Media Issues
We get most of our information about crime stories from the media. Often the media get blamed for sensationalising crime. Are they making us all scared for no reason other than to sell papers? Or are journalists just giving us the stories we want?
To investigate how different media reports can frame things, get the students to collect stories about a particular crime story over the course of a week or month (or, they can simply check internet archives of papers).
- Activity – media analysis
- Discussion – censorship or sensationalism?
- Discussion – what makes a good story?
- Discussion – why crime news, and for whom?
Get the students to work in groups and compare a few stories on the same issue to find out how the “framing” of a story effects what we take from it.
Things they can look out for and record:
- The language used.
- The particular facts put into the story.
- How much space the article is given.
- Where in the paper it is presented.
- The headline in particular (how big is it, what words does it use, how well does it sum up the story?).
- Whether any experts are referred to and how.
Bringing the class together to get the groups to share their research with everyone else is a good prompt for discussion of wider media issues. Some discussion topics, with links to media stories to use as resources, are suggested below.
Discussion – censorship or sensationalism?
Here’s an interesting case study to get the class thinking about what makes “good” crime reporting.
A mid-Somerset newspaper started reporting lists of crimes, they said it was to keep their readers informed of crime trends and warn them if lots of burglaries happening in their area.
The local police objected because they said reporting all the crimes (and reporting them just in a list rather than with the context of a story) would only act to increase the readers’ fear of crime. They changed the way they released the information to the press, to try to make them report it in what they thought was a more “responsible” way.
The editor of the paper responded by saying the police were trying to “gag” him and defended his reporting by suggesting that putting all the crime stories in one part of the paper actually acted to stop the readers getting too scared. You can read a full story of the event from BBC-i news
Some questions to ask the class:
- Do we want/ need to know everything about crime; would society be better off if we could just ignore it?
- Who knows best about how crime should be reported (the journalists, the police, someone else or a mixture of people)?
- Is it better to read crime reports as lists statistics or as more fully developed stories?
Discussion – what makes a good story?
From comparisons of different reports of the same crime story, get the students to imagine they are journalists and think what sort of things they would be looking for in a good story.
Would a journalist prioritise picture opportunities, people their readers will identify with, reliable and authoritative sources or celebrities, bad news or good news?
As a class, make a list of what a journalist wants from a story. Media studies people call these sorts of lists “news values”. Get the class to think about the effect of such news values, how they shape and frame the news we get. Are the media giving us the stories we want, the stories they think we want or the stories the police want us to get?
Discussion – why crime news, and for whom?
From the class’ research into crime news stories, choose one particular story, preferably one about a crime that is still under investigation, and spend a little time discussing its content.
Then divide the students into four groups:
- Journalists
- General public who don’t know anyone involved
- The police
- People involved in the crime (e.g. the family of a victim)
Get each group to think about what sort of information they would like to be in the news reporting of this crime, and why. Then get bring the class together for discussion to see if and how the different interests clash.Which group is the most important (if any)?