Reporting Crime and Fearing Crime in Three Communities

Abstract

Newspaper emphasis on relatively infrequent violent crimes may contribute to a heightened public concernand fear-among readers about their own aafety.Crime news is a staple of journalism, and reporting it has been considered a public duty of the press (see 16). The rationale behind this view is that if presented with problems in the social order, the public would respond. The journalist's role, in this traditional view, is to provide an objective portrayal of reality to ensure that members of society can accurately assess the social problem. Recent views of the press have been less sanguine. While conceding that the news media can assume useful information roles, critics argue that "objective" and comprehensive portrayals are unavailable to the public because press treatment of social problems is insufficient and superficial, and because newsroom values color the selection and presentation of information (see 11).The reliance on the press as a source of public information about social problems like crime has been accentuated by the increasing urbanization of society and the institutionalizing of social problems. As the members of society who are judged to be the source of those problems are more and more isolated from society by institutional processes, personal experience with or firsthand knowledge of any of these social problems has decreased. Thus the public's opinion about the norms and the judgment of deviant behavior must be formed increasingly by the mass media (see 15). While personal experience might be an important standard by which individuals could judge the media definitions of

The Role of Fear in Agenda Setting by Television News

“…As Graber had found previously, their review indicated that in 26 American cities, only .02% of all crimes were homicides, yet a content analysis of news coverage for the year prior to the survey found that homicides accounted for 29.9% of the crime stories reported in all of the largest daily papers that served these 26 cities (Liska & Baccaglini, 1990). Jaehnig, Weaver, and Fico (1981) discovered similar (although less extreme) results in a study conducted in three cities of differing sizes-Indianapolis, Indiana (population: 714,878); Evanston, Illinois (population: 76,665); and Lebanon, New Hampshire (population: 11,300). They added data on fear of crime to a comparison between actual per capita crime rates and the percentage of newspaper stories on crime.…”

The Impact of Media on Knowledge and Perceptions of Megan’s Law

“…Generally, researchers have found heavy consumers of crime news to be more fearful of crime than light consumers are (Einsiedel, Salomone, & Schneider, 1984;Gerbner, Gross, Morgan, & Signorelli, 1980;Gerbner, Gross, Signorelli, Morgan, & Jackson-Beeck, 1979;Jaehnig, Weaver, & Fico, 1981;Johnstone et al, 1994;Roberts, 1992). In addition, Hollander (1996) suggested that heavy media consumers are more likely to develop more punitive attitudes than light media users.…”

News as nonfiction theater: How dispositions toward the public cast of characters affect reactions

“…scholars (e.g., Cowdy, 1993;Galician, 1986;Gerbner & Gross, 1976;Levine, 1986;Jaehnig, Weaver, & Fico, 1981;Veitch & Griffitt, 1976). In fact, the expectation of depressive and cynical reactions to the preponderance of bad news is said to have prompted the institution of closing newscasts with a piece or two of upbeat, good news (Scott & Gobetz, 1992;Zillmann, Gibson, Ordman, & Aust, 1994).…”