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Chapter 9
The Media and Criminal Justice Policy
Chapter Objectives
After reading Chapter 9, students should:
1. understand the link between media content and criminal justice policy
2. comprehend the policy effects of the backwards law
3. know about the media’s crime-and-justice ecology
4. appreciate how immanent justice underlies media crime and justice portrayals
5. learn how technology is advanced as a crime-fighting tool
6. see that the assessment of criminal justice policy is based on faulty information
7. recognize how the public crime-and-justice agenda, beliefs about criminality, and
attitudes toward policy are influenced by the media
Chapter Outline
I. Slaying Make-Believe Monsters
a. The cumulative result of the media’s construction of crime, crime fighters, courts,
corrections, and crime control are punitive criminal justice policies as the media
mainstay for dealing with crime
i. When the dominant media portrait is of predatory offenders committing
violent crimes in continuous battle with the criminal justice system,
nonpunitive policies come across as naïve
b. The concepts of due process and crime control serve as conceptual frames for
understanding the criminal justice system, its goals, and the mass media’s effects
on the system
i. Due process model
ii. Crime control model
1. The criminal justice system is perceived as an assembly line along
which defendants should be processed as quickly and as efficiently
as possible
2. Primary goal = to punish criminals and to deter crime
3. Key determination = factual guilt (decided early in the process in
accordance with the perceived strength of evidence and police
judgment)
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iii. Both models describe organizational case flows and are useful for
understanding the conflicting perceptions that exist within the criminal
justice system regarding the mass media and their impact on crime and
justice policy
1. Even if people agree on the effects of the mass media on the
criminal justice system, they may disagree as to whether these
effects are good or bad
a. The same media effect—such as making it more difficult
for the police to conduct evidence searches—can be seen
by some observers as promoting due process and therefore
good, while other observers see it as hindering crime
control and therefore bad
2. Media portraits forward one model and disparage the other
a. Usually forwarding the crime control model
II. Media Crime-and-Justice Tenets
a. Two crime-and-justice tenets provide insight into the way criminal justice as a
social issue is constructed
i. The first tenet is the “backwards law,” which is associated with a
particular crime-and-justice “ecology”
ii. The second tenet is the “rule of immanent justice,” which paradoxically is
associated with an enhanced view of technological solutions to crime
iii. The two media-constructed tenets have the police imbedded in a randomly
violent environment where:
b. The Backwards Law
i. Media construct and present a nonrealistic crime-and-justice world
1. Whatever the truth about crime and the criminal justice system in
America, the entertainment, news, and infotainment media seem
determined to project the opposite
a. True in every category including:
i. Crimes
ii. Criminals
iii. Crime fighters
iv. Attorneys
v. Correctional officers
vi. Inmates
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vii. The investigation of crimes and making of arrests
viii. The processing and disposition of cases
ix. The experience of incarceration
2. The wildly inaccurate and inevitably fragmentary images and facts
found in the entertainment and infotainment media reflect this law
most clearly
a. They provide a distorted reflection of crime within society
and an equally distorted reflection of the criminal justice
system’s response to crime
b. The lack of information leads to demonizing of the criminal
justice system
c. The result is the exacerbation of the public’s lack of
understanding of crime and justice while constructing a
skewed portrait of criminal justice reality
ii. The backwards law also applies to crime-and-justice news content
1. The criminal justice system and its component parts are seldom the
subject of news reports
a. When the explicitly referred to, it is usually the courts that
are portrayed, not as institutions but as backdrops to present
information about individual cases
2. Seldom are broader system issues covered
a. References to sentencing are reported within stories about
an individual receiving a sentence, most often prison
1. when crime prevention does get covered, the
coverage is usually negative
3. The end result is news that approaches criminal justice policy from
the bottom up—that is, as the piecemeal, cumulative result of a
focus on individual crimes and individuals rather than as a
coherent, system of justice
4. Formatting of news stories
a. Episodic format: treats stories as discrete events (a crime is
described and a resulting case is followed)
i. Episodic formatted stories encourage viewers to
place responsibility for social problems totally on
individuals and to ignore possible societal forces
b. Thematic format: highlights trends, persistent problems, or
other systematic phenomena (a crime-and-justice issue or a
category of crimes is explored)
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i. A set of problems have developed, what changed in
society?
c. The entertainment media reflects the same dichotomy,
concentrating on events more than issues
i. By being episodic rather than thematic, the media
reinforce the popular view that says:
1. crime is caused by individual choices
2. punitive, harsh deterrent-based policies are
the only effective response
5. The media therefore supply a large amount of information about
specific crimes and convey the impression that criminals threaten
the social order and its institutions with imminent collapse
a. Media provide less information to help the public
comprehend the larger society-wide forces that underlie
individual crimes and cases
6. Rare is the thematic interpretative analysis that places criminal
justice information in the contexts of history, sociology, or politics
a. In the absence of system-wide information, the public is
left to build its own picture of the effectiveness of current
criminal justice policies and the desirability of newly
offered ones
iii. Most media evaluations of the criminal justice system are implicit rather
than explicit.
1. They indirectly convey references
a. To the ability or inability of the system to apprehend
specific criminals
b. To convict and punish them when they are apprehended,
and
c. To return them to society reformed and deterred
2. When queried, the public ranks
a. Police as good to fair
b. The courts as fair to poor
c. Corrections as poor
3. The media’s construction of the criminal justice system appears to
a. Lead the public to evaluate the overall system poorly
b. While paradoxically leading the same public to increase
support for crime-and-justice policies so long as they are
crime control and law enforcement oriented.
4. This paradox has been attributed
a. To the public’s view of street criminals as the most
pressing crime image
b. To media depictions that show curable deficiencies in the
justice system and personality defects in individuals as the
main causes of apparently rampant crime
5. Within this paradox, the faulty system frame has done the best in
the media
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a. Not surprisingly, researchers have found that most people
who pay regular attention to the media support as their first
policy choice criminal justice reforms that would toughen
and strengthen the existing system
i. This is true even though these same people place a
large share of the blame for current crime levels on
the existing criminal justice system
ii. The media implicitly suggest that improving it, at
least as a law enforcement and punitive system, is
the best hope against the many violent crimes and
predatory criminals that are portrayed
iii. From the backwards law emerges a recurrent
picture of social reality that disparages social
structure solutions while constructing a particular
social structure regarding crime and justice
c. The Crime-and-Justice Environment in the Media
1. The social dynamic underlying the media image of crime – an image
that has not substantively changed over the hundred-plus-year history of
the modern media – is populated by wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs
a. Evil and cunning predator criminal wolves create general
mayhem
b. Prey on weak, defenseless – and often stupid – victim sheep
(women, the elderly, the general public)
c. While good crime-fighting hero sheepdogs (usually middle class,
white, and male) intervene and protect the sheep in the name of
retributive justice
2. In a subtle shift
a. The earlier predatory but rational criminal wolves have become
unpredictable, irrational mad dogs
b. While over the years the protective noble sheepdogs have
become wolf-like rogues and vigilantes for whom the law is an
impediment to stopping crime
c. Heroes and villains become more alike and less human.
3. Today’s media-constructed crime-and-justice ecology is populated with
ideal offenders, victims, and heroes
a. Ideal offenders: are the outsiders, strangers, foreigners, aliens,
and intruders who lack essential human qualities
i. Offenders have become generic others and as such can
never be rehabilitated or resocialized
b. Ideal victims: are the innocent, naïve, trusting, obviously-in–
need-of-protection true human
i. Children are the archetypal innocent victims and key
symbols in the media’s social construction of crime
c. Ideal heroes: are capable of great violence similar to the ideal
offender, but also display the additional admirable human
qualities of sacrifice and strength
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i. When these ideal types combine, memorial legislation
can result (see Box 9.1)
4. By depicting this predatory violent social environment, the media
project message to the audience concerning:
a. whom to trust
b. whom to victimize
c. how victims and criminals should act
d. The consistent message is that crime is caused by predatory
individuals
e. Combating these predators requires a special person who is:
i. equally tough
ii. predatory
iii. an unfettered crime fighter (most important)
f. Criminality is an individual choice and other social, economic, or
structural explanations are irrelevant and can be ignored
g. The public is shown that
i. counterviolence is the most effective means of combating
crime
ii. due process considerations hamper the police
iii. in most cases, the law works in the criminal’s favor
h. The public is further instructed to fear others because criminals
are: i. not always easily recognized
ii. often are rich
iii. often powerful
iv. often in positions of trust
5. This constructed social environment, combined with the emphasis on
investigations and arrests – the front end of the criminal justice system –
ultimately promotes pro-law enforcement and crime control policies
a. “Quick fixes” are supported over preventive long-term
approaches
b. Harsher punishments and more law enforcement (depicted as
being the most effective responses) entail expansion of the
existing criminal justice system
c. Underlying this construction is a persistent, if often unstated,
explanation of crime
i. Crime is caused by predatory personality traits, such as
innate greed and violence
d. The only valid approach to crime:
i. dramatic, individual action
ii. action that emphasizes violence and aggression
iii. actions with a preference for weapons and sophisticated
technology
e. By portraying criminality as innate and crime as an act of nature,
the logical response is found in:
i. Revenge
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ii. Punishment
iii. immanent justice
d. The Media Dynamic of Immanent Justice
i. Immanent justice: is the belief that a divine higher power will intervene,
and reveal and punish the guilty while protecting the innocent
1. The operation of divine intervention in the media becomes most
clear in entertainment gunplay
a. Sinful, evil criminals miss or inflict benign flesh wounds
b. Blessed, good crime fighters hit and kill
2. Modern media reality relies on the moral superiority of the crime
fighter to ultimately defeat criminality
3. Lessened as a social problem, criminality is reduced to an
individual moral battle
a. Sin must be resisted and sinner punished
4. This good versus evil perspective on crime and justice is also
reflected in the common media crime fighter who is motivated by
personal injury and revenge; upholding the law is secondary to
individual retribution
a. The associated media-constructed crime-and-justice
policies gain support from our basic cultural values:
i. free will
ii. individualism
iii. personal responsibility
b. Crime is further diminished as a social problem, and
instead, it becomes a theological one, albeit not without a
role for technology
ii. Technology Enhances Immanent Justice
1. In contrast to their focus on individual factors as the cause of
crime, the media do portray some collective responses to crime as
effective, but only if they are technology based.
2. Immanent justice is often helped along by technology and gadgets
a. If God is not handy, then a good engineer or scientist will
do
b. In the media, the good guys are often helped by some smart
guys
3. Within the portrait, it makes sense to
a. ignore social and structural sources of conflict, such as
i. racism
ii. sexism
iii. economic inequality
b. focus on solutions requiring more
i. equipment
ii. manpower
iii. resources
4. Unfortunately, for true social problems like crime, technology-
based solutions do not work
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e. Real-World Crime and Justice Problems
i. In the real world, social problems come bundled together – crime is found
with
1. poverty
2. unemployment
3. poor health
4. poor schools
5. high divorce rates
6. high out-of-wedlock pregnancy rates
7. community decay and deterioration
8. drug use
9. illiteracy
10. high school dropout rates
ii. Communities and societies that experience one of these problems tend to
experience most if not all of them together
iii. Unfortunately, the media present crime as largely autonomous from other
social problems and not as linked to them in any serious way
1. With its individually rooted causes, crime is constructed as an
autonomous plague on society, its genesis not associated with other
historical, social, or structural conditions
2. It follows that criminological theories that are individually focused
gain more support from the media’s construction of crime and
justice than do group or culturally focused theories
a. Retribution and deterrence are trumpeted; rehabilitation and
social reform are belittled
iv. The end product from a constructed backwards world of immanent justice,
where policy is steered by divine intervention and derived from contests
between good and evil individuals is, ironically, a preference for high-tech
policies
1. Does the public make the connection between the content they see
and the policies they support?
2. Do they even pay attention to the implicit messages?
III. Criminal Justice Policy and Media Research
a. This section looks at the relationship between media and criminal justice policy,
examining the pathways that connect them:
i. The effects on crime’s rank on the list of social problems
ii. Attitudes about the world as mean and dangerous
iii. Fear of crime
iv. Counterproductive and anticipatory effects
b. Crime on the Public Agenda
i. Can the media, by emphasizing or ignoring topics, influence the ranking
of issues that are important to the public?
1. The hypothesis is that people will tend to judge a social issue such
as crime as significant to the extent that the media emphasize it
a. If true, in time the media will construct the public agenda
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2. When a correlation is looked for between media attention and
public concern, a weak to moderate relationship is found
3. However, evidence of a direct, linear relationship has not emerged
from the research
a. The media’s influence is seldom direct and is more often
modified through multiple steps and social networks
ii. As the research now stands, a media effect on the public’s agenda is
generally acknowledged, but is usually regarded as unimportant
1. An extension of the interaction between the media and criminal
justice policy called ‘indexing’ happens when policymakers
influence what the media pay attention to
2. The research indicates that media effects
a. are variable
b. appear to increase with exposure (those who are exposed to
the media content mirror the media ranking of issues more
closely)
c. are more significant the less direct experience people have
with an issue
d. are more significant for newer, concrete issues than for
older abstract ones
e. diminish quickly
f. are nonlinear, sometimes reciprocal, and highly interactive
with other social and individual processes
3. Specifically, regarding crime and justice, the media emphasis on
crime and associated claim about the nature of crime have been
credited with
a. raising the public’s fear of being victimized
b. giving crime an inappropriately high ranking on the public
agenda
4. It is felt that crime’s high ranking also
a. encourages moral crusades against specific crime issues
b. heightens public anxiety about crime
c. pushes or blocks other serious social problems, such as
hunger or health care, down or off the public agenda
c. Beliefs and Attitudes about Crime
i. The second question is whether exposure to crime-and-justice claims in
the media affect a person’s beliefs and attitudes about crime
1. For example:
a. the claims about crime a person accepts as true
b. the feelings about crime a person believes to be justified
2. George Gerbner and his colleagues investigated the association
between watching large amounts of television and general
perceptions about the world
a. They developed the “worldview cultivation” hypothesis
i. Worldview cultivation: the hypothesis that through
exposure to television’s content most everyone
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comes to have a similar media-constructed view of
the world
b. The world cultivation hypothesis was amended to
“mainstreaming”
i. Mainstreaming: the hypothesis that the media affect
some viewers more than others regardless of
exposure level
ii. They now argue that the media are:
1. homogenizing society
2. influencing those heavy television
consumers who are currently not in the
mainstream to move toward it
3. while not affecting those already in the
mainstream
iii. The significance and extent of a media
mainstreaming effect has yet to be determined
ii. One factor that has emerged as important in determining the impact of the
media is the local environment of the media consumer
1. Local conditions and family context in which media information is
obtained influence the acceptance or rejection of media-based
claims about crime and justice
a. Media-based claims are expected to have less impact on
beliefs about crime among those who have had direct
neighborhood experience with crime
2. If one’s world truly is mean, the media will have less effect on
one’s view of the world
a. This conclusion is consistent with the general social
construction proposition that media effects are most
powerful for issues that are outside of your personal
experiences or experienced reality
iii. The most relevant crime-and-justice attitude that has been linked to the
media is fear of criminal victimization
1. Fear-of-crime levels are socially important because they encourage
a. support for punitive criminal justice policies
b. increased personal social isolation
2. Viewing television crime shows, for example, has been found to be
related to
a. fear of crime
b. perceived police effectiveness
c. opposition to gun control
d. negative perceptions of sentencing, recidivism, parole and
probation
3. Currently, research suggests that media exposure to crime content
is more strongly related to fear about distant seldom visited places
than to fear about local personal victimization
4. It also follows that media consumption is more strongly related to
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a. fear of general social violence than to fear of personal risk
b. fear of urban areas more than fear of nonurban areas
iv. What does this research say about people’s beliefs and attitudes about
crime?
1. Heavy media consumers do share certain beliefs about high
societal crime and victimization levels
a. A socially constructed world is seen as being more violent
and dangerous – and feared
2. The most common effects are
a. increased beliefs in the prevalence of
i. crime
ii. victimization
iii. violence
b. increased societal attitudes of
i. cynicism
ii. distrust
3. The media’s portrayal of crime and justice thus defines a broad
public reality of crime
d. Crime-and-Justice Policies
i. The next question is whether the resulting beliefs and attitudes translate
into support for specific crime and justice policies
ii. Understanding the relationship between the media and the formation of
criminal justice policies is important because media effects translate into
1. how tax monies are spent
2. what actually happens to offenders and victims
a. Victorious, policy-influencing claims makers gain
i. power
ii. resources
iii. ownership of a core social issue
3. Recognizing this, they work diligently to garner media attention
and favor
iii. It is also important to distinguish the effect of the media on criminal
justice policy formation from their effect on preexisting popular crime and
justice attitudes
1. Two ways the media influence criminal justice policy:
a. by legitimizing and amplifying nascent punitive public
attitudes
b. by helping to create those attitudes
iv. Research has shown that the media can directly affect what actors in the
criminal justice system do without having to first change the public’s
attitudes or agenda
1. However, predicting the direction and magnitude of the media
influence in specific situations is difficult
v. There are three media-criminal justice policy relationship models (See
Box 9.4).
1. Direct media influence
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a. The media may actually be the cause of a criminal justice
policy change (model A)
2. No media influence external event
a. Conversely, an external event may be the cause, while the
media simply covers the event prior to the policy change,
which would have occurred without media attention Model
B)
3. Simultaneous media influence external event
a. Or the media’s coverage of an external event and the event
may both be influencing the criminal justice policy (model
C)
vi. The available research indicates that among criminal justice officials, even
more than among the public, the media significantly influence both policy
development and support
1. Effects are multidirectional, and media content, the timing and
presentation of the claims, and the characteristics and concerns of
the general public, claims makers, and the criminal justice policy
makers interact to determine the media’s influence on criminal
justice policies
2. Misinformation pervades the interplay between crime, politics, and
public opinion
3. In what has been called crime control theater, claims makers
exploit misinformed public opinion
a. Effects range from broad, far-reaching policy crusades and
criminal legislation to specific narrow influences on
decisions in individual cases
vii. Unexpected effects arise from the novel manner in which the media relate
to criminal justice policy, and three types appear: echo effects,
counterproductive results, and anticipatory reactions
1. Echo effects: refers to a tendency for officials to treat defendants in
unpublicized cases harshly if the press has been demanding such
treatment for defendants in publicized cases
a. The existence of echo effects portends an influence
spillover from the coverage of newsworthy criminal cases
onto nonpublicized ones
i. Diffused but pervasive systemic media effects on a
large number of unpublicized cases are likely
2. Counterproductive effects: occurs in situations where media
attention results in unanticipated consequences, usually involving a
crime reduction program
a. Some media-based anticrime campaigns have been found
to have effects opposite to the campaign goals
3. Anticipatory effects: seem to reverse the causal order of media
attention and criminal justice policy change
a. Among criminal justice officials, responses to the media
can be either reactive or proactive
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i. They may react to what they have seen and heard in
the media
ii. They may act in anticipation of what they expect to
find in the media
1. The effect on policy occurs before any
observable change in media content
2. Criminal justice system officials respond in
a proactive manner to anticipated media
coverage, perhaps due to seeing negative
media coverage of a criminal justice practice
in a distant jurisdiction
a. The official initiates a new policy or
fails to implement a requested police
to avoid expected negative media
attention
b. This cancels the potential coverage
viii. The task of determining and studying a media policy effect is daunting
1. The unpredictability makes it difficult to determine the direction
and magnitude of influence or to specify the mechanism through
which the media’s influence is being exerted
2. Media-related changes can be
a. in anticipation of the media attention
i. as when prosecutors decide to increase DUI
prosecutions to head off potential negative publicity
b. in anticipation of a policy being changed
i. as when prosecutors decide to pursue harsher
sentences for drunk drivers due to the echo effect
from a highly publicized DUI case
c. due to a criminal justice policy change directly lobbied for
by the media
i. as when DUI prosecutions increase due to an
investigatory media series suggesting that lenient
treatment for DUI offenders is common
3. There is the real possibility of one effect occurring to prevent a
second effect
a. In such a case, a preemptive decision to not change an
established policy in favor of a new policy might occur so
as to avoid the anticipated negative media coverage
generated by the appearance and subsequent waning of an
announcement effect of the (now rejected) new criminal
justice policy
IV. The Social Construction of Crime-and-Justice Policy
a. The ultimate impact of social constructionism on criminal justice is found in its
implication for criminal justice policy
i. It is with our crime-and-justice policy decisions that we decide how we are
going to collectively
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1. respond to crime
2. deal with offenders
3. spend our taxes
ii. The media’s role is not praised
1. “We have a public dialogue that is segmented and reduced to
sound bites, content that dulls an increasingly inattentive populace,
and media that provides feedback via call-ins, Internet polls, and
narrow constituencies”
iii. Figure 9.1 lays out the relationship between the media, social
constructionism, and criminal justice policy
1. Media’s Crime-and-Justice Content
a. Especially crime and justice narratives, symbolic crimes,
and media-disseminated crime information
b. Needed to create factual and interpretative claims
2. Social Construction of Reality Process
a. Determines which competing constructions are favored by
the public; media-savvy social constructionists favored
b. Providing the arena for the crime-and-justice social
construction competition to be held, thereby favoring
media-savvy claims makers
3. Social Attitudes, Perceptions, and Behaviors
a. What we agree to believe about crime and justice, such as
the faulty system frame and predator criminal as
representative of criminality
b. An overly lenient justice system is also popular
4. Criminal Justice Policy
a. Behaviors we criminalize and decriminalize and the
punitive and corrective actions we take
b. How policies are presented and perceived determines
whether they are supported or opposed and media
constructed crime waves are sometimes transformed into
real-world criminal justice policies
b. The media are not the most important factor in the construction of crime and
justice policy, but their influence cannot be ignored
i. The media are not often found to be direct causes of criminal justice
policy shifts but they function as part of a larger social matrix that
generates and preserves the dominant attitudes about crime and justice
ii. Beyond policy formation, the media also are important for the spread of
criminal justice policies
1. A recent review of the literature on the diffusion of criminal justice
policies reported that media attention was a significant factor in
whether a criminal justice policy was adopted in other jurisdictions
2. They remain influential because their content regarding social
problems resonates strongly with the emotional framework of the
public
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a. Perceptions of crime and justice appear to be intertwined
with other social perceptions, and perceptions of crime and
justice are part of a larger construction of the nature and
health of society
i. If perceptions of crime are intricately related to
broader perceptions of the world, it is unrealistic to
expect that they would change solely in accordance
with media presentations of crime
iii. If there is a general media effect on criminal justice policy, it is to increase
punitiveness and surveillance as the first and sometimes only policy
choices
1. A punitive policy effect, however, need not be the default impact
of the media
a. there is evidence that when media framing of capital
punishment shifted from supportive to portraying capital
punishment as flawed an associated downward shift in
public support for executions followed
c. For the most part though, the image of justice that most people find the most
palatable and popular is the image that the media have historically projected
i. True for:
1. The entertainment elements of the media
2. The news elements of the media
3. The infotainment elements of the media
ii. The repeated message in the media is
1. that crime is largely perpetrated by predatory individuals who are
basically different from the rest of us
2. that criminality is predominantly the result of individual problems
3. that crimes are acts freely committed by individuals who have a
wide range of alternate choices
iii. This image:
1. locates the causes of crime solely in the individual criminal
2. supports existing social arrangements and approaches to crime
control
3. allows crime to be more easily divorced from other social
problems
4. highlighted crime as society’s greatest threat
iv. In the end, crime-and-justice media advances system-enhancing crime
control policies to address individual-level deficiencies
d. Not surprisingly, the overriding concern involves the image of the criminal justice
system that the media constructs and the public receives
i. Learning about the criminal justice system from the media is analogous to
learning geology from volcanic eruptions.
ii. The media-constructed reality contrasts starkly with the criminal justice
system’s daily reality
1. predatory crimes versus property crimes
2. high-stakes trials versus plea bargaining
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3. violent riots versus order maintenance
iii. The public is shown that the traditional criminal justice system is not
effective and is simultaneously told that its improvement remains the best
solution to crime
iv. These messages translate into
1. support for order over law
2. punishment over rehabilitation
3. criminal justice based over non-criminal-justice-based policies
v. This portrait has led to concern
1. Fear and fatalistic acceptance of crime
2. mystification of the criminal justice system
3. myopic support for punitive criminal justice policies
4. increased tolerance for illegal law enforcement practices
e. How could the media portray crime and justice better?
i. On the criminal justice system side, system impact statements have been
recommended as required accompaniments for new crime related
legislation as counterbalances to the emotion driven waves that push
through ill-conceived new legislation
ii. On the media side, the news media have the experience and a coverage
model to adopt if they want to improve
1. The media are able to provide comprehensive, contextual coverage
for sporting events on a daily basis
a. Sports coverage stands as a model for
i. reporting on individual events
ii. supplemented by
1. statistics
2. trend analysis
3. forecasts
4. commentary
5. discussion
b. Sporting events are consistently placed by the media in
their larger social context and constructed in a way that
provides both historical understanding and current
significance
i. Covering justice like sports would provide the
public with a counterbalance
iii. Sports, however, are covered in breadth and depth because there is a
strong public demand and interest
1. Lacking a similar incentive regarding criminal justice, there is no
reason to expect the commercial media to direct their limited
resources to delivering an expanded justice portrait
a. Lacking a large enough market, they cannot afford to do it
b. The most profitable content follows entertainment
narratives, formatting, and frames
c. Whether in news, infotainment, or entertainment, this
profitable content carries imbedded messages about
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criminal justice polices and encourages public support for
policies that will fix and enhance what some view as the
“faulty” criminal justice system while discouraging support
for other approaches
i. Some hold out hope that new social media can
reverse this tendency
Chapter Key Terms
episodic format [206] public agenda [214]
thematic format [206] worldview cultivation [214]
ideal offenders [207] mainstreaming [215]
ideal victim [208] echo effect [218]
ideal hero [208] counterproductive effects [218]
immanent justice [186] anticipatory effects [219]
Helpful and Interesting Internet Sites
The following sites are interesting sources for this chapter. Please review them before
recommending them to your students.
Criminal Justice Policy
http://www.cjpf.org/index.html
http://www.cjcj.org/
http://www.urban.org/justice/index.cfm
Media Issues
http://www.victimsofviolence.on.ca/rev2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id
=352&Itemid=42
Justice and Journalism
http://www.justicejournalism.org/