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Violence, media effects, and criminology.

• Nickie D. Phillips Nickie D. Phillips Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, St. Francis College
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.013.189
• Published online: 27 July 2017

Debate surrounding the impact of media representations on violence and crime has raged for decades and shows no sign of abating. Over the years, the targets of concern have shifted from film to comic books to television to video games, but the central questions remain the same. What is the relationship between popular media and audience emotions, attitudes, and behaviors? While media effects research covers a vast range of topics—from the study of its persuasive effects in advertising to its positive impact on emotions and behaviors—of particular interest to criminologists is the relationship between violence in popular media and real-life aggression and violence. Does media violence cause aggression and/or violence?

The study of media effects is informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives and spans many disciplines including communications and media studies, psychology, medicine, sociology, and criminology. Decades of research have amassed on the topic, yet there is no clear agreement about the impact of media or about which methodologies are most appropriate. Instead, there continues to be disagreement about whether media portrayals of violence are a serious problem and, if so, how society should respond.

Conflicting interpretations of research findings inform and shape public debate around media effects. Although there seems to be a consensus among scholars that exposure to media violence impacts aggression, there is less agreement around its potential impact on violence and criminal behavior. While a few criminologists focus on the phenomenon of copycat crimes, most rarely engage with whether media directly causes violence. Instead, they explore broader considerations of the relationship between media, popular culture, and society.

• media exposure
• criminal behavior
• popular culture
• media violence
• media and crime
• copycat crimes

Media Exposure, Violence, and Aggression

On Friday July 22, 2016 , a gunman killed nine people at a mall in Munich, Germany. The 18-year-old shooter was subsequently characterized by the media as being under psychiatric care and harboring at least two obsessions. One, an obsession with mass shootings, including that of Anders Breivik who ultimately killed 77 people in Norway in 2011 , and the other an obsession with video games. A Los Angeles, California, news report stated that the gunman was “an avid player of first-person shooter video games, including ‘Counter-Strike,’” while another headline similarly declared, “Munich gunman, a fan of violent video games, rampage killers, had planned attack for a year”(CNN Wire, 2016 ; Reuters, 2016 ). This high-profile incident was hardly the first to link popular culture to violent crime. Notably, in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine shooting massacre, for example, media sources implicated and later discredited music, video games, and a gothic aesthetic as causal factors of the crime (Cullen, 2009 ; Yamato, 2016 ). Other, more recent, incidents have echoed similar claims suggesting that popular culture has a nefarious influence on consumers.

Media violence and its impact on audiences are among the most researched and examined topics in communications studies (Hetsroni, 2007 ). Yet, debate over whether media violence causes aggression and violence persists, particularly in response to high-profile criminal incidents. Blaming video games, and other forms of media and popular culture, as contributing to violence is not a new phenomenon. However, interpreting media effects can be difficult because commenters often seem to indicate a grand consensus that understates more contradictory and nuanced interpretations of the data.

In fact, there is a consensus among many media researchers that media violence has an impact on aggression although its impact on violence is less clear. For example, in response to the shooting in Munich, Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology, avoided pinning the incident solely on video games, but in the process supported the assertion that video gameplay is linked to aggression. He stated,

While there isn’t complete consensus in any scientific field, a study we conducted showed more than 90% of pediatricians and about two-thirds of media researchers surveyed agreed that violent video games increase aggression in children. (Bushman, 2016 )

Others, too, have reached similar conclusions with regard to other media. In 2008 , psychologist John Murray summarized decades of research stating, “Fifty years of research on the effect of TV violence on children leads to the inescapable conclusion that viewing media violence is related to increases in aggressive attitudes, values, and behaviors” (Murray, 2008 , p. 1212). Scholars Glenn Sparks and Cheri Sparks similarly declared that,

Despite the fact that controversy still exists about the impact of media violence, the research results reveal a dominant and consistent pattern in favor of the notion that exposure to violent media images does increase the risk of aggressive behavior. (Sparks & Sparks, 2002 , p. 273)

In 2014 , psychologist Wayne Warburton more broadly concluded that the vast majority of studies have found “that exposure to violent media increases the likelihood of aggressive behavior in the short and longterm, increases hostile perceptions and attitudes, and desensitizes individuals to violent content” (Warburton, 2014 , p. 64).

Criminologists, too, are sensitive to the impact of media exposure. For example, Jacqueline Helfgott summarized the research:

There have been over 1000 studies on the effects of TV and film violence over the past 40 years. Research on the influence of TV violence on aggression has consistently shown that TV violence increases aggression and social anxiety, cultivates a “mean view” of the world, and negatively impacts real-world behavior. (Helfgott, 2015 , p. 50)

In his book, Media Coverage of Crime and Criminal Justice , criminologist Matthew Robinson stated, “Studies of the impact of media on violence are crystal clear in their findings and implications for society” (Robinson, 2011 , p. 135). He cited studies on childhood exposure to violent media leading to aggressive behavior as evidence. In his pioneering book Media, Crime, and Criminal Justice , criminologist Ray Surette concurred that media violence is linked to aggression, but offered a nuanced interpretation. He stated,

a small to modest but genuine causal role for media violence regarding viewer aggression has been established for most beyond a reasonable doubt . . . There is certainly a connection between violent media and social aggression, but its strength and configuration is simply not known at this time. (Surette, 2011 , p. 68)

The uncertainties about the strength of the relationship and the lack of evidence linking media violence to real-world violence is often lost in the news media accounts of high-profile violent crimes.

Media Exposure and Copycat Crimes

While many scholars do seem to agree that there is evidence that media violence—whether that of film, TV, or video games—increases aggression, they disagree about its impact on violent or criminal behavior (Ferguson, 2014 ; Gunter, 2008 ; Helfgott, 2015 ; Reiner, 2002 ; Savage, 2008 ). Nonetheless, it is violent incidents that most often prompt speculation that media causes violence. More specifically, violence that appears to mimic portrayals of violent media tends to ignite controversy. For example, the idea that films contribute to violent crime is not a new assertion. Films such as A Clockwork Orange , Menace II Society , Set it Off , and Child’s Play 3 , have been linked to crimes and at least eight murders have been linked to Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers (Bracci, 2010 ; Brooks, 2002 ; PBS, n.d. ). Nonetheless, pinpointing a direct, causal relationship between media and violent crime remains elusive.

Criminologist Jacqueline Helfgott defined copycat crime as a “crime that is inspired by another crime” (Helfgott, 2015 , p. 51). The idea is that offenders model their behavior on media representations of violence whether real or fictional. One case, in particular, illustrated how popular culture, media, and criminal violence converge. On July 20, 2012 , James Holmes entered the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises , the third film in the massively successful Batman trilogy, in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. He shot and killed 12 people and wounded 70 others. At the time, the New York Times described the incident,

Witnesses told the police that Mr. Holmes said something to the effect of “I am the Joker,” according to a federal law enforcement official, and that his hair had been dyed or he was wearing a wig. Then, as people began to rise from their seats in confusion or anxiety, he began to shoot. The gunman paused at least once, several witnesses said, perhaps to reload, and continued firing. (Frosch & Johnson, 2012 ).

The dyed hair, Holme’s alleged comment, and that the incident occurred at a popular screening led many to speculate that the shooter was influenced by the earlier film in the trilogy and reignited debate around the impact about media violence. The Daily Mail pointed out that Holmes may have been motivated by a 25-year-old Batman comic in which a gunman opens fire in a movie theater—thus further suggesting the iconic villain served as motivation for the attack (Graham & Gallagher, 2012 ). Perceptions of the “Joker connection” fed into the notion that popular media has a direct causal influence on violent behavior even as press reports later indicated that Holmes had not, in fact, made reference to the Joker (Meyer, 2015 ).

A week after the Aurora shooting, the New York Daily News published an article detailing a “possible copycat” crime. A suspect was arrested in his Maryland home after making threatening phone calls to his workplace. The article reported that the suspect stated, “I am a [sic] joker” and “I’m going to load my guns and blow everybody up.” In their search, police found “a lethal arsenal of 25 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition” in the suspect’s home (McShane, 2012 ).

Though criminologists are generally skeptical that those who commit violent crimes are motivated solely by media violence, there does seem to be some evidence that media may be influential in shaping how some offenders commit crime. In his study of serious and violent juvenile offenders, criminologist Ray Surette found “about one out of three juveniles reports having considered a copycat crime and about one out of four reports actually having attempted one.” He concluded that “those juveniles who are self-reported copycats are significantly more likely to credit the media as both a general and personal influence.” Surette contended that though violent offenses garner the most media attention, copycat criminals are more likely to be career criminals and to commit property crimes rather than violent crimes (Surette, 2002 , pp. 56, 63; Surette 2011 ).

Discerning what crimes may be classified as copycat crimes is a challenge. Jacqueline Helfgott suggested they occur on a “continuum of influence.” On one end, she said, media plays a relatively minor role in being a “component of the modus operandi” of the offender, while on the other end, she said, “personality disordered media junkies” have difficulty distinguishing reality from violent fantasy. According to Helfgott, various factors such as individual characteristics, characteristics of media sources, relationship to media, demographic factors, and cultural factors are influential. Overall, scholars suggest that rather than pushing unsuspecting viewers to commit crimes, media more often influences how , rather than why, someone commits a crime (Helfgott, 2015 ; Marsh & Melville, 2014 ).

Given the public interest, there is relatively little research devoted to exactly what copycat crimes are and how they occur. Part of the problem of studying these types of crimes is the difficulty defining and measuring the concept. In an effort to clarify and empirically measure the phenomenon, Surette offered a scale that included seven indicators of copycat crimes. He used the following factors to identify copycat crimes: time order (media exposure must occur before the crime); time proximity (a five-year cut-off point of exposure); theme consistency (“a pattern of thought, feeling or behavior in the offender which closely parallels the media model”); scene specificity (mimicking a specific scene); repetitive viewing; self-editing (repeated viewing of single scene while “the balance of the film is ignored”); and offender statements and second-party statements indicating the influence of media. Findings demonstrated that cases are often prematurely, if not erroneously, labeled as “copycat.” Surette suggested that use of the scale offers a more precise way for researchers to objectively measure trends and frequency of copycat crimes (Surette, 2016 , p. 8).

Media Exposure and Violent Crimes

Overall, a causal link between media exposure and violent criminal behavior has yet to be validated, and most researchers steer clear of making such causal assumptions. Instead, many emphasize that media does not directly cause aggression and violence so much as operate as a risk factor among other variables (Bushman & Anderson, 2015 ; Warburton, 2014 ). In their review of media effects, Brad Bushman and psychologist Craig Anderson concluded,

In sum, extant research shows that media violence is a causal risk factor not only for mild forms of aggression but also for more serious forms of aggression, including violent criminal behavior. That does not mean that violent media exposure by itself will turn a normal child or adolescent who has few or no other risk factors into a violent criminal or a school shooter. Such extreme violence is rare, and tends to occur only when multiple risk factors converge in time, space, and within an individual. (Bushman & Anderson, 2015 , p. 1817)

Surette, however, argued that there is no clear linkage between media exposure and criminal behavior—violent or otherwise. In other words, a link between media violence and aggression does not necessarily mean that exposure to violent media causes violent (or nonviolent) criminal behavior. Though there are thousands of articles addressing media effects, many of these consist of reviews or commentary about prior research findings rather than original studies (Brown, 2007 ; Murray, 2008 ; Savage, 2008 ; Surette, 2011 ). Fewer, still, are studies that specifically measure media violence and criminal behavior (Gunter, 2008 ; Strasburger & Donnerstein, 2014 ). In their meta-analysis investigating the link between media violence and criminal aggression, scholars Joanne Savage and Christina Yancey did not find support for the assertion. Instead, they concluded,

The study of most consequence for violent crime policy actually found that exposure to media violence was significantly negatively related to violent crime rates at the aggregate level . . . It is plain to us that the relationship between exposure to violent media and serious violence has yet to be established. (Savage & Yancey, 2008 , p. 786)

Researchers continue to measure the impact of media violence among various forms of media and generally stop short of drawing a direct causal link in favor of more indirect effects. For example, one study examined the increase of gun violence in films over the years and concluded that violent scenes provide scripts for youth that justify gun violence that, in turn, may amplify aggression (Bushman, Jamieson, Weitz, & Romer, 2013 ). But others report contradictory findings. Patrick Markey and colleagues studied the relationship between rates of homicide and aggravated assault and gun violence in films from 1960–2012 and found that over the years, violent content in films increased while crime rates declined . After controlling for age shifts, poverty, education, incarceration rates, and economic inequality, the relationships remained statistically non-significant (Markey, French, & Markey, 2015 , p. 165). Psychologist Christopher Ferguson also failed to find a relationship between media violence in films and video games and violence (Ferguson, 2014 ).

Another study, by Gordon Dahl and Stefano DellaVigna, examined violent films from 1995–2004 and found decreases in violent crimes coincided with violent blockbuster movie attendance. Here, it was not the content that was alleged to impact crime rates, but instead what the authors called “voluntary incapacitation,” or the shifting of daily activities from that of potential criminal behavior to movie attendance. The authors concluded, “For each million people watching a strongly or mildly violent movie, respectively, violent crime decreases by 1.9% and 2.1%. Nonviolent movies have no statistically significant impact” (Dahl & DellaVigna, p. 39).

High-profile cases over the last several years have shifted public concern toward the perceived danger of video games, but research demonstrating a link between video games and criminal violence remains scant. The American Psychiatric Association declared that “research demonstrates a consistent relation between violent video game use and increases in aggressive behavior, aggressive cognitions and aggressive affect, and decreases in prosocial behavior, empathy and sensitivity to aggression . . .” but stopped short of claiming that video games impact criminal violence. According to Breuer and colleagues, “While all of the available meta-analyses . . . found a relationship between aggression and the use of (violent) video games, the size and interpretation of this connection differ largely between these studies . . .” (APA, 2015 ; Breuer et al., 2015 ; DeCamp, 2015 ). Further, psychologists Patrick Markey, Charlotte Markey, and Juliana French conducted four time-series analyses investigating the relationship between video game habits and assault and homicide rates. The studies measured rates of violent crime, the annual and monthly video game sales, Internet searches for video game walkthroughs, and rates of violent crime occurring after the release dates of popular games. The results showed that there was no relationship between video game habits and rates of aggravated assault and homicide. Instead, there was some indication of decreases in crime (Markey, Markey, & French, 2015 ).

Another longitudinal study failed to find video games as a predictor of aggression, instead finding support for the “selection hypothesis”—that physically aggressive individuals (aged 14–17) were more likely to choose media content that contained violence than those slightly older, aged 18–21. Additionally, the researchers concluded,

that violent media do not have a substantial impact on aggressive personality or behavior, at least in the phases of late adolescence and early adulthood that we focused on. (Breuer, Vogelgesang, Quandt, & Festl, 2015 , p. 324)

Overall, the lack of a consistent finding demonstrating that media exposure causes violent crime may not be particularly surprising given that studies linking media exposure, aggression, and violence suffer from a host of general criticisms. By way of explanation, social theorist David Gauntlett maintained that researchers frequently employ problematic definitions of aggression and violence, questionable methodologies, rely too much on fictional violence, neglect the social meaning of violence, and assume the third-person effect—that is, assume that other, vulnerable people are impacted by media, but “we” are not (Ferguson & Dyck, 2012 ; Gauntlett, 2001 ).

Others, such as scholars Martin Barker and Julian Petley, flatly reject the notion that violent media exposure is a causal factor for aggression and/or violence. In their book Ill Effects , the authors stated instead that it is simply “stupid” to query about “what are the effects of [media] violence” without taking context into account (p. 2). They counter what they describe as moral campaigners who advance the idea that media violence causes violence. Instead, Barker and Petley argue that audiences interpret media violence in a variety of ways based on their histories, experiences, and knowledge, and as such, it makes little sense to claim media “cause” violence (Barker & Petley, 2001 ).

Given the seemingly inconclusive and contradictory findings regarding media effects research, to say that the debate can, at times, be contentious is an understatement. One article published in European Psychologist queried “Does Doing Media Violence Research Make One Aggressive?” and lamented that the debate had devolved into an ideological one (Elson & Ferguson, 2013 ). Another academic journal published a special issue devoted to video games and youth and included a transcript of exchanges between two scholars to demonstrate that a “peaceful debate” was, in fact, possible (Ferguson & Konijn, 2015 ).

Nonetheless, in this debate, the stakes are high and the policy consequences profound. After examining over 900 published articles, publication patterns, prominent authors and coauthors, and disciplinary interest in the topic, scholar James Anderson argued that prominent media effects scholars, whom he deems the “causationists,” had developed a cottage industry dependent on funding by agencies focused primarily on the negative effects of media on children. Anderson argued that such a focus presents media as a threat to family values and ultimately operates as a zero-sum game. As a result, attention and resources are diverted toward media and away from other priorities that are essential to understanding aggression such as social disadvantage, substance abuse, and parental conflict (Anderson, 2008 , p. 1276).

Theoretical Perspectives on Media Effects

Understanding how media may impact attitudes and behavior has been the focus of media and communications studies for decades. Numerous theoretical perspectives offer insight into how and to what extent the media impacts the audience. As scholar Jenny Kitzinger documented in 2004 , there are generally two ways to approach the study of media effects. One is to foreground the power of media. That is, to suggest that the media holds powerful sway over viewers. Another perspective is to foreground the power and heterogeneity of the audience and to recognize that it is comprised of active agents (Kitzinger, 2004 ).

The notion of an all-powerful media can be traced to the influence of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, or Frankfurt School, in the 1930–1940s and proponents of the mass society theory. The institute was originally founded in Germany but later moved to the United States. Criminologist Yvonne Jewkes outlined how mass society theory assumed that members of the public were susceptible to media messages. This, theorists argued, was a result of rapidly changing social conditions and industrialization that produced isolated, impressionable individuals “cut adrift from kinship and organic ties and lacking moral cohesion” (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 13). In this historical context, in the era of World War II, the impact of Nazi propaganda was particularly resonant. Here, the media was believed to exhibit a unidirectional flow, operating as a powerful force influencing the masses. The most useful metaphor for this perspective described the media as a “hypodermic syringe” that could “‘inject’ values, ideas and information directly into the passive receiver producing direct and unmediated ‘effects’” (Jewkes, 2015 , pp. 16, 34). Though the hypodermic syringe model seems simplistic today, the idea that the media is all-powerful continues to inform contemporary public discourse around media and violence.

Concern of the power of media captured the attention of researchers interested in its purported negative impact on children. In one of the earliest series of studies in the United States during the late 1920s–1930s, researchers attempted to quantitatively measure media effects with the Payne Fund Studies. For example, they investigated how film, a relatively new medium, impacted children’s attitudes and behaviors, including antisocial and violent behavior. At the time, the Payne Fund Studies’ findings fueled the notion that children were indeed negatively influenced by films. This prompted the film industry to adopt a self-imposed code regulating content (Sparks & Sparks, 2002 ; Surette, 2011 ). Not everyone agreed with the approach. In fact, the methodologies employed in the studies received much criticism, and ultimately, the movement was branded as a moral crusade to regulate film content. Scholars Garth Jowett, Ian Jarvie, and Kathryn Fuller wrote about the significance of the studies,

We have seen this same policy battle fought and refought over radio, television, rock and roll, music videos and video games. Their researchers looked to see if intuitive concerns could be given concrete, measurable expression in research. While they had partial success, as have all subsequent efforts, they also ran into intractable problems . . . Since that day, no way has yet been found to resolve the dilemma of cause and effect: do crime movies create more crime, or do the criminally inclined enjoy and perhaps imitate crime movies? (Jowett, Jarvie, & Fuller, 1996 , p. 12)

As the debate continued, more sophisticated theoretical perspectives emerged. Efforts to empirically measure the impact of media on aggression and violence continued, albeit with equivocal results. In the 1950s and 1960s, psychological behaviorism, or understanding psychological motivations through observable behavior, became a prominent lens through which to view the causal impact of media violence. This type of research was exemplified by Albert Bandura’s Bobo Doll studies demonstrating that children exposed to aggressive behavior, either observed in real life or on film, behaved more aggressively than those in control groups who were not exposed to the behavior. The assumption derived was that children learn through exposure and imitate behavior (Bandura, Ross, & Ross, 1963 ). Though influential, the Bandura experiments were nevertheless heavily criticized. Some argued the laboratory conditions under which children were exposed to media were not generalizable to real-life conditions. Others challenged the assumption that children absorb media content in an unsophisticated manner without being able to distinguish between fantasy and reality. In fact, later studies did find children to be more discerning consumers of media than popularly believed (Gauntlett, 2001 ).

Hugely influential in our understandings of human behavior, the concept of social learning has been at the core of more contemporary understandings of media effects. For example, scholar Christopher Ferguson noted that the General Aggression Model (GAM), rooted in social learning and cognitive theory, has for decades been a dominant model for understanding how media impacts aggression and violence. GAM is described as the idea that “aggression is learned by the activation and repetition of cognitive scripts coupled with the desensitization of emotional responses due to repeated exposure.” However, Ferguson noted that its usefulness has been debated and advocated for a paradigm shift (Ferguson, 2013 , pp. 65, 27; Krahé, 2014 ).

Though the methodologies of the Payne Fund Studies and Bandura studies were heavily criticized, concern over media effects continued to be tied to larger moral debates including the fear of moral decline and concern over the welfare of children. Most notably, in the 1950s, psychiatrist Frederic Wertham warned of the dangers of comic books, a hugely popular medium at the time, and their impact on juveniles. Based on anecdotes and his clinical experience with children, Wertham argued that images of graphic violence and sexual debauchery in comic books were linked to juvenile delinquency. Though he was far from the only critic of comic book content, his criticisms reached the masses and gained further notoriety with the publication of his 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent . Wertham described the comic book content thusly,

The stories have a lot of crime and gunplay and, in addition, alluring advertisements of guns, some of them full-page and in bright colors, with four guns of various sizes and descriptions on a page . . . Here is the repetition of violence and sexiness which no Freud, Krafft-Ebing or Havelock Ellis ever dreamed could be offered to children, and in such profusion . . . I have come to the conclusion that this chronic stimulation, temptation and seduction by comic books, both their content and their alluring advertisements of knives and guns, are contributing factors to many children’s maladjustment. (Wertham, 1954 , p. 39)

Wertham’s work was instrumental in shaping public opinion and policies about the dangers of comic books. Concern about the impact of comics reached its apex in 1954 with the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Wertham testified before the committee, arguing that comics were a leading cause of juvenile delinquency. Ultimately, the protest of graphic content in comic books by various interest groups contributed to implementation of the publishers’ self-censorship code, the Comics Code Authority, which essentially designated select books that were deemed “safe” for children (Nyberg, 1998 ). The code remained in place for decades, though it was eventually relaxed and decades later phased out by the two most dominant publishers, DC and Marvel.

Wertham’s work, however influential in impacting the comic industry, was ultimately panned by academics. Although scholar Bart Beaty characterized Wertham’s position as more nuanced, if not progressive, than the mythology that followed him, Wertham was broadly dismissed as a moral reactionary (Beaty, 2005 ; Phillips & Strobl, 2013 ). The most damning criticism of Wertham’s work came decades later, from Carol Tilley’s examination of Wertham’s files. She concluded that in Seduction of the Innocent ,

Wertham manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence—especially that evidence he attributed to personal clinical research with young people—for rhetorical gain. (Tilley, 2012 , p. 386)

Tilley linked Wertham’s approach to that of the Frankfurt theorists who deemed popular culture a social threat and contended that Wertham was most interested in “cultural correction” rather than scientific inquiry (Tilley, 2012 , p. 404).

Over the decades, concern about the moral impact of media remained while theoretical and methodological approaches to media effects studies continued to evolve (Rich, Bickham, & Wartella, 2015 ). In what many consider a sophisticated development, theorists began to view the audience as more active and multifaceted than the mass society perspective allowed (Kitzinger, 2004 ). One perspective, based on a “uses and gratifications” model, assumes that rather than a passive audience being injected with values and information, a more active audience selects and “uses” media as a response to their needs and desires. Studies of uses and gratifications take into account how choice of media is influenced by one’s psychological and social circumstances. In this context, media provides a variety of functions for consumers who may engage with it for the purposes of gathering information, reducing boredom, seeking enjoyment, or facilitating communication (Katz, Blumler, & Gurevitch, 1973 ; Rubin, 2002 ). This approach differs from earlier views in that it privileges the perspective and agency of the audience.

Another approach, the cultivation theory, gained momentum among researchers in the 1970s and has been of particular interest to criminologists. It focuses on how television television viewing impacts viewers’ attitudes toward social reality. The theory was first introduced by communications scholar George Gerbner, who argued the importance of understanding messages that long-term viewers absorb. Rather than examine the effect of specific content within any given programming, cultivation theory,

looks at exposure to massive flows of messages over long periods of time. The cultivation process takes place in the interaction of the viewer with the message; neither the message nor the viewer are all-powerful. (Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, Singnorielli, & Shanahan, 2002 , p. 48)

In other words, he argued, television viewers are, over time, exposed to messages about the way the world works. As Gerbner and colleagues stated, “continued exposure to its messages is likely to reiterate, confirm, and nourish—that is, cultivate—its own values and perspectives” (p. 49).

One of the most well-known consequences of heavy media exposure is what Gerbner termed the “mean world” syndrome. He coined it based on studies that found that long-term exposure to media violence among heavy television viewers, “tends to cultivate the image of a relatively mean and dangerous world” (p. 52). Inherent in Gerbner’s view was that media representations are separate and distinct entities from “real life.” That is, it is the distorted representations of crime and violence that cultivate the notion that the world is a dangerous place. In this context, Gerbner found that heavy television viewers are more likely to be fearful of crime and to overestimate their chances of being a victim of violence (Gerbner, 1994 ).

Though there is evidence in support of cultivation theory, the strength of the relationship between media exposure and fear of crime is inconclusive. This is in part due to the recognition that audience members are not homogenous. Instead, researchers have found that there are many factors that impact the cultivating process. This includes, but is not limited to, “class, race, gender, place of residence, and actual experience of crime” (Reiner, 2002 ; Sparks, 1992 ). Or, as Ted Chiricos and colleagues remarked in their study of crime news and fear of crime, “The issue is not whether media accounts of crime increase fear, but which audiences, with which experiences and interests, construct which meanings from the messages received” (Chiricos, Eschholz, & Gertz, p. 354).

Other researchers found that exposure to media violence creates a desensitizing effect, that is, that as viewers consume more violent media, they become less empathetic as well as psychologically and emotionally numb when confronted with actual violence (Bartholow, Bushman, & Sestir, 2006 ; Carnagey, Anderson, & Bushman, 2007 ; Cline, Croft, & Courrier, 1973 ; Fanti, Vanman, Henrich, & Avraamides, 2009 ; Krahé et al., 2011 ). Other scholars such as Henry Giroux, however, point out that our contemporary culture is awash in violence and “everyone is infected.” From this perspective, the focus is not on certain individuals whose exposure to violent media leads to a desensitization of real-life violence, but rather on the notion that violence so permeates society that it has become normalized in ways that are divorced from ethical and moral implications. Giroux wrote,

While it would be wrong to suggest that the violence that saturates popular culture directly causes violence in the larger society, it is arguable that such violence serves not only to produce an insensitivity to real life violence but also functions to normalize violence as both a source of pleasure and as a practice for addressing social issues. When young people and others begin to believe that a world of extreme violence, vengeance, lawlessness, and revenge is the only world they inhabit, the culture and practice of real-life violence is more difficult to scrutinize, resist, and transform . . . (Giroux, 2015 )

For Giroux, the danger is that the normalization of violence has become a threat to democracy itself. In our culture of mass consumption shaped by neoliberal logics, depoliticized narratives of violence have become desired forms of entertainment and are presented in ways that express tolerance for some forms of violence while delegitimizing other forms of violence. In their book, Disposable Futures , Brad Evans and Henry Giroux argued that as the spectacle of violence perpetuates fear of inevitable catastrophe, it reinforces expansion of police powers, increased militarization and other forms of social control, and ultimately renders marginalized members of the populace disposable (Evans & Giroux, 2015 , p. 81).

Criminology and the “Media/Crime Nexus”

Most criminologists and sociologists who focus on media and crime are generally either dismissive of the notion that media violence directly causes violence or conclude that findings are more complex than traditional media effects models allow, preferring to focus attention on the impact of media violence on society rather than individual behavior (Carrabine, 2008 ; Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015 ; Jewkes, 2015 ; Kitzinger, 2004 ; Marsh & Melville, 2014 ; Rafter, 2006 ; Sternheimer, 2003 ; Sternheimer 2013 ; Surette, 2011 ). Sociologist Karen Sternheimer forcefully declared “media culture is not the root cause of American social problems, not the Big Bad Wolf, as our ongoing public discussion would suggest” (Sternheimer, 2003 , p. 3). Sternheimer rejected the idea that media causes violence and argued that a false connection has been forged between media, popular culture, and violence. Like others critical of a singular focus on media, Sternheimer posited that overemphasis on the perceived dangers of media violence serves as a red herring that directs attention away from the actual causes of violence rooted in factors such as poverty, family violence, abuse, and economic inequalities (Sternheimer, 2003 , 2013 ). Similarly, in her Media and Crime text, Yvonne Jewkes stated that U.K. scholars tend to reject findings of a causal link because the studies are too reductionist; criminal behavior cannot be reduced to a single causal factor such as media consumption. Echoing Gauntlett’s critiques of media effects research, Jewkes stated that simplistic causal assumptions ignore “the wider context of a lifetime of meaning-making” (Jewkes, 2015 , p. 17).

Although they most often reject a “violent media cause violence” relationship, criminologists do not dismiss the notion of media as influential. To the contrary, over the decades much criminological interest has focused on the construction of social problems, the ideological implications of media, and media’s potential impact on crime policies and social control. Eamonn Carrabine noted that the focus of concern is not whether media directly causes violence but on “how the media promote damaging stereotypes of social groups, especially the young, to uphold the status quo” (Carrabine, 2008 , p. 34). Theoretically, these foci have been traced to the influence of cultural and Marxist studies. For example, criminologists frequently focus on how social anxieties and class inequalities impact our understandings of the relationship between media violence and attitudes, values, and behaviors. Influential works in the 1970s, such as Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order by Stuart Hall et al. and Stanley Cohen’s Folk Devils and Moral Panics , shifted criminological critique toward understanding media as a hegemonic force that reinforces state power and social control (Brown, 2011 ; Carrabine, 2008 ; Cohen, 2005 ; Garland, 2008 ; Hall et al., 2013 /1973, 2013/1973 ). Since that time, moral panic has become a common framework applied to public discourse around a variety of social issues including road rage, child abuse, popular music, sex panics, and drug abuse among others.

Into the 21st century , advances in technology, including increased use of social media, shifted the ways that criminologists approach the study of media effects. Scholar Sheila Brown traced how research in criminology evolved from a focus on “media and crime” to what she calls the “media/crime nexus” that recognizes that “media experience is real experience” (Brown, 2011 , p. 413). In other words, many criminologists began to reject as fallacy what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson deemed “digital dualism,” or the notion that we have an “online” existence that is separate and distinct from our “off-line” existence. Instead, we exist simultaneously both online and offline, an

augmented reality that exists at the intersection of materiality and information, physicality and digitality, bodies and technology, atoms and bits, the off and the online. It is wrong to say “IRL” [in real life] to mean offline: Facebook is real life. (Jurgenson, 2012 )

The changing media landscape has been of particular interest to cultural criminologists. Michelle Brown recognized the omnipresence of media as significant in terms of methodological preferences and urged a move away from a focus on causality and predictability toward a more fluid approach that embraces the complex, contemporary media-saturated social reality characterized by uncertainty and instability (Brown, 2007 ).

Cultural criminologists have indeed rejected direct, causal relationships in favor of the recognition that social meanings of aggression and violence are constantly in transition, flowing through the media landscape, where “bits of information reverberate and bend back on themselves, creating a fluid porosity of meaning that defines late-modern life, and the nature of crime and media within it.” In other words, there is no linear relationship between crime and its representation. Instead, crime is viewed as inseparable from the culture in which our everyday lives are constantly re-created in loops and spirals that “amplify, distort, and define the experience of crime and criminality itself” (Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2015 , pp. 154–155). As an example of this shift in understanding media effects, criminologist Majid Yar proposed that we consider how the transition from being primarily consumers to primarily producers of content may serve as a motivating mechanism for criminal behavior. Here, Yar is suggesting that the proliferation of user-generated content via media technologies such as social media (i.e., the desire “to be seen” and to manage self-presentation) has a criminogenic component worthy of criminological inquiry (Yar, 2012 ). Shifting attention toward the media/crime nexus and away from traditional media effects analyses opens possibilities for a deeper understanding of the ways that media remains an integral part of our everyday lives and inseparable from our understandings of and engagement with crime and violence.

Over the years, from films to comic books to television to video games to social media, concerns over media effects have shifted along with changing technologies. While there seems to be some consensus that exposure to violent media impacts aggression, there is little evidence showing its impact on violent or criminal behavior. Nonetheless, high-profile violent crimes continue to reignite public interest in media effects, particularly with regard to copycat crimes.

At times, academic debate around media effects remains contentious and one’s academic discipline informs the study and interpretation of media effects. Criminologists and sociologists are generally reluctant to attribute violence and criminal behavior directly to exposure to violence media. They are, however, not dismissive of the impact of media on attitudes, social policies, and social control as evidenced by the myriad of studies on moral panics and other research that addresses the relationship between media, social anxieties, gender, race, and class inequalities. Scholars who study media effects are also sensitive to the historical context of the debates and ways that moral concerns shape public policies. The self-regulating codes of the film industry and the comic book industry have led scholars to be wary of hyperbole and policy overreach in response to claims of media effects. Future research will continue to explore ways that changing technologies, including increasing use of social media, will impact our understandings and perceptions of crime as well as criminal behavior.

Further Reading

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Media Representations of Crime and Criminal Justice

Christopher Birkbeck, University of Salford

• Published: 02 September 2014
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To date, criminologists have approached the media from a communications perspective that, directly or indirectly, treats them as a powerful social force. However, systematic research (conducted mainly outside but also within criminology) has failed to substantiate this image: the media may be an ubiquitous ingredient in daily life, but their influence is crucially mediated by social and psychological variables. Further progress in critically assessing the power of the media will depend on developments in media and communications theory rather than criminology. Meanwhile, criminologists could open up alternative lines of inquiry relating to the media’s quality of publicness and its location at the interface between revelation and concealment—an interface of considerable significance for crime and criminal justice. To do so would be to explore the media as a discourse, and materialization, of conventionality.

Introduction

Criminologists often criticize the media for a variety of sins, notably the emotiveness, distortion, and oversimplification that they bring to matters of crime and justice. This academic frustration is driven by the media’s social and technical accomplishments: their perceived capacity to create, reproduce, and deliver content in mind-boggling abundance and near instantaneity and their putative impacts on many aspects of social and cultural life. From this perspective, these apparently potent forms of communication subvert the work of criminology by purveying unrealistic images of crime and criminal justice and eschewing rational reflection about them.

Central to this critique are a conception of the media as a process of communication and an underlying imaginary drawn from physics. Messages are seen as profuse, ephemeral, but highly charged particles circulating in the social universe, with a potential to render some sort of change (in behavior, emotions, beliefs, or attitudes) in any individual or organization that they collide with. The predominant analytical framework is one of causal relations ( Greer and Reiner, 2012 ), within which media representations of crime and criminal justice are posited as both the outcome of societal and organizational processes and an influence on those who intersect with them. The communications perspective is shared with many other academic disciplines, most obviously media and communication studies. It was prefigured by social critics and the general public at least a century ago and—significantly—is still widely held today ( J. Anderson, 2008 ).

Notable for its absence has been any extended reflection on the merits and problems of adopting a communications perspective within criminology. For although this perspective has underpinned a burgeoning literature within the discipline ( Carrabine, 2008 ; Greer and Reiner, 2012 ; Jewkes, 2004 ; Mason, 2003 ; Surette, 2011 ), it appears to demand a vision of causality as a one-way process in which messages are merely an intermediate link between producers and consumers. From this viewpoint, a focus on the messages themselves will supposedly reveal important aspects of the production and consumption processes; or a focus on production will naturally look to its consequences for consumption. The problem, however, is that the messages produced are not necessarily the messages consumed, because the mere fact of production does not guarantee exposure or attention to content, and attention, if garnered, does not imply a singular reading. Criminologists have not been unaware of this, particularly those focusing on questions of meaning in media content (e.g., Carrabine, 2008 ; Rafter, 2007 ; Sparks, 1992 ), who have pointed out that texts are polysemic and may be interpreted in different ways by different consumers. Nevertheless, both the discipline in general and even these scholars in particular have not followed through on the implications of this claim, the former preferring to proceed as if the question of meaning can be ignored, and the latter opting to provide a presumed common reading of the texts that they consider. Both of these tactics create crucial weaknesses for their analyses. A better solution to the problem would be to treat messages as jointly determined by producers and consumers, but this would be to look much more closely at the process of communication and less at the particular images of crime and justice, at least for the time being. In other words, it would lead away from criminology into a more explicit engagement with communications theories and methods.

Some may see in this a welcome enrichment of approach through transdisciplinarity. But for those who are interested in remaining more firmly within the discipline there is an alternative perspective already hinted at by some of the studies on the production of media content. This perspective focuses on the media not as a process of communication but as a form of publicness and a key constituent of the contemporary public domain. Along with a host of other topics, matters of crime and criminal justice are made collectively visible by the media ( Thompson, 1995 , 2011 ), a process of some significance given that most instances of crime and many actions of criminal justice agencies seek some sort of secrecy. Interesting questions relate to the processes of revelation and concealment and to the media as the interface between them, questions partly touched on in existing studies but relegated to a relatively minor supporting role within the dominant communications perspective. Somewhat paradoxically, when looked at as a form of publicness, media representations of crime and justice offer a study in the production of conventionality.

The Challenges for a Communications Perspective

Difficulties in characterizing media representations of crime and justice.

Although scholarly interest in the media, crime, and justice has existed since at least the 1920s, researchers with a specialist focus on criminology did not begin to look at this topic until after the Second World War. The first task that they set for themselves, one that continues to serve as a staple ingredient in many contemporary projects, was to delineate the idiosyncratic renderings of crime and justice in the media. This could be done by comparing media content with the images of crime and justice furnished by systematic study (i.e., by criminology). For example, in perhaps the earliest study of this type, Davis (1952) compared changes in the amount of column inches devoted to crime in Colorado newspapers with changes in the volume of crimes recorded by the police. He found that the two were not associated.

Much recent work has used content analysis to compare the proportional representation of different crime types, offenders, and criminal justice outcomes in the media with that found in official statistics. For example, in a study of items about crime published in British newspapers between 1945 and 1991, Reiner, Livingstone and Allen (2003 : 18) found that about two-thirds referred to violent or sex offenses, a picture that was “almost the obverse of [that given by] official statistics.” Similarly, Cheatwood (2010) found that fictional crime programs broadcast by radio in the United States between 1929 and 1962 dealt almost exclusively with murders, whereas murders never accounted for more than 0.5 percent of offenses known to the police. Both studies reported that the offenders featured in these media samples were older and of higher social status than the typical offender caught by the police. However, Pollak and Kubrin (2007) summarized more recent research that indicated that young violent offenders and offenders from ethnic minorities were overrepresented in news items compared to official statistics. Finally, Reiner, Livingstone, and Allen (2003) found that the clear-up rate for offenses reported in the news was above the general clear-up rate achieved by the police during the same period. These authors noted that media attention to the criminal justice system was largely confined to the police, as did Cheatwood. Surette (2011) has referred to the “Law of Opposites” and “Front End Loading” to designate the respective patterns of reporting.

Beyond simple comparisons like this, representational processes begin to look more complex. For example, Galeste, Fradella, and Vogel (2012 : 4) identified four “myths” about sex offenders—that they are “compulsive, homogenous, specialists and incapable of benefiting from treatment”—which, they claimed, are perpetuated by the media. Nevertheless, only 38 percent of the articles they examined contained at least one of these myths. Researchers have noted the penchant for certain news items to use strong condemnatory terms for offenders, such as “fiend” or “beast” for sex offenders ( Greer, 2003 ); yet this is to highlight the well-known difference between “tabloid” and “quality” news, which may be blurring ( Esser, 1999 ) but has not disappeared ( Peelo et al., 2004 ). An influential perspective for examining the “construction” of crime and justice has been that of “framing,” which studies particular configurations of problem definitions, causal interpretations, moral evaluations, and treatment recommendations ( Entman, 1993 : 52). However, frames are seen to originate in ideology, politics, culture, and science, rather than the media. The latter mainly serve as a means for communicating frames—for there are usually several frames in existence at any given time—and as a source of information for researchers interested in studying them. For example, Sasson (1995) identified five frames that characterize political, policy, media, and private “talk” about crime. This kind of variety in the media’s depictions of crime and criminal justice makes it very difficult to posit straightforward effects of the resulting content.

A particular problem is posed by the matter of interpretation: what does media content mean to the person who intersects with it? The construction of meaning may be partly set by the producer of the message or text, but it will also be shaped by the characteristics of those who attend to it: their cultural background, personal history, level of comprehension, and the context of reception ( McQuail, 2013 ). Nellis (2009 : 131), for example, observed that although The Shawshank Redemption may look like a “prison movie,” film critic Mark Kermode “plausibly argues … [that] … its overall appeal and popularity has had little to do with its specifically penal content.” Nevertheless, despite some sort of routine caveat of this nature, rather than explore different meanings criminologists have proceeded to provide their own extended reading of the text or content, implying that this is how it will be interpreted by others. For example, Rafter (2006 : 3) asserted that “crime films offer contradictory sorts of satisfaction: pride in our ability to think critically and root for the character who challenges authority …; and pride in our maturity for backing the restoration of moral order.” Whether these sorts of satisfaction arise among viewers has not been explored.

Criminologists link what is often claimed to be the media’s idiosyncratic renderings of crime and justice with two additional claims that would be significant if they were well supported. The first is that crime and criminal justice are prominent topics in the media (e.g., Beale, 2006 ). However, general inventories of media content show that these are merely two among many subjects in the news, such as the economy, civil rights, sport, and international affairs ( Quandt, 2008 ) and not the most frequent. In the realm of fiction, where classificatory tasks seem much more complicated ( Altman, 2003 ), films or shows about “crime” or “justice” sit alongside many others about “romance,” “comedy,” “science fiction,” and so on.

The second claim is that most people get their information about crime and justice from the media; at least, that is what they say when asked about it ( Marsh and Melville, 2009 ). This claim would seem unproblematic given that most criminological events cannot be witnessed directly, but it fails to give due consideration to other sources of information, such as that relayed by friends and acquaintances, or that which can be gained through personal experience as a protagonist or victim of crimes or, perhaps more important, lesser delicts of equal moral consequence to the individual (cf. Katz, 1987 ). More significantly, attention needs to be paid to the priority accorded to different sources of information and to the notion of “information” itself. What, exactly, is captured from the media? Perhaps people believe that the media are an important source of information, when something other than a single survey question used as a method of measurement might reveal different processes at work. Some of the limitations to survey research for measuring respondents’ contact with the media have been explored by Prior (2009) who found that many people overstate their viewing of TV news—sometimes quite considerably.

Related to this is a tendency among criminologists to assume that the samples of items compiled to demonstrate the “distorted” image of crime and justice will also have been seen, heard, or read by the public, but this is not necessarily the case ( Graber, 2004 ). Indeed, the only people likely to view and—more important—analyze these particular samples are the researchers themselves. Media and communications studies have long recognized that audiences are not passive recipients of messages (Livingstone and Das, 2103). Some people may never watch “slasher films,” and never want to; others may do everything possible to view them.

Seeking the Effects of Media Images of Crime and Justice

Research that directly seeks evidence of media effects represents a vast field of inquiry that has mainly been conducted outside of criminology, much of it in relation to topics that are of little or no interest to the discipline. However, matters relating to crime or criminal justice have often featured as questions of specific concern, or as case studies for broader conceptual and theoretical explorations. One prominent line of inquiry has involved the search for the effects of media content on violent and aggressive behavior ( J. Anderson, 2008 ). Another has looked at the effects of media on perceptions, beliefs, and attitudes relating to crime and justice (e.g., Holbrook and Hill, 2005 ). Some studies have used experimental methods, in which subjects were asked to read short texts or view video clips and were then canvassed for reactions or observed in their immediate behavior (e.g., Slater, Rouner, and Long, 2006 ). Other studies have asked samples of respondents about their recent engagement with the media, perceptions of crime, attitudes toward punishment, and associated matters (e.g., Goidel, Freeman, and Procopio, 2006 ). The focus of attention has been the individual, as reflected in the numerous theories of media effects—social learning, cognitive, reception, cultivation, agenda setting, and so on—proposed by psychologists, communications theorists, and others ( Bryant and Oliver, 2008 ). Criminologists undertaking empirical projects to detect effects have mainly focused their attention on fear of crime (e.g., Ditton et al., 2004 ) or punitiveness (e.g., Callanan, 2005 ), both of which link to the considerable interest within the discipline in the evolution of crime policy over the past 50 years and the well-documented shift from penal welfarism to populist punitiveness. In so doing, they have cited antecedent work from outside criminology, used similar research techniques, and obtained similar sorts of findings.

The cumulative results of this “individual effects” research, reported in literature reviews and meta-analyses, can be summarized as follows: variables measuring exposure or attention to the media are not always statistically significant; significance, when established, usually indicates association rather than causality; and the associations are comparatively weak. For example, J. Anderson (2008) reported that 70 years of research had shown correlations between media exposure and aggression ranging from .01 to .10. Similarly, C. Anderson and colleagues (2010) reported only small effects of violent video gaming on different dimensions of aggression. Morgan and Shanahan (2010 : 340) reported that a prior meta-analysis of more than two decades of cultivation research showed that television makes “a small but consistent contribution to viewers’ beliefs and perspectives.” Research has confirmed the ability of the media to influence people’s estimation of the most salient issues at any time—the so-called agenda-setting effect—including the issues of crime and criminal justice ( Uscinski, 2009 ). However, agenda setting can be weakened or eliminated by factors relating to personal experience or beliefs ( Graber, 2004 ). Translating these results into situated processes leads to what J. Anderson (2008 : 1272) called the “some/some/some” conditionals, as in “For some children under some conditions some television is harmful.”

For some commentators, these generally modest results are indicators that the search for effects is not a very fruitful enterprise ( Ferguson and Kilburn, 2010 ). For others, however, even small effects are worth documenting ( C. Anderson et al., 2010 ; Grabe and Drew, 2007 ). Given the multiple options for refining and varying the research strategy—changing samples, time frames, and measurement techniques; studying different variables relating to audiences, media types, genres, contents, and outcomes; testing different concepts and theories—there are endless possibilities for doing more of this kind of work in the search for more significant results.

Effects, however, have not only been researched and theorized in relation to the individual; they have also been discussed at the organizational level. Thus, and in relation to criminology’s subject matter, media content may affect the decisions made by the judiciary, bureaucrats, politicians, other media organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and so on. This has been one of the premises underlying studies of moral panics and scandals. For example, Cohen’s ([1972] 2003) initial work on a moral panic over youth violence in English seaside towns included extensive consideration, on the one hand, of the media treatment of the topic and, on the other, of official reactions to the “problem” (greater police control, harsher judicial treatment, and so on). Similarly, Greer and McLaughlin (2011 , 2012 ) described a “politics of outrage” that emerged in relation to the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Service and that they linked to the resignation of one its commissioners and to complications in public order policing. The notion that the media have this kind of influence is also underwritten by the organizations themselves, most of which have a media strategy if not a media liaison office ( Mawby, 2010 ) and whose members sometimes cite the media as a factor that influences their decisions.

The methodological preference in this work is for case studies, but the latter have been limited by their reliance on the media as almost the sole data source. As colleagues working on individual effects would attest, any impact of the media on organizations cannot be demonstrated by focusing entirely on the media; additional determinants of decisions need to be examined. Researchers would need to observe for themselves what happens within organizations and assess the role of media alongside that of organizational resources, objectives, normative frameworks, the existence of institutional competitors, and the like. There is general agreement, both within criminology ( Surette, 2011 ) and outside of it ( Voltmer and Koch-Baumgartner, 2010 ), that this is a complex task and that, so far, the results have been equivocal: there are some processes or policy outcomes where significant media influence has been detected but many that seem completely impervious.

Despite these difficulties, criminologists doing empirical research on individual or organizational effects tend to be faithful to the communications canon. They argue that it would be premature to give up this line of inquiry ( Ditton et al., 2004 : 598) and often overstate the analytical significance of their findings (e.g., Callanan, 2005 ). What these media-centric studies reveal, however, is that the principal determinants of the phenomena under study lie elsewhere. For example, in their study of media usage and fear of crime Weitzer and Kubrin (2004) focused on four theories of media effects but hardly commented on the fact that in their results age, gender, race, and the local violent crime rate emerged as stronger predictors of fear. Another way of envisaging the peripheral role of the media in thinking about the causes of crime is to peruse any text on theories of criminal behavior, where discussion of the media is likely to make only a brief appearance and only in relation to social learning and anomie perspectives.

Several authors have correctly observed that the notion of effects needs to be critically assessed: people should not be seen as passive recipients of media messages but rather as individuals who intersect with these messages in different ways—purposefully, accidentally, attentively, distractedly, passionately, apathetically, and so on (e.g., Carrabine, 2008 ; Chiricos, Eschholz and Gertz, 1997 ; Sparks, 1992 ). And they have noted the importance of understanding how people make meaning out of the content they intersect with. For example, Rafter (2007) has suggested that the media provide individuals with a “tool kit” ( Swidler, 1986 ) of images and ideas about crime and justice that they use to develop their own discourse about these topics, a conception that grants much agency to the individual in the interpretation and subsequent use of media content. In making this kind of argument, these criminologists have drawn—explicitly or implicitly—on theories of audience and reception that have an established trajectory in media studies ( Livingstone and Das, 2013 ). But they have not studied audiences or reception, or provided inventories of interpretations, or typologies of media users (for a very limited exception see Chiricos, Eschholz, and Gertz, 1997 ). Instead, they have preferred to develop their own reading of media content and offer this as the likely reading among the audience. As suggestive as these readings might be, they can only be speculative: criminology as exegesis. To go beyond this demands sustained engagement with the concepts, theories, and methods of media and communications studies, for which matters of crime and justice simply become case material. There is no prima facie reason for thinking that the processes operating in the reception, interpretation, and use of media content on these topics are radically different to those operating in relation to, for example, the environment, politics, the economy, or fashion.

The Production of Media Representations of Crime and Justice

One of the stronger antidotes to the notion of passive media recipients lies in the concept of the market, a mechanism through which consumers express their preferences and cumulatively construct something like collective attention. From this perspective, it is the task of media organizations—which sit at the interface between demand and supply—to read market forces accurately and do their best to develop content that will attract sufficient attention. They may not always be successful in this: some content surprises because it garners so much attention; other content surprises because it garners so little. The most thorough examination of market forces in relation to crime and justice content was Hamilton’s (1998) , who argued that the presence or absence of violence in television programs is strongly determined by strategic attempts to attract particular audiences. Because the most frequent consumers of violence are viewers ages 18 to 34, channels and advertisers seek to target this group through programming schedules. More generally, crime and violence are thought to attract public attention and to have been used increasingly to maintain ratings ( Beale, 2006 ). In relation to news and reality TV shows, matters of crime and justice also have the added attraction of comparatively low production costs. Several criminologists and communications scholars have examined the journalistic practices which underlie the production of crime and justice news, including journalists’ routine reliance on specific sources for items of interest and the efforts of criminal justice agencies or stakeholders to influence and control what is reported ( Chermak and Weiss, 2005 ; Ericson, Baranek and Chan, 1987 , 1989 ; Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994 ; Silverman, 2012 ). They have demonstrated quite convincingly that the agendas of media organizations and sources frequently overlap and are consciously made to do so but that there are also inherent tensions between media objectives on one side and public relations on the other (see also Doyle, 2003 ). While media professionals and sources can usually maintain cooperative relationships in the generation of newsworthy items about crime—focusing on the immediate, the dramatic, the novel, the celebrity offender, and so on ( Jewkes, 2004 )—that relationship will rapidly become conflictive if the media turn a critical eye on agencies’ shortcomings.

Of course, newsworthiness can only be an explanation, and a superficial one at that, of the demand for factual content on crime and justice. Deeper explanations, which would also cover the demand for fictional content, require a different approach. Thus criminologists and others have gestured at individual and collective social processes that translate into the “demand” for certain kinds of media content on crime and justice. For example, Sparks (1992 : 120) speculated that crime fiction “presupposes an inherent tension between anxiety and reassurance and that this constitutes a significant source of its appeal to the viewer.” Echoing the earlier influential work of Hall and colleagues (1978) , he posited a “displacement” process by which widespread social anxieties about economic and social change (notably unemployment and immigration) were partly addressed and partly resolved through narratives depicting the overturn of disorder (see also Welsh, Fleming, and Dowler, 2011 ). Moving more toward the terrain of psychoanalysis, other researchers have written of voyeurism and the fascination with mediated crime and violence ( Carrabine, 2008 ; Jewkes, 2004 ), or of offenders as scapegoats “onto which society projects ‘its darkest fears and desires’ (Schober, 2007:135)” ( Kohm and Greenhill, 2011 : 196). Intriguing as these claims are, they have yet to be substantiated by systematic empirical research. More problematically, they seek to hold media portrayals of crime and justice in the largely contradictory position of simultaneously being a result of consumers’ demands and a determinant of their perceptions—a difficulty that might be resolved by arguing for a positive feedback spiral between the two but that has not so far been recognized or addressed. This sort of problem derives from the adherence to a communications perspective that ultimately privileges a focus on media representations as determinants of individuals’ images of crime and justice.

The Media as a Materialization of Publicness

Studies on the production of media content relating to crime and justice offer a useful starting point for developing an additional framework to the communications perspective. For example, Ericson, Baranek, and Chan (1989) looked at media-source relations in terms of openness and closure in the genesis of news. While criminal justice agencies “patrol the facts” ( Ericson, 1989 ) by attempting to establish particular dividing lines between what is revealed and what is concealed, journalists and others are often trying to move those divides. For Ericson and colleagues, unable to free themselves entirely from the framework of communication, the significance of this process lay mainly in its consequences for the inventory of news items that would be offered to consumers ( Ericson, Baranek, and Chan, 1991 ). But it is also significant for what it indicates about the tensions between social visibility and invisibility in relation to crime and justice. One set of tensions relates to that which is withheld from public view and another to that which is brought into the public domain. Both are founded on a widely held lay theory of media functioning. Both work to maintain a notional boundary to the public domain; both connect significantly with the dynamics of crime and criminal justice; and both support the production of conventionality in public life.

When legal or moral censures of behavior are powerful, those who think they will attract such censure usually work to keep the offense clandestine and its authorship anonymous. Few seek to publicize their own wrongdoing, except politically motivated actors, who often accompany their actions with discursive challenges to the prevailing normative climate—positioning themselves, for example, as “freedom fighters,” not terrorists. Video surveillance, now so widespread and an easy source of material for the news and entertainment media, is mainly ignored and sometimes avoided by those committing crimes in public places ( Phillips, 1999 ). For a long time some individuals—fascinated with deviance—have kept photos, home movies, or sound recordings of their crimes, and these have been joined more recently by “happy slappers” ( Chan et al., 2012 ) and others who record their clips on mobile phones ( Kenyon and Rookwood, 2010 ). But they have rarely sought to make these materials public, even if some of them have subsequently entered the public domain. The result, quite obviously, is that those who think that they are, or might be, engaged in wrongdoing will try to avoid public disclosure.

For media organizations, the undermining of secrecy can be a powerful source of news or infotainment. In its more confrontational mode, this process takes the form of revelations and seeks its justification in the idea of accountability. It is typically used against other organizations (in the criminal justice sector, particularly the police or prisons) or against white-collar or higher status offenders, and it often produces scandals. Information or allegations arising from these revelations may then be examined by police or prosecutors to determine whether legal action should be taken. While investigative reporting is obviously a prominent topic in journalism studies ( de Burgh, 2008 ), criminology has so far paid scant attention to it. Which sorts of crimes and delicts are investigated and why, how journalists gather and make sense of information, the roles played by whistle-blowers, and freedom-of-information requests are just some of the topics that are ripe for investigation.

In its lighter mode, designed for infotainment rather than accountability, the undermining of secrecy is much shallower, sometimes bordering on illusion. Here the media seek to get close to offending behavior but are hampered by the evasive tactics of their protagonists or by legal and ethical constraints on what can be revealed. It is not so difficult, of course, to find convicted offenders who will talk about what they have done rather than simply use the media to proclaim their innocence. However, their media performance is likely to center on justifications ( Sykes and Matza, 1957 ), excuses ( Scott and Lyman, 1968 ), or apologies ( Birkbeck, 2013 ) for their behavior, all of which represent discursive strategies for moral alignment with the public domain. When it comes to individuals who are supposedly involved in ongoing criminal activity as part of a gang or organized crime group, anonymity may be a condition of collaboration, and generalities the order of the day in what they say. Media organizations cannot learn about, witness, or generate criminal behavior in the course of their activities without an obligation to report it (even if they may not always do so), and consequently their domain of inquiry is quite limited. Thus the police and other spokespersons for criminal justice, bureaucrats in other branches of government, politicians, journalists, occasionally researchers, and victims and witnesses are the sources for news items ( Frost and Phillips, 2011 ; Thompson, Young, and Burns, 2000 ). Rarely included are those labeled as offenders ( Pollak and Kubrin, 2007 ). The interesting questions relate to presentational strategy: that which is revealed and that which is not by people who publicly acknowledge their engagement in crime. Those questions cannot be answered by focusing on the media appearance itself but only by comparing media revelations with revelations made to researchers who interact with these individuals under different conditions (although with similar ethical and legal obligations) and often for much longer periods of time (e.g., Miranda, 2003 ).

Thus where wrongdoers do not entirely evade public attention there seem to be many moral incentives that support the construction of accounts or apologies for their crimes. But even for the small group of rebels, terrorists, or others who would seek to defend their crimes or encourage others to join them there are legal and institutional barriers to getting a hearing. Media space is well policed, in order to exclude content that is considered undesirable. Schmid and De Graaf (1982 : 165), for example, cited rules within the CBS News organization that sought to avoid providing “an excessive platform for the terrorist/kidnapper”; while Miller (1984) reported a similar approach by the BBC to television coverage of the Provisional IRA in the United Kingdom. The object is to avoid incitement to crime—a crime itself—by publicizing nothing in the way of encouragement. In the United States, the First Amendment right to free speech has been curtailed by the courts when incitement to crime is argued to be in play ( Montz, 2002 ); in the United Kingdom, the Broadcasting Act of 1990 prohibited the dissemination of anything that “is likely to encourage or incite to crime or lead to disorder” ( Ofcom, 2013 ). Of course, this type of legislative control is based on a theory of noxious media effects, and its purview extends beyond the news to fictional portrayals of crime ( Montz, 2002 ). Criminology could do much by developing a critical perspective on the notion of incitement to crime and setting out the limitations to any simplistic view of media effects in this regard.

The right to free speech is also debated in relation to the media’s coverage of police investigations and criminal trials. In interviews with media representatives, witnesses may subtly change their accounts of events in order to comply with the interests of the news organization. Reports with information gathered by journalists about crimes, victims, or offenders may affect the perceptions and judgments of those involved in processing the case, particularly jurors (e.g., Spano, Groscup, and Penrod, 2011 ). Closure of proceedings, jury sequestering, and contempt of court are the measures typically used to control publicity in criminal cases, often aimed at limiting the perceived undesirable effects of the media (e.g., Conboy and Scott, 1996 ). Once again, there is scope for criminology to review the trends in, and characteristics of, this kind of control but from a theoretical rather than a normative perspective.

A concern for noxious effects also crystallizes in the controls on materials considered to be offensive to “good taste” and “decency” ( Shaw, 1999 ). Here the worry is less about the posterior effects of media content than about the reactions provoked at the moment of its reception: readers, listeners, or viewers may be shocked, offended, or repulsed ( Taylor, 1998 ). An associated concern is with the dignified treatment of those in the frame: too close an examination of grief, harm, or vulnerability may be felt to invade their privacy ( Fullerton and Patterson, 2006 ). Advocates, commentators, social critics, journalists, and legal scholars have examined the history, merits, and problems of this type of control (e.g., Couvares, 2006 ; Tait, 2009 ), but criminologists have not looked at censorship or control—whether external or self-imposed—of media content. Doing so would be less the addition of one more voice in the normative or historical debate about the appropriateness of particular media contents than an extended exploration of the contours of control: what material relating to crime or justice is felt to be inappropriate and why? Scholars in other disciplines (e.g., Campbell, 2004 ; Tait, 2008 ) have assembled some important observations relating to graphic portrayals of violence and death and have reflected on their uses, meanings, and moral significance, but these would need to be reexamined to understand the dynamics of revelation and concealment around crime. Campbell, for example, discussed the racist murder of James Byrd in Texas by three men who dragged him behind their truck for three miles. He noted the effects of this ordeal on the body of the victim—flesh worn down to the bone, ribs broken, head torn off, and so on—and the unsparing detail in the photographs of the deceased. These pictures were not carried by the news media, and the jurors found them “horrendous, and had to force themselves to look” (58). Criminologists could doubtless join other scholars here in considering whether these images should have been made public or what emotions they provoked in those who saw them, but a central criminological question—probably overlooked by other disciplines—concerns the understanding of concealment. Why are such graphic accounts of violence not made public? How does the boundary between revelation and concealment affect the meanings and censure brought to bear on these events? Within criminology, some purchase on this type of question can be gained through historical studies of the concealment of executions (e.g., Foucault, 1979 ; Lofland, 1975 ; Sarat and Schuster, 1995 ), but explanations—while very suggestive—are still quite speculative and topically focused. Their relevance would also have to be explored in relation to nonstate violence and to crimes that do not involve force but fraud or stealth.

Sociologist William Gamson (1988 : 162) once remarked that “There is some residue of [a lay theory of media effects] in all of us.” This lay theory accords great influence to the media because it equates publicness with collective attention and suggestibility. Systematic research, however, has failed to confirm the equation: in point of fact, media effects are mediated by social and psychological variables. Criminologists know this (through their reading of the extant literature) and have confirmed it for themselves (through their own studies of the media); nevertheless, they have largely continued to work within a communications perspective that is insinuated by the lay theory of media effects. They have thus been inattentive to an alternative conceptualization of the media as the construction of publicness and to the questions about the revelation and concealment of crime and criminal justice that thereby arise. Those questions lead in a number of different directions, offering additional lines of inquiry that look to be at least as productive as those currently pursued. They also imply a decentering of the media within the analytical frame, for revelation and concealment are inherent in every type of public domain, from street life to mass meetings. It is the visibility and accessibility of the media that makes them a convenient object for study.

Normative debates about “appropriate” media content on crime and justice reflect the importance accorded to the character of the public domain. In fact, the tensions relating to revelation and concealment spring from a desire to ensure that publicness is an exercise in conventionality, not deviance. This is reflected at the level of discourse, where the identities talked into being in the news are those of respectability; the community created in words and images is that of civil society; and the experience narrated is that of a melodramatic conflict between good and bad ( Birkbeck, 2013 ). Even fictional renderings of crime could be seen as rhetorics of conventionality: “Given the primacy of the hero, villains and their villainies may be relatively incidental” ( Sparks, 1992 : 147). And although the outcome of conflicts between good and bad may sometimes be ambiguous, the situation does not become more ambivalent; it simply becomes bleaker: “evil is ubiquitous, crime intractable, the criminal justice system impotent and moral redemption impossible” ( Rafter, 2007 : 409). Yet even a cursory glance at the media hints at the narrowness and superficiality of current convention. Surely there are better, more satisfying ways of discoursing on crime and justice.

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