Media's Influence On Crime

Crime rates have an effect on everyone in one way or another. Whether you have experienced criminal activity first hand or have heard of a crime that was committed on some type of mass media resource. According to Jeffrey M. Jones in his article in “Gallup” “Twenty-six percent of Americans say they or another member of their household were the victim of some type of property or physical crime in the last 12 months, ranging from theft to sexual assault, according to Gallup 's index of crime victimization”. Studies have shown that the ethnicity has an effect on the crime rates of a certain neighborhood, the social class of the people who commit crimes, if the offender has juvenile record, the gender of the offender, and whether the media plays …show more content…
According to the article "The Sociology of Crime," it is proven that the media does have an effect of the increasing numbers of crime rates because of several reasons. The most prominent reason that the media plays so much of a role in the increasing rates is because when the media blows up the stories about how someone commits a crime it give other people ideas so that they will feel famous due to the simple fact they could get their face on the news for something they did. Also, according to the article “The Sociology of Crime,” the way that the media portrays the crimes as an acceptable or normal task, and one of the more important issues is that when the aggressor goes unpunished the problem then becomes compounded which then could lead to desensitization and greater likelihood for aggressive behavior. Another thing that the media does is change the statistics on crime rates to make people think that one thing is happening but in reality the opposite is happening. According to “The Sociology of Crime,” the mass media portrays wrong facts to the consumers because they want to make them believe what they want them to. They also blow up stories on crime so that the news becomes more interesting so that they have more people watching the news. An example of this is what has been going on lately about the police brutality on the African American race which has caused riots due to the media. The consumers believe that the just because a white police officer protects himself against an African American victim it is a racial issue because the media has portrayed it that way. All in all, the media portrays criminal stories in the way that will benefit them the most instead of informing the consumers on what they really need to