The criminologist who first discussed how media reporting leads to the social construction of "crime waves" was Mark Fishman in his essay "Crime Waves as Ideology". He analyzed the NY news media, one of the country's largest, and argued that crime waves are frequently media constructions. Although you can't be mugged by a crime wave (but, only by a real criminal), a crime wave can certainly increase citizens' fears. It can also directly lead to increased efforts at law enforcement, the enactment of new laws and penalties, and impact the correctional system as well.

In 1976, the NY news media created a major crime wave that resulted in an entirely new category of crime, one we are all now familiar with, "crimes against the elderly."; The wave lasted for seven weeks and was a major news theme covered by three daily newspapers and five local TV stations. The reported muggers, murderers, and rapists of the elderly were usually Hispanic and black juvenile delinquents, who came from ghetto neighborhoods near areas in which the victims, characterized as elderly whites, resided. The media crime wave began with the reporting of a series of gruesome murders against elderly victims. The NY Daily News started the crime wave and the other media followed suit, even the usually circumspect NY Times. The raw number of reports went from about one story a week by each media organization before the wave began to over 4 per week per media outlet carried during the wave period.

The response from the community and the political establishment was immediate. The Mayor of NYC publicly pledged to "do something about it." The NYPD increased the efforts of its already existing Senior Citizens Robbery Unit by creating a new plainclothes operation. The NY state legislature introduced bills to deny 16 to 19 year olds juvenile court status if they victimized a senior citizen, to enact mandatory prison sentences for crimes of violence against the aged, and to make previously closed juvenile records available to the judge when elderly victim was attacked. If teens, the attackers were to be tried in adult court as adults.

But, were crimes against the elderly really on the rise? When Fishman reviewed the NYPD crime statistics for the period of time covered by the media crime wave, he found the statistics did not show that crimes against the elderly were increasing. In fact, homicides against the elderly were down 19% from the previous year.

So, why did the crime wave occur? Adopting a news theme (not the theme music played by TV news shows), in this case "crimes against the elderly," is an example of how the news media makes sense of events for us all the time. The media do not want to simply report haphazard events, but try whenever possible to make events fit news themes. Elderly victims are newsworthy in that they are easily depicted as innocent victims, just like small children killed accidentally at the scene of a drive-by shooting. By reporting on such crimes, the media can also claim that it fulfilling its public trust to warn the public of possible dangers, so that precautions can be taken.

News themes allow journalists to cast an incident as a specific instance of something; in this case the murder of an elderly victim becomes an instance of a crime wave against the elderly. Once the media identifies a new news theme, they become sensitized to future reports of similar incidents. They may do a series of stories on a particular newscast or in one edition of the paper linked by the theme. A piece on the latest attack may be followed by one showing the formation of a citizens' neighborhood watch group, followed by a story on action in the legislature, etc.

How does the media get the type of information it needs to construct a crime wave? Of course, the media cannot report on crime waves or upon the topic of crime at all without the aid of the local police department. While the police are under no obligation to fully report to the media daily on all the crimes that occurred in a city, most police departments are willing to help out. All departments must make certain public information available to the media, an issue we will discuss in a later lecture. The NY media had come to depend upon the NYPD's summaries of the crimes that occurred each day. In other cities, the DA's office may also send summaries to the media as well. Philadelphia is an example. In Oklahoma City, the designated police press spokesperson called every newspaper and local TV station whenever a "major" crime took place. In NYC, the NYPD's Office of Public Information used a teletype "police wire" to send its daily report to the media. The police wire fed the media a steady diet of street crimes because the police department believed these were the stories the media wanted. Shootings and stabbings accounted for 42% of the felony crime reports sent over the wire, with 66% being robberies and burglaries.

Today many police agencies maintain Internet press release sites, some updated through out the day and night. For example, the FBI has a press room, Tallahassee PD has a press release page, while non-governmental organizations (NGO's) such as Amnesty International publish press releases on human rights atrocities around the world.

However, there are a number of types of crimes which were never reported over the police wire. These included consumer fraud, price-fixing, environmental crimes, political bribery and corruption, etc. As a result, such crimes were reported on less frequently, because more time intensive investigative reporting by the media would be required. Also, obviously, agencies other than the city police enforce these types of violations of law. The kinds of things the police wire provided plenty of examples of were: crimes between strangers, crimes in public places, and crimes specific to age. From such reports the media could create a number of new crime waves (i.e., subway crime, school yard crime, youth gang crime, drug crimes, etc.) Since the police wire rarely mentioned if the victim and offender knew each other, an impression was given that crimes occurred among strangers more frequently than they do in reality.

Why didn't someone simply expose the fact that the media had concocted the crime wave against the elderly? The media helped perpetuate the satanic crime hoax of the 1980s, but then reversed itself and exposed it as fantasy. However, one would first have to ask whose interest would be served if the media reversed its position on elderly victimization? Certainly, it was not in the interest of the media, the police, or public officials to do so. Public officials were willing from the outset to assume that the crime wave represented something real. Even the elderly may have benefited from the stepped up police protection and the citizens' action groups that sprouted as a result of the media campaign. Nevertheless, fear of victimization did rise as a result of the reports, along with the negative over-responses this engenders.

Elderly woman rarely leaves her home.
Photo by Reuter's News Service

Journalism is not a discipline without self-awareness, though it sometimes seems like its self reflection is underdeveloped. Organizations like the Poynter Institute for Media Studies run seminars for crime reporters. Criminal Justice Journalists is an organization that maintains a Web site on aspects of crime reporting, aimed at improving the practice.

Criminality on Primetime Crime Dramas

Media crime news coverage is not a wholly accurate portrayer of crime trends as our discussion of crime waves showed. However, local TV news focus on street crimes as largely a phenomenon among the poor, and as a result impacting minority victims, does approach reality. In our quest to investigate how the media defines the crime problem, another area ripe for investigation is prime-time crime dramas. These have been a staple of network TV since its inception. (Note: Website Episode Guides lists over 2000 TV shows with every episode. For example the current U.S. TV networks' schedule list 19 crime-related shows. Law & Order and its spin-offs, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and 2 CSI shows are most watched.)

When we turn to Hollywood made prime-time crime dramas, we discover that portrayals of neither criminals nor victims were accurate, particularly before the emergence of "reality-based" crime dramas such as Hill Street Blues, LA Law, or NYPD Blue. Steven Bochco, producer of all these programs, may still be an exception.

When Ben Stein looked at prime time crime in his 1979 analysis The View from Hollywood Boulevard, he found it in no way mirrored reality. He found that the typical "street crime" on prime time TV involved a well-to-do white person (often a businessman) murdering another well-to-do white person. If one thinks of the programs of that era; e.g. Columbo, Dallas, Dynasty, Hart to Hart, Starsky and Hutch, Quincy, etc. one could only conclude that violent crimes are committed every day by the wealthy and the powerful. (For more, watch the documentary Hollywood's Favorite Heavy: Businessmen on Primetime TV. In this documentary high schoolers are interviewed about whether to be successful in business one had to lie, cheat, steal, and even kill for the company. Most agreed! One wanders whether a generation raised on these shows moved into corporate jobs with the mindset that the bottom line is showing a profit.) In comparison to these media depictions, in reality both perpetrators and victims of street crime are usually poor, and frequently from minority groups. Reality-based TV dramas put an end to this era, but led to new claims that TV was falsely depicting minorities as criminals. 

It is also important to investigate what explanations of the origins of criminal behavior dominate on night time crime shows. When we do we discover that few of the explanations developed within the field of criminology ever appear. Of course, criminologists have developed a number of theories over the last 100 years to explain criminal behavior. We may actually have developed too many good explanations of why people commit crime, but few that explain why criminals whose behavior is largely determined by forces outside their control sometimes desist from crime when they become adults (see Matza's Delinquency and Drift). Among the major theoretical schools are:

1. Biological and genetic explanations that see criminals as mutants victimized by faulty heredity.
2. Psychological models explain that criminals are sick or suffering from early childhood or familial traumas.
3. Social environmental theories see criminals trapped in poverty or participating in an underclass subculture that fosters and celebrates criminal activity.
4. Conflict explanations see criminals are poor persons fighting back against an established societal elite that keeps them down.

In comparison, prime time crime dramas prior to the "reality era" drew upon few of these explanations. By locating crime in the upper class, a number of criminological explanations for crime were rarely employed. Prime time crimes were almost always premeditated, with careful planning taking place weeks or even months prior to the event. There were no sudden impulses of rage or anger that motivated prime time criminals. The motivation was simply greed. If the white perpetrator was not well-to do (e.g., a white punk) they are most frequently presented as mentally ill. An overbearing mother or a traumatic childhood was often introduced to explain criminal motivation. For example, the premiere episode of Unsub, a drama created to simulate the work of the FBI's forensic unit, featured a white serial killer who killed to erase the pain of an overly demanding mother. She had forced him to watch her take baths.

Maybe TV crime shows represented a version of classical criminology? To a significant extent Americans, including our criminal justice system, do not take positivistic criminological explanations seriously. Instead most accept a classical free will model of criminal motivation. Criminals have a choice in whether or not to commit crimes. Criminals must get something out of it, certain advantages (e.g., money, property, the pleasure of dominating and inflicting pain on others), or they won't commit crimes. If punishments are swift, certain, and severe enough, a reasoning criminal would desist. Such a model goes back to Beccaria and Bentham, and is based upon the utilitarian pleasure-pain principle and the assumption of rationality. Criminals will continue in their ways as long as the advantages outweigh the potential disadvantages. Prime time's fascination with greed as the motivation for middle-class white criminals is in fundamental agreement with the classical model. Only when TV offered us up mentally ill criminals, did it differ with the beliefs of the American majority.

If Hollywood portrayals are dominated by the classical model, Ben Stein still wondered why prime time crime consisted almost exclusively of white upper-class violence. After watching thousands of hours of TV crime shows, he reported never to have seen a major crime committed by a poor, teenage, black, Mexican, or Puerto Rican youth, even though in reality they account for a high percentage of violent crime. The question he asked was, why? To get an answer Stein interviewed the persons most directly responsible for the images portrayed on prime time shows, TV writers and producers. The answers that he received astounded him.

He found that the overwhelming majority of TV writers had rejected the classical free will explanation of crime. They believed that the blame for violent street crime rested not in the criminals themselves, but on some larger social failure. Our society had failed to adequately integrate a significant portion of its population or to offer a real opportunity to succeed. (Maybe they had read Robert Merton's anomie essay.) In the eyes of TV writers, the inequity of the situation in which the poor are forced to live was cited as more detrimental than neighborhood crime. The former simply produced the latter. Their explanations for street crime included the following: 

What I am referring to as reality TV has two components: (1) reality-based crime dramas and (2) TV crime documentaries (reality programs). Both have become staples of network and cable TV station offerings since the mid-1980s. 

1. Reality-based crime dramas began with Hill Street Blues, and continue today in programs like Law and Order, NYPD Blue, and 100 Centre Street. These shows feature plots ripped from newspaper headlines, camera angles purposefully used to look more amateurish, and ongoing character development made to simulate careers within criminal justice.

(2). Reality programs on television are defined as nonfictional programming in which the portrayal is presumed to present current or historical events or circumstances. The production presents itself as being a realistic account.

Included are news and public affairs programming, interview and talk shows, entertainment news-and-review programs, documentaries, and other programs presenting themselves as recreations of "real-world" events, such as those depicting scenes of police or emergency workers, or humorous events or circumstances. Programs may be either actual or recreated depictions of events or circumstances, but in the case of the latter, the context must make it clear that efforts have been made to recapture a past event as it happened. Although not coded for this project, instructional programs featuring live actors and quiz and game shows are also considered reality programs.

The two continue to become less distinct as Hollywood TV producers copy many of the documentary video/film styles and reality shows are edited to appear more movie-like. Hybrids like America's Most Wanted feature both documentary-style re-enactments spliced with real photos and surveillance camera footage. Confused viewers have frequently spotted the actors playing the criminals and turned them in to the FBI.

In the reality TV era, minorities are depicted as criminals during primetime much more frequently than in the past. If producers fed viewers a steady diet of white-only criminals, they would be charged with being unrealistic, the most serious charge that could be leveled at them. Activist groups have challenged what they see as stereotyping.

Additional Reading:

1. TV Violence in Reality Programming by NTVS Research Team

Discussion Questions:

Question 1. Why is the media so likely to generate false crime waves? create moral panics? propagate urban legends?

Question 2. What do you see as the major discrepancies between media accounts of crime (TV news, primetime fictional and reality based TV) and the reality of crime?

Please demonstrate that you have read this week's required text readings in your answers.

Answer these questions on the course Campus site under Communication: Discussion Board: Week 3

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