Media Coverage of Criminal Justice

SIGNIFICANCE: Because the print media are responsible for conveying much of the information on crime and criminal justice that the public receives, they play a significant role in helping to form public opinion on criminal justice issues. Understanding the reasons for media distortions can provide greater understanding of the relationship between media and public perception of crime.

In the twentieth century world of proliferating electronic communication, the American print media remain a booming industry. The advent of the Internet has actually increased public access to print media resources, and the print media and local and national network news sources remain important sources of information for the general public. However, the public draws on the print media’s heavy coverage of crime and criminals to form its opinions, and these media often present biased views. Scholars have presented a variety of perspectives and theories concerning the processes that are at work that lead to such media distortion.

Distortions in the News

One aspect of print media coverage that has garnered attention from researchers is the issue of prevalence of crime that appears in print. To examine this issue, researchers generally use a research method known as content analysis to examine how much coverage of crime actually appears in newspapers. Studies of media content have reported that crime news represents between 4 and 28 percent of all newspaper news coverage. Some studies have placed the figure as high as 50 percent.

While it is generally well known that issues of crime and justice are popular topics in media coverage, it is not as well known how accurate this coverage is. Researchers have found that in many ways, the images of crime presented by the mass media in general, and the print media in particular, tend to distort the realities of crime, particularly in the disproportionate attention they pay to violent crime. For example, an analysis of New Orleans newspapers found that murder and robbery cases accounted for 45 percent of news items while only accounting for 12 percent of actual crimes in the region covered. Another study found that 55 percent of the stories in Canadian newspapers concerned violent offenses, whereas violent offenses represented only 6 percent of actual crimes. Another study, in 1991, found that for every two studies in the media on property crime, there were eight stories about violent crime, although property crimes outnumbered violent crimes nine to one.

Research has also suggested that changes in print media crime coverage do not necessarily reflect changes in actual local crime rates. A study made as early as 1951 found no correlations between newspaper coverage of crime and local crime rates. A study found that imbalanced crime coverage still persisted. Moreover, even as violent crime rates were declining in society, television and newspaper coverage of crime was increasing by more than 400 percent.

The Impact of Distortions on Society

There are also other, and more subtle, ways in which the print media can distort the realities of crime, such as by giving disproportionate coverage to certain types of victims, offenders, or social circumstances. For example, the print media tend to focus more attention and resources on crimes involving female victims, young victims, elderly victims, white victims, and affluent victims. At the same time, the print media emphasize cases involving offenders who are members of minority groups.

An example of skewed attention to social circumstances and contexts is the print media’s emphasis on crimes involving offenses committed by strangers on local victims, while simultaneously downplaying offenses that committed by acquaintances and relatives of victims. Crimes involving multiple offenders consistently receive intensive coverage. The media also foster distorted notions about causes behind crimes by focusing on individual explanations and emphasizing crimes with unusual motives that do not match the typical patterns of the same offenses.

Media distortion of crime images potentially affects public opinion of crime and criminal justice issues. Researchers have found that people who pay the attention to entertainment and news media depictions of crime tend to hold more negative views of society. For example, the crime rate in the United States was nearly halved from 1991 to 2019, while the juvenile crime rate fell by 80 percent from 1986 to 2020. Yet, thanks in part to sensationalistic coverage of crime by the media, polls have shown the public perceived crime to be increasing during the same periods. Similarly, people who consume more media news coverage are more likely to hold exaggerated views of the amount and seriousness of crime in society. They also are more likely to fear crime and support the idea of retribution. Moreover, people who consume the most media news are more likely to have negative attitudes toward African Americans and other minorities.

It is clear that news media coverage of crime can have a negative impact on social policy. This can be seen in the tendency of politicians and legislative bodies to justify “get tough” stances on criminal justice issues by citing public opinion, much of which is formed by distorted news coverage of crime.

Theories of Mass Media Behavior

Media scholar Gregg Barak has developed a theory of mass media coverage of crime that acknowledges the importance of power and interests in determining media behavior but sees power as broadly distributed. Instead of arguing for the existence of a monolithic source of power—such as the elites who own mass media outlets—as Marxist and radical media theories do, Barak sees power as more evenly dispersed among competing sources. Barak calls this “newsmaking criminology.” His view holds that diverse social institutions, including the media, special interest groups, politicians, government officials, and private interests, all have power in society and all compete for the ability to shape public perception about a particular issue, such as crime. Therefore, the mass media behavior can be influenced by outside sources competing to shape public perceptions about crime. This view sees the media as conduits of information that act as middlemen to convey information to the public. Media treatment of crime is thus governed by the daily activities of the politicians, government officials, and interest groups on which the mass media subsequently report. The activities of these interest groups serve as constraints on the daily activities of journalists as they convey and report crime information to the public.

Barak’s newsmaking criminology perspective also suggests that mass media reporting practices are governed by the interests of news organizations—and one overriding interest of such organizations is producing news that sells. Decisions of editors and journalists therefore reflect their interpretations of what the public wants to know about. The general assumption is that the public wants to know a great deal about crime, particularly violent crime. This view has given rise to a journalistic adage, “If it bleeds, it leads,” in media coverage. The print media achieve success by selling more newspapers and magazines and increasing their advertising revenue. The broadcast media succeed by boosting their audience ratings and increasing their advertising ratings.

Another issue that news organizations consider in decisions about their news coverage is the degree to which readers can identify with stories. There is evidence suggesting that news editors and journalists make these judgments about the news items that they produce. Milwaukee journalists who were the subject of a 1997 research study confirmed this view by openly acknowledging that when they wrote stories they considered the types of people who were most likely to read them. One reporter explained, “If the reader could say ‘that could have been me that was killed,’ then that has more news value.”

The Use of News Themes by Media

News organizations occasionally pursue interests that influence their news decisions that may have little or nothing to do with the type of information presented. These other interests typically have more to do with the gathering and synthesizing of information for presentation to the public. For example, a 1978 study found that a “crime wave” of offenses against elderly New York City residents reported in the media had nothing to do with actual increases in such crimes. The apparent “crime wave” perceived by citizens and politicians was nothing more than the continued and heavy coverage of numerous occurrences of crime that were being covered by the media as a single topic. The manner in which the media organized the news gave the public the false impression that a crime wave against the elderly was developing.

From that New York incident, a sociologist developed a theory of how media distortions can result from the ways that the media organize their news. The research coined the term “news theme” for methods of organizing and unifying massive amounts of potential news items into a single thematic framework to give them structure and reduce confusion. The practical implication of that study was that media news emphases are sometimes determined by decisions to link individual items thematically to other events occurring around the same times.

To illustrate how the generation of news themes work, the 1978 study summarized an actual package of news stories that included these segments:

•Police apprehend juveniles who mugged an elderly couple in Queens

•Police and citizens in Queens meet to discuss crimes against the elderly

•Feature segment on Senior Citizens Robbery Unit

•Police seize guns and drugs that intended for warring gangs

•Two members of a youth gang are arrested for robbery at knifepoint

•An ROTC cadet is arrested in the stabbing death of another cadet

•A city audit finds that police have been mishandling funds

•The city and the police union are working on a contract at the same time that laid-off firemen and subway cops are being rehired

This package of news items is strongly suggestive of a broader news theme of crime in general, as every item in the list covers an aspect of crime or criminal justice. However, within this broader theme, subthemes are evident as well. For example, the lists highlights crimes against the elderly, juvenile delinquency, and issues concerning the city police department. It seems unlikely that stories about the senior citizens robbery unit and the meeting to discuss crime against the elderly would normally be deemed newsworthy, if not for the more dramatic story about the mugging of an elderly citizen. By presenting the three stories together, the media conveyed the appearance that crime against the elderly was a serious problem that was receiving much attention by the police, even though the stories were about unrelated events.

Informational Constraints

An additional aspect of news processing that can influence print media behavior is information limitations. News media organizations rely heavily on information that is obtained and filtered by official agencies, including the police and the court system. The amount of coverage that the media can give to stories is often limited by the amount of information they receive from those agencies. Furthermore, official agencies have different types of motives that can determine the amount of information that is released to the media. These motives can include case-management objectives, attempts to prevent organizational liability, and police attempts to legitimize their work to the public.

Mass media behavior, including the behavior of print media organizations in generating news, therefore, can be explained by considering both cultural influences and organizational influences. Cultural influences affect news organizations by providing the organization with an implicit script to follow outlining the types of news items that are considered culturally interesting, stimulating, and acceptable for news coverage. Organizational factors regarding media process in the generation of news also place considerable limitations on news organizations both in terms of how information is thematically presented, and in terms of the availability of information.

 In addition, the twenty-four hour news cycle brought about by the rise of the internet and social media has made sensationalistic headlines commonplace, inflating the importance of news stories just to get the attention of media consumers. Stories are packaged as “must reads,” with violent elements played up and statistical information inflated to attract eyeballs and clicks. Because many people only glance at headlines on online news stories, such exaggeration and outright deception may give people a false impression of the truth.

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