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the media as a source of entertainment or as a source of
instruction.
b. The first path is related to thoughtful planned
3. In the third path, narrative persuasion operates, and deep
psychological involvement with media content and storyline
develops
a. In this path no real-world decision is pending, and
instruction is not a goal
b. This path describes how most people use and interact with
most media, seeking entertainment, not explicit instructions
c. When engagement with criminogenic content is high,
transformation or absorption results, and the consumer is
transported to a world where criminal behavior is:
i. Justified
ii. Rewarded
iii. Unlikely to be punished
d. Due to the large quantity of crime-related narratives in the
media, media content in general can be thought of as a
haphazard entertainment-education effort
e. The higher the level of engagement with the narrative, the
less counter-arguing with the content’s informational
messages will occur
f. Provides a mechanism to influence individuals who would
be resistant to following the cognitive persuasion paths
i. Rather, in the narrative persuasion path, media
consumers are “side-participants” in the story line—
prepared to play an active role when given the
opportunity
g. However, it is expected that few transverse the middle
block and follow one of the three copycat paths down to the
third “appraisal and adoption” block in which committing a
copycat crime is seriously considered
i. Given the comparative low visibility of copycat
crimes, it is speculated that most individuals who
have passed through block 2 in the model will
decide not to attempt a copycat crime and will exit
ii. The third block is thus the least traveled road even
for at-risk copycat offenders
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ix. Actual copycat crime attempts are hypothesized to be rare as a proportion
of all crime, but not rare in terms of criminal life histories
1. Most of the crimes committed by offenders will not be copycat
crimes, but many offenders (about one in four if prior surveys are
accurate) will have attempted a copycat crime in their lifetimes
2. Two factors are forwarded as playing central roles in the decision
to attempt or not attempt a copycat crime:
a. An individual’s criminal history
1. While there is a long standing belief that the depiction of
punishment at the end of a media portrayal of crime will mitigate
any pro-crime messages, media portrayed punishment will not
necessarily dissuade copying as affixing a punishment to the end of
a succession of successful crimes or to near-successful ones should
not be expected to remove criminogenic learning effects
a. Media depicted punishments can be seen as instructive
lessons on ways to avoiding similar mistakes, and potential
copycats may copy a crime on the belief that with slight
modification of tactics, they can gain the benefits of crime
without suffering the costs
b. Habitual offenders often overestimate their odds of success
and will alter their crime techniques, confident that they
have significantly reduced their risk of failure
xi. Although the copycat crime paths are felt to operate universally, it is
expected that societies will differ between themselves and over time in
their copycat crime rates
1. Some societies are expected to generate more:
a. criminogenic content
b. at-risk copycat offenders
c. opportunities and cultural support for applying copycat
crime models
xii. Concerning the question of who follows the pathways, commits the
copycat crime, and generates the copycat crime rates, a set of five
umbrella concepts have emerged as hypothesized flags for at-risk copycat
individuals:
1. Immersion in crime-related content
a. At greater risk offenders who:
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i. Immerse themselves in a criminogenic niche media
(for example, watching criminogenic excerpts from
a single video repeatedly)
ii. Are weakly networked into law-abiding groups
iii. Are strongly networked into deviant groups
b. Type of copycat crime that generates the most concern:
i. Unpredicted bizarre violence
ii. Violence by individuals without unknown violent
histories (such as found with the Columbine,
Aurora, and Newtown shooters)
iii. Repetitive viewing, in which the copier watches
media content multiple times prior to offending and
displays self-editing of content by repetitively
watching only the copied sequences (sometimes
using freeze-framing to slow down the violent
content)
2. A set of psychological traits
a. Predictors of a propensity to copy violent models include:
i. characteristics such as delusion
ii. a history of high interest in guns and law
enforcement encounters
iii. traits of idleness, isolation, and deterioration in
socioeconomic functions
iv. perceptions of persecution and resentment
3. A personal belief in criminal efficacy
4. An individual’s personal history of inconsistent punishment for
crime
5. A number of family, community, and cultural environment factors
a. The likelihood of media immersion increases as peers and
family decrease in importance
i. Individuals who are deeply immersed in popular
culture and media dependent should also show an
increased copycat propensity
b. Weak social bonding also plays a role
i. Individuals with less to lose from failed criminality
are speculated to more often choose copycat crime
as these individuals will rely more on media for
positive social reinforcement
c. Immersion is also associated with identification with media
offenders
i. Because media-immersed consumers are not
necessarily heavy consumers in terms of total hours
but appear to form para-social relationships with
media personalities, media-immersed individuals
who imagine themselves as the media criminals
should be more likely to copy their offenses
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d. Social isolation
i. Increases copycat crime risk due to the media
increasing in importance as information sources
e. The decision to copy a crime is weighed not only against
the expected reward versus punishment from the crime, but
also against expected outcomes of alternate law-abiding
behaviors. So copycat crime would be more attractive to
those who do not see law-abiding behavior as likely to be
rewarded
f. Persons who see media personalities as opinion leaders and
as friends are postulated as more likely copycat crime
candidates
g. Other copycat flags are found in individual media
preferences and usage motives
i. Individuals who prefer crime content and who
consume high amounts of media content combined
with viewing motives of information seeking or
learning are hypothesized as more at risk to be
copycats
h. Additional personality traits that have been flagged include:
i. low self-control
ii. high criminal innovativeness
iii. behavior disinhibition tendencies
i. The role of intelligence levels in copycat crime is likely
interactive with other factors
j. It is at the family and neighborhood environment levels that
the final determinants of copycat crime operate
i. Potential copycat offenders estimate the likelihood
of reward versus punishment and the expected
social reaction to a copycat offense
k. The presence of criminogenic parents should produce more
copycat offspring
i. Criminogenic parents can either be offenders
themselves or verbally support criminogenic values
l. The media’s criminogenic effects will be further enhanced
by:
i. racial strife
ii. income disparities
iii. detrimental social conditions and contribute to an
increased number of people at risk for criminogenic
media influences
xiii. Research suggests that:
1. a media criminogenic influence will concentrate in preexisting
criminal populations
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2. the effect of the media is more likely qualitative (affecting criminal
behavior) rather than quantitative (affecting the number of
criminals)
3. a pragmatic use of the media by offenders, with borrowing media
crime techniques as the most common practice
4. copycat offenders usually have the criminal intent to commit a
particular crime before they copy a media-based technique
5. copycat criminals are more likely to be career criminals involved
in property offenses rather than first or violent offenders
6. there is no evidence of a strong media criminalizing effect on
previously law-abiding individuals
a. the media are most often a crime rudder, molding crime’s
form rather than being its engine
7. unknown are what factors launch the short term busts of high
profile criminogenic copying the periodically occur
a. Examples of copycat crime waves:
i. product tampering
ii. airline hijacking
iii. suicide bombings awaits further research
i. Media-Oriented Terrorism
i. Even before the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center and Pentagon
attacks, the copycat crimes that generated the most concern were those
related to terrorism
ii. The Media-Terrorism Relationship: A Symbiotic Relationship
1. Media-oriented terrorism: violence is scripted to earn publicity
a. Has significantly increased due to the mutual goal of
terrorists and the media to maximize audience size
b. Today a steady stream of terrorist acts can be identified as
media-oriented terrorist events characterized by:
i. the selection of high-visibility targets
ii. graphic terrorist acts
iii. pre-event contact with media outlets
iv. post-event videos, interviews, postings, and other
media accommodations
c. In the research literature on terrorism, no doubts are
expressed that the media motivate copycat terrorist acts or
that a substantial number of terrorist events are aimed
primarily at garnering publicity
d. Like politicians, terrorists have learned to manipulate
media coverage to bypass editorial gatekeeping and
contextual formatting by journalists and go directly to the
public with their message
i. This process has been made easier by social media
2. Media-oriented terrorism is highly valuable to media organizations
a. Acts of terrorist violence benefit media because they
normally:
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i. have a beginning and an end
ii. can be encompassed in a few minutes of air time
iii. possess a large degree of drama
iv. involve participants who are perceived by the
viewing public as unambiguous
v. are not so complex as to be unintelligible to those
who tune in only briefly
3. Terrorists now understand the dynamics of newsworthiness and the
benefits of news coverage, which include:
a. increased legitimacy and political status
b. heightened perception of their strength and threat
c. an increased ability to attract:
i. resources
ii. support
iii. recruits
4. Contemporary media-oriented terrorists are guided by five
principles
a. Their acts are not tactical in nature but are aimed at distant
external audiences
b. Victims are chosen for symbolic meaning to maximize fear
and public impact
c. The media are eager to cover terrorist violence and will
devote significant resources to reporting terrorist events
d. The media can be activated, directed, and manipulated for
propaganda effects
e. Target governments are at a disadvantage because their
choice is usually between censorship and allowing
terrorists to use the media
5. Gaining media attention is not guaranteed
a. Many more acts of terrorism are committed than are
reported in the media
i. U.S. media give more coverage to terrorism aimed
at U.S. citizens or property
ii. Coverage is focused on events with casualties
b. The resulting competition for media attention causes
terrorists to escalate their violence because more violent
and more dramatic acts are necessary to gain news
coverage as the shock value of ordinary terrorism
diminishes
iii. The impact of media coverage on terrorism is twofold
1. Coverage of a terrorist act encourages copycats
a. There is much anecdotal evidence that terrorist events
occur in clusters, such as with:
i. kidnappings
ii. bank robberies in which hostages are taken
iii. plane hijackings
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iv. parachute hijackings
v. planting altitude bombs on airplanes
vi. suicide bombings
vii. on-line beheadings of hostages
b. These copycat effects are especially strong following a
well-publicized successful terrorist act using a novel
approach
2. Although their numbers wax and wane, the pattern of these violent
performances suggests that media-oriented terrorism has become a
persistent element of the total terrorism picture
a. Started when the Palestine Liberation Organization
terrorists killed members of the Israeli Olympic team in the
1972 Olympics
b. The World Wide Web has also provided a new avenue for
terrorists to disseminate their messages and has partly
supplanted their need to attract news media attention in
order to reach their target audiences
c. Today terrorism is often a twisted public relations
“infotainment” effort
II. Criminogenic Infotainment
a. Where does the research about violent, criminogenic, and terrorism related media
lead?
i. Most people exposed to pernicious media will show no negative effects
ii. Some small proportion of people will show slight effects, concentrated
more in attitudes than in behaviors
iii. Strong behavioral effects are relatively rare and are most likely to appear
in at-risk individuals
iv. The media’s ability to generate greater numbers of predisposed at-risk
individuals also appears to be real
1. In the future, the media’s criminogenic effects will be enhanced as
their current crime-and-violence content contribute to an increased
number of people at risk for negative media influences due to:
a. racial strife
b. income disparities
c. poor social conditions
2. Especially at risk are:
a. violence-prone children
b. violence-prone adults
c. hypermasculine males
v. When the news media sensationalize crime and make celebrities of
criminals, the danger of imitation for notoriety increases
1. When successful crime is detailed, criminals will emulate it
2. When a successful terrorist event is shown or a terrorist group is
able to gain the attention of the media, media-oriented terrorism
will increase
vi. New media have hypothesized criminogenic effects when:
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1. they provide avatar-like criminal models to copy
2. they stimulate interpersonal communications about crime
a. Example: new media communications such as blogs,
Twitter, and e-mails can encourage imitation among
geographically separated terrorist groups
vii. The Internet is seen as a particularly powerful criminogenic influence due
to it having both mass and interpersonal elements
1. As part way between mass media and interpersonal
communication, the Internet provides word-of-mouth
communication with global reach
a. Where real world criminogenic instructors are not
available, the Internet can substitute with interpersonal
communications and deliver detailed how-to crime
information
b. For crime and justice, this means that
i. Media consumers can:
1. experience committing a murder rather than
just observing one
2. help to catch an offender rather than just
watch over the shoulder of a crime fighter
3. determine guilt or innocence of the
defendant rather than just follow a trial
ii. A candidate copycat offender can:
1. search out like-minded role models
2. interact with like-minded role models on a
personal level
3. anonymously learn crime techniques
b. Whether criminogenic effects, such as copycat crime, emerge in any particular
individual depends on:
i. the highly idiosyncratic interactions of the content of a particular media
product
1. its characterizations of crimes and criminals
ii. the individual’s predispositions
1. personal criminal history
2. family
3. environmental factors
iii. the media’s social context
1. preexisting cultural norms
2. crime opportunities
3. pervasiveness of the mass media
a. The more heavily the consumer relies on the media for
information about the world and the greater his or her
predisposition to criminal behavior, the greater the
likelihood of an effect
c. Media effects are real, but it is also apparent that the media alone cannot make
someone a criminal
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i. The media play their role after the biological, economic, and social factors
1. Violent media alone does not make a violent person, but violent
media can make a violent person more often violent
2. Criminogenic media won’t make a law-abiding person a criminal,
but a preexisting criminal may become a greater threat
ii. However, media do facilitate the packaging and delivery of a criminogenic
rate boost
d. The media’s influence on the behavior of most of us is to cause us not to do
certain things
i. By painting crime in a particular hue, the media color the actual world as
violent, predatory, and dangerous
1. Media keeps us from:
a. flying
b. taking a foreign vacation
c. going downtown
d. opening our door
ii. The media makes us:
1. wary of each other
2. more isolated
3. more dependent on the media for our knowledge about crime and
other social conditions
iii. Media does the following:
1. supplies criminal role models and techniques
2. creates a conducive social atmosphere for the predisposed few to
emulate the crimes they see, hear, and read about
3. provides the theoretical ideas that explain it all to the public while
largely absolving that public of any social responsibility
Chapter Key Terms
copycat crime [83] scripts [85]
generator crime [83] narrative persuasion [86]
priming [85] media-oriented terrorism [94]
Helpful and Interesting Internet Sites
The following sites are interesting sources for this chapter. Please review them before
recommending them to your students.
Media and Terrorism:
http://www.trackingterrorism.org/article/new-terrorism-and-new-media-mass-mediated-terrorism
129
http://psychologyofterrorism.com/subpage6.html
Media and Copycat Crime:
http://people.howstuffworks.com/5-copycat-killers.htm
http://www2.cohpa.ucf.edu/crim.jus/documents/Surettecauseorcatalyst_001.pdf
http://brainz.org/15-films-inspired-real-life-crimes/
