Constructing crime: media, crime, and popular culture/La construction sociale du crime: les medias, le crime et la culture populaire.

• Author: Dowler, Ken

Arguably one of the most significant and potentially illuminating areas of criminological inquiry is the analysis of crime, media, and popular culture.

As residents of a highly technological society undergoing rapid transformations in the conduits for information on crime, we have an increasing array of options in forming our ideas about crime and justice. A staple assertion of introductory texts and lectures is that societal perceptions of crime are formed through exposure to various forms of media, including television, film, video, and Internet services. Our knowledge acquisition has changed dramatically in the past 200 years, from first-hand knowledge of crime and deviance in rural communities and small urban centres to a society in which we are inundated with so much information that it is difficult to assess what specific impacts media have on our ideas and attitudes. Therefore, when we speak of "knowledge of crime," we must also be specific about the type of information we receive and the form in which this information is presented.

Crime is central to the production of news in Canadian society (Dowler 2004a: 574; Fleming 1983, 2006). Although crime is considered newsworthy and often produced as informative, it is also a central component in entertainment in Canadian and North American society. It grips the collective imagination of television viewers, theatregoers, Internet browsers, and readers of true-crime books. Moreover, the boundary between crime information and crime entertainment has been increasingly blurred in recent years through the rise of reality crime shows. Crime as entertainment has cemented a place in popular culture, reflected in all the above-mentioned media formats and beyond. Canadian viewers are now exposed to American reality television shows including American Justice, Cold Case Files, COPS, Court TV, and Dallas SWAT, while "cop" shows focus on the investigation and arrest of suspects for a variety of offences. The First 48 tracks cases through the investigative process, showing the arrest and interrogation of suspects. Court TV presents sensational trials that typically focus on murder, serial murder, or sexual assault. The Nancy Grace Show selectively targets specific kidnappings, sex crimes, or murders, with a particular focus on retribution and punishment. Canada boasts its own equivalent of COPS, the less sensational To Serve and Protect, which follows everyday police patrols in various Canadian cities. Ideas about crime emerge not only from news sources and reality television shows but also from dramatic movies and television shows that adopt crime as their subject. The massive popularity of crime shows has spawned some of the most enduringly popular television series of the 1990s and beyond, including Law & Order, DaVinci's Inquest, and CSI. The enormous appeal of crime as entertainment is also reflected in the many spin-offs of these series, all of which are currently running alongside the original series and their re-runs.

What is particularly disturbing about these crime drama shows is that they are presented as "realistic" portrayals of crime and justice, which further blurs the lines between fiction and reality. In fact, they often borrow storylines from real-life cases and advertise their programs as "realistic" crime portrayals (Eschholz, Mallard, and Flynn 2004)--so much so that the expression "the CSI Effect" has been bandied about by such media outlets as CNN, National Geographic, USA Today, CBS News, and US News and World Report. Simply put, the CSI Effect relates to the popularity of CSI, Criminal Minds, Crossing Jordan, and other programs that portray scientific and forensic evidence-gathering procedures to catch criminals; the "effect" is the rise in expectations of real-life crime victims and jury members. Prosecutors lament the fact that they have to supply more forensic evidence because jurors expect this type of evidence, having seen it on television. Of course, academic studies have yet to reveal the extent of this effect; at the time of this writing, there are no studies that show it to be genuine.

Crime as entertainment/information has significant audience appeal, since some viewers accept crime drama as crime reality. Ray Surette (2007:17) argues that these portrayals can best be described as "infotainment," a highly stylized, edited, and formatted form of entertainment that is disguised as informative or realistic. Thus, the portrayal of crime and justice is blurred, especially within news content, in which the most serious and violent crimes are given an entertaining angle and presented as "hard" news, even though the facts are often distorted or misrepresented. Moreover, studies suggesting that Canadians are more afraid of crime than their American counterparts (see Roberts 2001), despite significantly lower crime and victimization rates, may tell us more about our nation's viewing choices, and have the potential to yield interesting analyses of how people filter news, reality shows, and drama to construct their ideas about crime and the fear of victimization.

There is little doubt that the media have become central in the production and filtering of crime ideas. The selective nature of crime news, for example, with its emphasis on violence and sensationalism--essentially crime as a product, playing to the fears, both imagined and real, of viewers and readers--has produced a distorted picture of the world of crime and criminality. Moreover, another form of media, the true-crime book genre, has seen exponential growth, with hundreds of titles emerging every year. All these sources contribute to the public's unending thirst for information on bizarre and violent crime. It may be truly said that to reach the status of national news crime stories must contain elements of extreme violence or special-interest issues that can be expected to elicit a response in a broad spectrum of media consumers. Beyond this, news stories on crime tend to be highly repetitive in nature, reflecting reporters' tendency to revive well-known stories that can be used to contextualize related stories or "new" developments in the original story. The case of Karla Homolka provides a good example of what Soothill and colleagues (Soothill, Peelo, Francis, Pearson, and Ackerley 2002; Soothill, Peelo, Pearson, and Francis 2004) term "mega cases," that is, cases that enjoy relative longevity in the media because they elicit a very strong response in the potential audience the reporter is writing to. Homolka's case has generated more than 1,100 stories or reports in the Toronto Star since 1995, yielding some measure of both its utility as a tool to draw to audiences and the relative simplicity of repeating well-understood themes, a common practice in journalism (Fleming 1983, 1996, 2006).

The study of media portrayals of crime has broadened substantively in the more than 30 years since the emergence of the modern British wave of crime and media studies (Chibnall 1977; Cohen 1971, 1972; Cohen and Young 1973; Glasgow University Media Group 1978, 1979; Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts 1978; Roshier 1973). In Canada, the research of Richard Ericson, Patricia Baranek, and Janet Chan (1987, 1991) on news organizations and crime in the news ushered in an era of renewed interest in and increasingly diverse studies of crime, media, and popular culture. As scholars continually mined and refined research on emerging issues and media forms from the 1970s to the present, our knowledge of the relationship between crime, media, and popular culture expanded substantively. Mark Fishman's (1978, 1980) and Steven Gorelick's (1989) seminal works on the ideological dimensions of crime waves and police news; Jason Ditton and James Duffy's (1983) study of bias in news reporting; Thomas Fleming's (1981, 1983) articles on the presentation of mentally disordered offenders in the British press and the use of media to create criminals; Joseph Dominick's work (1978) on crime and law enforcement; Inez Dussuyer's (1979) study of crime news in Ontario newspapers; and Drew Humphries' (1981) research began to demonstrate that the construction of crime news is a complex process that requires analysis of a variety of interrelated issues. Research on ownership of the production of news, issues of story choice, and overrepresentation of violent crime (Duwe 2000; Jerin and Fields 1994, Chermak 1995), as well as renewed interest in the production of crime "waves" (Sacco 1995), provided important contributions to the expansion of the field.

Crime has made a dramatic entrance into North American popular culture. Fascination with the "underside" of society and unjustified concerns about the seeming rising of violence in our society have Lombrosian overtones. The need of various groups to see "others" as active participants in criminal cultures, as different, is brilliantly expressed in the arguments presented by philosopher Jeffrey Reiman (2003). The highly skewed presentation of crime stories on U.S. national television news and in leading newspapers highlights stories on select forms of violent crime and crime victims (Cohen and Young 1973; Duwe 2000; Levin and Fox 1996; Gabor and Weimann 1987; Gorelick 1989; Graber 1980; Lofquist 1997). For instance, in a study of local crime newscasts, Kenneth Dowler (2004b) argues that in both Canadian and American newscasts, racial images saturate media portrayals of criminality and victimization; minority crime victims receive less attention and less sympathy than white victims, while crime stories involving minority offenders are rife with racial stereotypes. Essentially, the racial status of the victim is one of the most important elements in the presentation of crime stories (Dowler 2004b; Weiss and Chermak 1998; Sorenson, Manz, and Berk 1998; Dixon and Linz 2000). Dowler (2004b: 94) claims that the common statement "if it bleeds it leads" is not...