Crime and News Media

Crime and the Media

In this course, Dr Francesca Menichelli (University of Surrey) explores the relationship between crime and the media. In the first lecture, we think about depictions of crime in news media and the factors that shape which incidents of crime are selected to appear in the news. In the second lecture, we look at crime fiction, its influence on how people think about crime, and how it is studied by scholars. In the third lecture, we consider research into media effects and the notion that the media can cause crime. Next, we turn to moral panics. In the fifth and final lecture, we think about media representations of victims and offenders and how these are informed by factors such as ethnicity, gender and class.

Crime and News Media

In this lecture, we think about the representation of crime in news media, focusing in particular on: (i) the factors which influence the selection of events to become news, such as production processes and agenda setting; (ii) the ways in which individuals and groups try to shape news selection to suit their interests, known as agenda setting, as interpreted by pluralist and Marxist theoretical approaches; (iii) the role of new values - the features of incidents which make them valuable to news agencies - in shaping news selection; (iv) some recent developments which are changing how scholars have traditionally thought about news selection, such as the rise of social media.