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Mass Media and Crime
Mass Media And Crime
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Updated Oct 5 2020

MASS MEDIA AND CRIME

The relationship between the criminal justice system and the media system has been
the subject of research, speculation, and commentary throughout the twentieth
century. This relationship may be understood in terms of dependency relations
operative between these massive systems (Ball-Rokeach and De Fleur). Put most
simply, neither the media nor the criminal justice system could operate effectively
without the other. The criminal justice system is a resource for the media system
in that it affords one of the common sources of news and entertainment stories. The
classical surrogate scout role of the media, whereby they monitor the environment
for actual and potential threats to individual and collective welfare, affords a
powerful way for the media to attract their audiences. People must constantly
update their understanding and ability to orient themselves to the environments in
which they act. Media crime stories, whether the news or entertainment genre,
instruct and update these understandings. Commercial media organizations translate
this relationship with their audience into the profit that flows from advertisers.
The media system's capacities to reach vast audiences of citizens and policymakers
also positions it as an essential resource for the criminal justice system and all
of its attendant judicial and law enforcement organizations. For the criminal
justice system to operate effectively, it must have the authority that derives from
people's willingness to grant it legitimacy, and media storytelling can profoundly
affect this process. Allocation of scarce resources to the criminal justice system
also depends upon success in the struggle to get "its" story positively framed and
widely disseminated to media audiences. These macro dependency relations serve as
context for examinations of specific aspects of media, criminal justice, public,
and decision-maker relations.

Research attention has been given to the dependency relations between journalists
and the police, courts, and jails. The impact of journalism on public perceptions
of the criminal justice system, and on public attitudes toward specific cases—
including the attitudes of potential and actual jurors—has been another frequent
focus. The right of journalists to protect sources by not disclosing their names
has also come under scrutiny from time to time.

While journalism may be the media profession with the most legitimate claim to
exercise influence over the criminal justice system, it is by no means the only way
the media exercise such influence. Entertainment media have also been studied and
criticized for their influence over public perceptions of the people and
institutions that comprise the criminal justice system. A striking amount of
television programming has in one way or another (e.g., through comedy, mystery,
drama, biography, docudrama, and soap opera) been centered on police, lawyers,
judges, criminals, and victims of crime. The effects on public attitudes and
behavior that these portrayals may have brought about have received considerable
research attention. Media portrayals of violence, largely in television but also in
movies and—increasingly in the 1990s—recorded music, have been studied in part for
their potential to inspire real-life criminal behavior. Exposure to violent media
content has been argued in criminal defenses as a mitigating factor in the guilt of
defendants.

Since the early 1980s a television genre has emerged that is part journalism (in
that it purports to deal with reality and with important subjects) and in no small
part entertainment (in that it is dramatic, enhanced with music and special
effects, and often includes actors playing various roles). Shows such as Cops,
America's Most Wanted, and Unsolved Mysteries combine footage of actual arrests,
interviews with people involved in crimes, and other documentary information with
an assortment of dramatic elements to create a new sort of quasi-journalism scorned
by professional journalists but very popular. While not yet the focus of much
research attention, the emergence of such shows is occasionally credited for a
perceived decline in the quality of broadcast journalism, which may have an
indirect effect on the justice system.

Journalism
Only in the twentieth century did journalism attain the status of a profession,
with professional schools, organizations, honors, norms, and the means of
disciplining transgressors. Early conceptions of the journalist as an objective
conduit of facts about the world have given way to more complex models of
journalism in which the role of institutional imperatives and individual biases are
recognized as highly influential, if not decisive, factors shaping the content of
news (Bennett; McManus; Winch).

Various elements of the criminal justice system are among those most likely to
influence journalism. Public interest in crime news is generally high, so there is
a commercial incentive for newspapers and broadcasters to provide such information.
Crimes are usually good stories; they can be told as morality plays, dramatic
confrontations, and human-interest stories even when their value as hard news is
not high. Demand for crime news produces close relationships between police,
judicial officers, and reporters. The information resources controlled by police,
such as the identity of suspects, the status of cases, and the evidence assembled,
are highly prized by reporters. Attorneys and (less frequently) judges may offer
valuable information about ongoing (and even long-past) trials. Reporters do their
best to cultivate close and reliable relations with the police, the courts, and the
prosecuting attorneys on their beats. If a reporter is not on good terms with these
people, he or she risks losing information necessary to tell a coherent or
interesting story. A reporter may not be alerted to new discoveries of evidence,
new legal strategies, or impending changes in the dates and times of public
hearings. Often there is no source of this information other than the police,
courts, and prosecutors.

Reporters control resources of their own, prized by the criminal justice system.
The threat of adverse publicity can be potent, especially for elected officers of
the court and (in some jurisdictions) police chiefs or sheriffs. Truly virulent
public attacks on the police or the judiciary are rare, however, since the
relationship between journalists and these institutions is ongoing and valuable; no
newspaper or broadcast outlet can afford to burn such bridges. Apart from
publicity, journalists can enhance the overall legitimacy of the justice system by
covering its activities. Public confidence that the police are behaving
appropriately or that the judicial system "works" can be maintained simply through
routine coverage of crime. Stories that challenge that confidence may be presented
as aberrations from an otherwise upbeat routine.

Pritchard and Hughes demonstrate the practical result of these dependency

relations. They studied the newspaper coverage of a year's worth of homicides in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with attention to the factors that determine whether a murder
will merit coverage or not. They found that "reporters tended to take cues for
evaluations of newsworthiness from race, gender, and age" (p. 52), information
about both victims and suspects usually available from official sources. Deadline
pressure seems to encourage reporters and editors to use such attributes to
calculate the extent and nature of "deviance" the murder involves. While
conventional wisdom describes newsworthiness in terms of "statistical deviance"
(i.e., departure from the usual, as in "man bites dog"), Pritchard and Hughes show
that "status deviance" (i.e., the death or suspect-status of high status citizens)
and cultural deviance (i.e., murder of the "especially vulnerable," such as women,
children, and the aged) explains the decision to cover or ignore a homicide (p.
52).

Pritchard had earlier (1986) demonstrated that coverage of homicides in Milwaukee

was a strong predictor of whether or not the prosecuting attorney would plea-
bargain the case. Murders that received more coverage in the newspapers were less
likely to be bargained than low-publicity crimes. Pritchard notes that this finding
is consistent with earlier research (Alschuler; Jones) regarding the decision-
making of prosecutors that indicated that political considerations (e.g., fear of
being seen as "soft on crime") exercised strong influence on prosecutors'
decisions. Further, Pritchard, Dilts, and Berkowitz demonstrated that prosecution
of pornography offenses in Indiana in the mid-1980s was influenced by the relative
priority of pornography on the agendas of citizens and of the local newspapers.

The cumulative impact of Pritchard and others' work is to illustrate that reporters
and editors are most likely to report crimes based on certain attributes of the
victims and suspects, and that prosecutors monitor press coverage and choose which
crimes to prosecute aggressively based in part on the level of press attention the
crime has received. Since the criteria of reporters tend toward coverage of white
victims and victims who are either female, very young, or very old (or some
combination of those attributes), the least likely crime to be covered is one in
which the victim is a black adult male. Thus the least likely crime to be
aggressively prosecuted is one committed against a black adult male.

Defendants and defense attorneys are less likely to benefit from these relations of
dependency. A guilty criminal defendant has no interest in sharing details of a
crime, of course, and innocent defendants have no details to offer. Even if
defendants do have valuable information, they are unlikely to have valuable
information on a regular basis for years to come, the way police and judicial
officers do. Defense attorneys are a bit more likely to be valuable sources in the
future, but not nearly as likely as prosecutors. There is much more crime in the
world than there is coverage of it, so most defense attorneys most times will not
be defending newsworthy clients. But all newsworthy prosecutions are performed by a
handful of offices, from city attorneys to federal prosecutors. Given a choice
between developing close, mutually rewarding relationships with defendants or
prosecutors, a working reporter knows where his or her professional future is most
safely insured. Robert Shapiro, a prominent defense attorney (and member of O.J.
Simpson's "Dream Team") noted that "[t]he defense lawyer who has never dealt with
the press, or has no pre-existing relationship with a particular reporter, is at a
severe disadvantage. In order to overcome this, the lawyer must cultivate a line of
communication with the reporter so the client's point of view can be expressed in
the most favorable way" (p. 27).

One effect of crime coverage on the judicial process that has received considerable
research attention is the influence of pretrial publicity on jurors. Partly due to
the pattern of dependency relations described above, it has been noted that most
coverage of crime is detrimental to the defendant, including the publication of
information inadmissible at trial (Imrich, Mullin, and Linz; Dixon and Linz). Does
this bad publicity produce predispositions in jurors one way or the other? A
variety of experimental and quasi-experimental research studies have demonstrated
consistent support for the hypothesis that at least mild antidefendant bias can be
the result of exposure to pretrial publicity (Constantini and King; Dexter, Cutler,
and Moran; Greene and Wade; Kramer, Kerr, and Carroll; Kerr, Kramer, Carroll, and
Alfini; Moran and Cutler; Ogloff and Vidmar; Otto, Penrod, and Dexter). Judicial
remedies such as voir dire, judges' instructions, and continuances are not
guaranteed to overcome these effects (Kramer et al.; Carroll et al.; Vidmar and
Melnitzer; Dexter et al.; Kerr et al.). Bruschke and Loges, however, found that the
conviction rate for federal murder defendants whose cases received no discernible
print coverage did not differ significantly from the conviction rate of defendants
whose cases received high amounts of print coverage. In fact, Bruschke and Loges
found that the highest conviction rate was observed among those who had between one
and five stories written about their case. Once convicted, however, defendants with
the most publicity received substantially longer prison sentences than those with
little or no publicity.

The effect of pretrial (and during-trial) publicity on public opinion and jury bias
can lead to policies such as gag rules (prohibiting trial participants from
publicly discussing the case), restriction of court access to the press—
particularly TV cameras—and changes of venue. Salwen and Driscoll point out that
support for media regulation may spring from a "third-person effect" in which a
person believes that others are prone to media influence while he or she is much
less prone to the same effect. Studying public opinion regarding conflicting
evidence and arguments during the murder trial of O.J. Simpson, Salwen and Driscoll
found that there is a significant tendency for survey respondents to estimate
higher media influence for others than for themselves, but that this belief is not
strongly associated with calls for regulation of the press, particularly among
well-educated respondents. While education in general may reduce one's willingness
to endorse media regulation, it is not clear whether judges subject to the third-
person effect might be more willing to impose restrictions given their unique role
in the judicial process, despite their high levels of education. McLeod, Eveland,
and Nathanson (1997) found that support for censorship of rap lyrics thought to
incite misogyny and violence was associated with a third-person effect, although
their college-student sample made it impossible to control for education.

Another approach to the study of news content and its effect on public opinion is
framing. "Framing essentially involves selection and salience. To frame is to
select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a
communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition,
causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the
item described " (Entman, 1993, p. 52, emphases in original). Research into the
methods journalists use to reconstruct reality into "the news" has focused on the
use of framing devices to turn events into coherent stories (Kahneman and Tversky;
Graber; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock). Entman (1994) has argued that by showing
visual images of black suspects and defendants in the grasp of white police
officers, television news frames blacks as both more dangerous and under more
direct physical control than whites (who are less likely to be shown in the
physical grasp of an officer—especially a nonwhite officer). Dixon (1998) finds
that black suspects are disproportionately shown on the news (compared to their
proportion of arrested suspects in crime reports). The concept of framing suggests
that such patterns of representation increase the salience of connections between
blacks and crime in general, and thus perpetuate stereotypes of both black
criminality and white authority.

Entertainment
The possibility that exposure to mass media entertainment—from comic books to the
Internet—can inspire criminal behavior was the subject of research, speculation,
and debate throughout the twentieth century. Some content is considered more
suspect than others, particularly depictions of violence. Since 1950, violent
television fare has been the subject of a great deal of research, and meta-analyses
of this body of research tend to conclude that there is a consistent, moderate
causal relationship between exposure to televised violence and aggressive behavior
in the real world (Hearold; Paik and Comstock; Hogben). Various theoretical
explanations for the link have been offered, notably including social learning
(Bandura), excitation transfer (Zillmann, Hoyt, and Day), and disinhibition, or
desensitization (Berkowitz and Rawlings; Thomas, Horton, Lippincott, and Drabman).

Not all aggressive behavior is criminal, of course. The laboratory studies that
lead to the conclusion that exposure to televised violence causes more aggressive
behavior in real life are frequently criticized for not being sufficiently
realistic to be generalized to the potential for truly dangerous, criminal behavior
outside the laboratory. This criticism is deflected somewhat by research using
other methods, including large sample surveys, quasi-experiments (using a more
realistic setting with naive subjects unaware that they are under observation) and
"found experiments" (in which public records are searched for evidence of pre- and
post-exposure effects) (Phillips), all of which tend to support the conclusion that
a persistent but moderate effect on aggressive behavior can be traced to exposure
to violent media.

Three particular subjects receive the bulk of research attention where

entertainment-related effects are concerned: (1) the effects of any violent media
on children; (2) the "cultivation" of beliefs about crime and the criminal justice
system that results from viewing television; and (3) the effects of pornography on
adults. It is frequently noted that by the time an American child reaches
adolescence he or she is likely to have seen thousands of murders depicted on
television (e.g., Huston et al's, calculation that by the time a child leaves
elementary school he or she will have seen eight thousand murders) (cited in
Bogart, p. 351). In the 1990s the increasing popularity of computer games that
simulate wholesale slaughter of human beings (e.g., Doom and Quake ) has led to
speculation that the wave of school shootings of the late 1990s has roots in part
in the skills (such as arming, evaluating killed or wounded status, and
strategizing) cultivated by playing such games and in the indifference toward
suffering that leads to success in the games (Grossman).

Cultivation theory hypothesizes that television's depiction of the world leads

heavy viewers of television to believe that the real world resembles the television
world in key respects, including the likelihood of crime and the proportion of
people involved in the criminal justice system (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, and
Signorielli). Carlson (1985) studied the content of crime shows in the late 1970s
and the attitudes toward the criminal justice system held by viewers of these
shows. He found that the crime shows on television in the late 1970s presented a
very unrealistic view of the criminal justice system, specifically including the
effectiveness of police, the rights of suspects and defendants, and the general
level of criminal activity in the world. People who watch these shows report more
support for authorities such as police, less support for civil liberties, and more
political cynicism. Carlson notes that the consistent messages of crime shows may
result in "an increase in demand for police protection" (p. 195) since police are
portrayed as extraordinarily effective and crime as rampant. It should be noted,
however, that the sort of crime shows Carlson examined were qualitatively different
from the shows that emerged in the 1980s, beginning with Hill Street Blues. These
later shows, many produced by Stephen Bochco, have featured flawed police who often
fail to catch their suspects, and open criminals as recurring characters who appear
immune to capture. The effects of such programs would, by Carlson's logic, result
in mistrust of police and perhaps even more generalized cynicism.

Shrum and Mares each have attempted to explain the psychological processes by which
cultivation occurs. Shrum points to the accessibility of heuristics, whereby it is
easier for heavy viewers of television to rely on the impression TV makes on them
when they answer questions about the real world than it would be for heavy viewers
to search their minds and make a more elaborate—and perhaps accurate—calculation.
Mares argues that respondents are not always aware of where their information comes
from, and thus "source confusion" accounts for people's tendency to describe the
real world in television terms. Potter, Warren, and others point out that even if
viewers limit their exposure to non-fiction programs, such as news and news
magazines (e.g., 20/20 ), they are likely to end up with distorted impressions of
the real world. The authors compare nonfiction TV depictions of antisocial behavior
to real-world statistics. "If we rely on non-fiction programming to tell us about
the parameters and nature of our society, that programming is constructing
narratives that are not particularly useful for that purpose. Nonfictional
television presents a very high rate of antisocial activity, and the most serious
forms of that activity (physical violence and crime) are presented at rates far
above the rates in the real world" (p. 86).

While fears regarding children's exposure to violent media are mostly centered on
the likelihood that children will imitate or learn the criminal behavior they see,
concerns about adults' exposure to pornography also include the impact of such
exposure on such decisions as jury verdicts in rape trials (Linz, Donnerstein, and
Penrod) and acceptance of "rape myths," for example, that women only pretend to
resist rape (Allen, Emmers, Gebhardt, and Giery). Adults play many roles in the
criminal justice system that make their attitudes toward crime important. If, as
Linz and others demonstrate, exposure to pornography can affect jurors' decisions,
voir dire in rape cases might benefit from questions about such exposure (if
potential jurors could be counted on to respond to voir dire inquiries on this
subject truthfully).

Conclusion
It is not always easy to define the ideal relationship between the media system and
the criminal justice system. The goals and resources of the media do not mesh
perfectly with those of prosecutors, defendants, judges, and police. The goals and
resources that people possess as audiences and readers are different from the goals
and resources those same people possess in other roles they play, as citizens,
jurors, suspects, and consumers. The ongoing negotiation between the media, the
justice system, and people in their various relevant roles produces the media
effects observed in the research fields reviewed here (Ball-Rokeach). Many of these
effects may be unintended or undesirable, but mitigating such effects as
prejudicial pretrial publicity is often not possible without threatening goals that
others consider paramount, such as press freedom or the desire of a prosecutor to
try a case locally (i.e., avoiding a change of venue).

When goals are in conflict, and resources are scarce or fought over, the relative
power of the parties to the conflict becomes the central issue. There is doubt that
the ability of the media to influence the course of criminal justice is entirely
legitimate or desirable, especially when that influence stems from the increasing
dominance of the media's entertainment over its journalistic function. But the
media are powerful enough to resist intrusive public policy and defend their
resources (such as access to sources, control over their broadcast schedules, and
use of information-gathering tactics such as hidden cameras). The justice system
has powerful resources of its own to use to pursue its goals when they conflict
with the media's. It is the public, particularly when the public is atomized, whose
goals are least likely to receive support and benefit from rich resources when they
are threatened by the goals of the media or the justice system. As Potter and
Warren point out in their discussion of policies regarding the regulation of sex
and violence on television, the political influence of the broadcasting industry
allows the media to tie up regulators over definitional issues (What is sex? What
is violence?), rendering public policy to limit such content ineffective.
We began and ended the twentieth century with a nervous tension of conflict and
cooperation between the media and criminal justice systems. In nontotalitarian
societies this tension is unavoidable as the goals and interests of these systems
differ. A question for the twenty-first century is whether the delicate balance of
power between these players will give way. A major concern is the trendline of
increasing distrust of major social institutions, especially when combined with an
apparent decline in the strength of commitment to civic society (Putnam, 1995). In
other words, the relationship between the media and criminal justice systems is a
dynamic one that reflects changes in the larger social and political environment
where conceptions of justice and community are formed. For the criminal justice
system to have legitimacy for its just administration of the criminal law and for
the media system to have legitimacy for its contributions to civil society, each
must be regarded as playing vital roles in furtherance of a democratic order that
commands the allegiance of its citizens. In short, justice must remain part of the
crime story, whether told by the criminal justice system or by the media.

Bill Loges

Sandra Ball-Rokeach

See also Crime Causation: Psychological Theories; Fear of Crime; Publicity in

Criminal Cases; Public Opinion and Crime.

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