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Examine How the Media Causes Crime -21 Marks.

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Examine how the media causes crime -21 Marks.
We live today in a media- saturated society. The media are all around us and crime is the central theme of their output, both fiction and non-fiction. Crime and deviance make up a large percentage of news coverage. For example, Richard Ericson et al’s study of Toronto found that 45-71% of quality press and radio news was about various forms of deviance and its control, while Williams and Dickinson found British newspapers allocate up to 30% of their news space to crime. However, many question whether media causes criminality.
There are frequent ways in which the media might possibly cause crime and deviance and this includes the glamorisation of offending. As we have seen, the media overstates the amount of violent and unusual crime, and they exaggerate the threats of certain groups of people becoming its victims, such as young women and the elderly. Hence, there is a concern that the media may be misleading the public’s impression of crime and causing an impractical fear of it. Research evidence to some degree supports the view that there is a link between media use and fear of crime. For example, in the USA, Gerbner et al found that heavy users of television (over four hours a day) had greater levels of fear of crime. However, the existence of such correlations doesn’t verify that media viewing causes fear. For example, it may be that those who are already afraid of going out at night watch more TV just because they stay in more.
Moreover, right realists argue that the underlying problem is socialisation and the underclass rather than the influence of media. Charles Murray argues that the crime rate is increasing because of a rising underclass or “new rabble” who are defined by their deviant behaviour and who fail to socialise their children appropriately. According to Murray, the underclass is growing in both the

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