Times best selling author and psychologist from Florence Massachusetts, was born on January 8th. When she was young, her father died of a heart attack and later in her life her ex-husband was killed in a motorcycling accident. During college Sheehan studied anthropology and art, and then after the birth of her daughter she went and got a Phd in psychology and worked at counseling centers. She started to write around the same time she starting becoming a counselor ("Jacqueline Sheehan”).

Read More
958 Words | 4 Pages

The state and region that individuals live in greatly determine their opinions on how gun control and amendment application should be interpreted. A study was done 4 months after the sandy hook mass shooting where children were killed, the study determined the belief of gun control after this tragedy. The researcher Kevin H. Wozniak found that, “ [only] a slim majority of Americans favors a semiautomatic weapon ban and proposals to make gun control laws stricter,” (Wozniak 2). Even directly after a mass shooting there is only a slim majority on a weapons ban. This makes it clear that the beliefs of guns in American culture are too deeply rooted and the county has become too dependant on them.

Read More
783 Words | 4 Pages

Contrary to the common belief, crime has been on the decline for the past three decades. Yet, news and media have been covering crime more than ever, resulting in the public belief that crime is at an all time high. The sharp drop in crime since the early 1990s has left experts curious to discover the reasons for the decrease in crime. As I compare the article Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s: Four Factors that Explain the Decline and Six that Do Not by Steven D. Levitt and the article Evaluating Contemporary Crime Drop(s) in America, New York City, and Many Other Places by Eric P. Baumer and Kevin T. Wolff, I will briefly describe the articles, compare their agreements and disagreements, as well as discuss my personal preferences.

Read More
176 Words | 1 Pages

Within American ideals, laws, and opinions concerning gun control, firearms continue to be a critical matter in the government, schools, and communities. Notably, the nation 's government has attempted, and or passed, laws that inhibit guns in some kind of way. Now, generally the issue of gun control is viewed differently by either political parties; liberal Democrats tend to sway towards the side that is in favor of gun control laws, while Conservative Republicans have opposing views about these ideas. Therefore, since our nation is executively governed by Barack Obama, a democrat, the concern around firearm laws have intensified over the past eight years he has been in office.

Read More
951 Words | 4 Pages

In that time, 168 permit holders have had their permits revoked for any type of firearms violation, the most commonly occurring was accidentally carrying into a no-carry zone such as a school or an airport, not threats or acts of violence. This represents a revocation rate of less than 0.01% over the course of two decades (Putnam). It is clear that this issue represents a point of contention for both individuals and the media. Before the rise of professional journalism in the early 1900s, and the conception of media ethics, newspapers reflected the opinions of the publisher and writer. Modern media bias occurs when the media systematically presents a particular point of view.

Read More
1175 Words | 5 Pages

Media’s Influence on Public Opinion of Law Enforcement Television, movies, and other mass media sources use persuasion in commercials, product placement, etc. but what about in the content? Is what one sees perceived as true and factual? How are people influenced by media (Postman, 161)? More importantly, how are people influenced by media to view those called upon for help when in need?

Read More
1700 Words | 7 Pages

In today’s society, one of the most alienating issues in American politics is gun control. More specifically, the issue is whether or not guns should be banned in the United States. Some people would say that guns should be banned because it would reduce crime as a whole and keep citizens safer. These people, enthusiasts of stricter gun laws, fear being safe in their country where there are so many people who have access to guns. Opponents of this argument, however, also fear losing safety.

Read More
1364 Words | 6 Pages

Cultural criminology’s “framework is concerned with meaning, power and existential accounts of crime and punishment and control” (Hayward, 2016:300). Which allows cultural criminologist to study crime in the relation to culture and its impact on criminality. Cultural criminology believes it is always “necessary to state and restate what crime is, if nothing else a human activity” (Presdee, 2004:276). The commodification of culture relates to Cultural Criminology in the sense of the many faucets of crime and deviance and what is getting exploited through the media to the public. Commodification of crime is becoming more prevalent as time goes on as the media has such a large influence on society.

Read More
1163 Words | 5 Pages

The media takes these crimes that occur very sporadically and mold them into a way to make people fearful of an occurrence that is incredibly unlikely to happen again, or to them. These heightened levels of fearful stories increase the anxieties of those who watch, listen, or read about the story. The people that have now heard of these heinous crimes are now more likely to create and uproar about what needs to be done about crime. The media is eliciting a response from citizens because then it is more news stories they can cover to keep the wheel

Read More
186 Words | 1 Pages

Before the media becomes involved with a case, the media needs to determine if the case will be worth their time. The negative influence of media comes in the form of their ability to convict a person using their influence as a media outlet. The media will tend to exaggerate a case to make the story more compelling and get people 's attention. That type of system of

Read More
1634 Words | 7 Pages

Everyday in the United States, ninety families are changed forever; guns claim an average of ninety lives every day in the United States, 33,000 lives in a single year. Gun control has been a debate in the United States for many years and is constantly thrusted back into the public’s attention by horrific shootings. These shootings constantly cause individuals to petition the government to place stricter and stricter regulations of guns. However, these policies cannot be the solution to this problem. To determine a solution that will be both effective and constitutional, we must look at statistics and research that has been conducted to determine the best course of action.

Read More
1296 Words | 6 Pages

A frame is the set up and order of a new story, with the goal of influencing the audience to favor one side or the other. Biased media frame stories can drastically change the audiences’ views and will get their ratings up. Tim Groseclose of UCLA and Jeff Milyo of the University of Missouri at Columbia have said, “For every sin of commission we believe that there are hundreds, and maybe thousands, of sins of omission – cases where a journalist chose facts or stories that only one side of the political spectrum is likely to mention.” When thinking of the media you often think they are reporting accurate information. That is not always true.

Read More

More about What Is The Media's Fear Of Crime

Related Topics

Open Document