Media Made Criminality the Representation of Crime in the Mass Media

crime in the media: subversion, social control, or mental chewing gum? Mass media representations of crime, deviance, and disorder have been a perennial cause of concern. Two competing anxieties can be discerned in public debate, and both are reflected in a large research literature. On the one hand the media are often seen as fundamentally subversive, on the other as a more or less subtle form of social control. Those who see the media as subversive see media representations of crime themselves as a significant cause of offending. This has been a constantly recurring theme of that 'history of respectable fears' which Geoffrey Pearson has traced back through the last few centuries (Pearson 1983). At the end of the eighteenth century, for example, the Middlesex magistrate Patrick Colquhoun claimed that crime was rising because 'the morals and habits of the lower ranks in society are growing progressively worse' (Radzinowicz 1956: 275). He attributed this in part to an alleged wave of bawdy ballad singers who went around entertaining in pubs. He regarded suppression of these as counter-productive, so he urged the government to sponsor rival groups of wholesome ballad singers. He was confident that these eighteenth century precursors of Sir Cliff Richard and Dame Vera Lynn would soon supplant their bawdy brethren in popularity and influence. A different concern about media representations of crime has worried liberals and radicals (Wykes 2001). To them the media are the cause not of crime itself but of exaggerated public alarm about law and order, generating support for repressive solutions. A fundamental theme of the radical criminologies of the 1960s and 1970s was the power of the mass media to foment fears about crime and disorder (Cohen 1972; Cohen and Young 1973; Hall et al. 1978). Within the field of media studies the influential 'Cultural Indicators' project has for three decades monitored the damaging consequences of media representations of violence for democratic institutions In their ideal-typical form these perspectives are polar opposites, sharing in common only their demonization of the media, whether as a subversive threat to law, order, and morality, or as an insidious form of social control paving the way to authoritarianism by cultivating exaggerated fears about criminality. Each has generated huge research industries conducting empirical studies of media content, production, and effects (Leishman and Mason 2002). Because of the difficulties in rigorously establishing straightforward causal relationships between images and effects, some …