How the Media Represents Crime

Last Updated on September 26, 2026 by Karl Thompson

TSociologists argue that the media give us a distorted picture of crime. The main points are:

1. News values decide which crimes get reported. Jewkes (2004) identifies twelve news values that shape crime news in particular.
2. The media simplify crime. They focus on individual offenders rather than social causes, take the side of the police and victims, and rarely discuss any solution other than tougher punishment.
3. The media exaggerate and sensationalise crime, over-reporting violent and sexual crime in the news and glamorising crime in fiction.
4. The media may cause crime, through imitation, desensitisation and by increasing relative deprivation.
5. The media may increase the fear of crime by exaggerating the risk of becoming a victim.
6. The media can create moral panics about groups labelled as folk devils.
7. New media have created new types of crime, most obviously cybercrime.

The media and crime is part of the Crime and Deviance module, examined on Paper 3 of the AQA’s A-level sociology specification (7192/3). It overlaps with the Media option, but in the crime exam you need to apply the material to crime, rather than write about the media in general.n criticized for overstating urban crime levels, contributing to heightened public anxiety, particularly during election cycles.

News values and crime: Jewkes (2004)

News values are the criteria journalists and editors use to decide whether a story is newsworthy. I cover the general theory in my post on news values. This section is about how they apply to crime.

Yvonne Jewkes (2004) identified twelve news values which shape crime news specifically. The more of these a crime story has, the more likely it is to be reported, and the more coverage it will get.

News value	What it means for crime news
Threshold	A crime has to be serious or dramatic enough to be reported at all, and the threshold is higher for national news than local news
Predictability	Events known about in advance, such as trials and sentencing, are easier to cover because news organisations can plan for them
Simplification	Stories are stripped of shades of grey so that they can be understood quickly
Individualism	Crime is explained through the individual offender rather than wider social or political causes
Risk	Stories focus on the danger to the public and the vulnerability of victims
Sex	Sexual crimes are over-reported compared with other crimes
Celebrity or high-status persons	A crime is more newsworthy if a well-known person is involved
Proximity	Crimes that are close to the audience, geographically or culturally, get more coverage
Violence or conflict	Violent crime is more newsworthy than property crime
Visual spectacle or graphic imagery	Crimes with dramatic pictures or footage get more coverage
Children	Crimes involving children, as victims or offenders, attract particular attention
Conservative ideology and political diversion	Coverage supports deterrence and tough punishment, and distracts attention from wider social problems

The important point for the exam is the consequence. If crime news is selected using these values, it will systematically give the public a distorted picture of what crime is really like, who commits it, and who the victims are.

How the media simplify crime

Several of Jewkes’ news values, especially simplification and individualism, lead the media to present a simplified version of crime. This shows up in several ways.

The focus is on individual criminals, not the social context

Media coverage of crime tends to focus on individual criminals and their psychological states, and often neglects the wider social context that contributes to crime. This lack of sociological analysis reduces complex issues to individual failings rather than structural problems.

For example, coverage of mass shootings in the United States frequently highlights the mental health history of the perpetrator, with minimal discussion of wider factors such as gun laws, economic inequality, or community disintegration. In the UK, media stories often sensationalise youth violence by focusing on the offender’s background and psychology, while leaving out the role of poverty, cuts to youth services and educational inequality.

Personalisation over analysis

Crime stories frequently quote the police, victims and their families, in line with the news value of personalisation: making stories relatable by focusing on individuals. However, experts in criminology, sociology or justice reform are rarely included, which limits balanced analysis.

For instance, during the 2021 Sarah Everard case in the UK, there was extensive coverage of the personal tragedy and of police failures, but relatively little discussion of the wider social issue of violence against women and sexism within institutions.

Emotional and fear-driven reporting

Crime reporting in both the UK and the US is often emotional and angry, prioritising sensationalism over objective analysis. Media narratives rarely consider the actual statistical risk of the public becoming victims of the crimes featured, and this emotional reporting fuels an unrealistic fear of crime.

A contemporary example is how some UK tabloids exaggerate the dangers posed by knife crime, despite crime rates decreasing in some areas. In the US, networks such as Fox News have been criticised for overstating urban crime levels, contributing to heightened public anxiety, particularly during election campaigns.

Limited policy discussion: a focus on harsher punishment

Media narratives around crime typically present harsher punishment as the only solution to criminal behaviour. Alternatives such as restorative justice, rehabilitation or investment in community programmes are rarely discussed, despite considerable evidence that punitive measures are often ineffective at reducing reoffending.

For example, in the UK, debates over rising prison populations often ignore the rehabilitation programmes of Scandinavian countries, where an emphasis on education and reintegration has reduced reoffending. In the US, states like California continue to grapple with mass incarceration without addressing alternatives such as restorative justice.

Crime documentaries take the side of the police

Crime documentaries often take the side of the police, portraying officers as heroes and experts. Programmes like Crimewatch in the UK encourage the public to cooperate with the police, by phoning in tips for example, but do not explore the deeper social causes of crime. Similarly, COPS in the US has long been criticised for glorifying police actions while overlooking poverty, racial bias and police misconduct.

Overlooking the root causes of crime

The underlying causes of crime, such as family breakdown, poverty and child abuse, are rarely addressed in mainstream media. Instead the focus remains on punishment or on surface-level analysis.

For instance, UK news outlets covering gang crime rarely discuss the impact of austerity, youth service cuts or intergenerational poverty. In the US, the opioid crisis has highlighted the neglect of rural communities, but coverage often blames individual addiction rather than healthcare access or economic decline.

Silencing criminal perspectives: the War on Terror

Offenders’ own perspectives are rarely heard in the media, with experts or officials speaking on their behalf. A clear example is coverage of the War on Terror. Over the past two decades, Western media have framed Islamist extremism solely as a threat, without exploring the ideological motivations or grievances that drive radicalisation.

While this is understandably sensitive, failing to engage with these perspectives limits understanding. For example, mainstream outlets such as the BBC and CNN rarely give radical voices a platform to explain their rationale, which might provide insights into preventing extremism.

Political protest

When political protests take place, media coverage often focuses on violence committed by a small minority rather than on the issues being protested about. Reports typically highlight clashes between police and demonstrators, overshadowing speeches, peaceful gatherings and the protesters’ wider message.

For example, during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the US, much mainstream coverage concentrated on looting and confrontations, diverting attention from police brutality and racial inequality. Similarly, in the UK, climate protests led by groups like Extinction Rebellion have been framed as disruptive, with less emphasis on the environmental concerns they highlight.

Exaggeration and sensationalisation

Content analysis consistently finds that the news media over-report violent and sexual crime compared with how common these crimes actually are, and under-report the everyday property crime that makes up most offending. I cover the evidence, including what happens on social media, in a separate post on the exaggeration of violent and sexual crimes in the media.

Fictional crime follows the same pattern. Surette’s ‘law of opposites’ holds that fictional representations of crime are the opposite of what official statistics show, and similar to news coverage. Fiction also tends to glamorise crime and normalise police misconduct, which I look at in my post on the sensationalisation of crime in the media.

Can the media cause crime?

As well as representing crime, the media may play a part in causing it. There are three main arguments.

Imitation. Children and young people may copy the violence they see in the media. Bandura’s Bobo doll experiment is the classic study here. HOWEVER, the experiment has many flaws, and there is little evidence of a direct link between media violence and real-life violence.

Desensitisation. Repeated exposure to violence in the media may make people less shocked by it. The claim is not so much that people become violent themselves, but that they may be less likely to react when they see violence in real life.

Relative deprivation. The media constantly present images of wealth and glamorous lifestyles as normal. Following Merton’s strain theory, this can widen the gap between the goals people are encouraged to pursue and the legitimate means they have of reaching them. Left realists such as Lea and Young argue that this relative deprivation is a major cause of crime, and the media feed it by showing everyone the same consumer lifestyle.

All three arguments rely on a fairly passive view of the audience. The Media module covers the audience models in detail, from the hypodermic syringe model to reception analysis. For the crime exam, the key point is that most people who watch violent or glamorous media do not commit crime, so any effect is at most one factor among many.

I work through how to apply these arguments to a 10-mark exam question in my post on two ways the media may contribute to an increase in crime.

The media and the fear of crime

If the media exaggerate violent crime and the risk of victimisation, one consequence may be that people are more afraid of crime than the statistics justify. Fear of crime has consequences of its own: people who stay at home at night leave fewer people on the streets to informally police them.

HOWEVER, the link is hard to prove. It may be that people who are already afraid of going out stay in and watch more television, rather than television making them afraid. Left realists also argue that fear of crime is often rational, especially among people living in high-crime inner-city areas, so it is not simply a media creation. I look at how the idea has developed in my post on fear of crime and concerns about safety and security.

Moral panics

A moral panic is an exaggerated outburst of public concern over the behaviour of a group, who become labelled as folk devils. The classic study is Stan Cohen’s (1972) work on the Mods and Rockers, which also introduced the idea that media exaggeration can amplify the deviance it reports.

Moral panic theory, folk devils and deviancy amplification are covered in full in my post on moral panics and the media.

New media and cybercrime

New media have not just changed how crime is reported; they have created new opportunities for crime. Some crimes, such as hacking and denial of service attacks, can only take place over computer networks. Others, such as fraud and identity theft, are older crimes that the internet has made easier to commit. I cover this in my post on cybercrime.

Evaluating the media’s role in crime

It is usual in A-level sociology to evaluate one perspective using other perspectives, and the media and crime topic works in the same way.

Marxists argue that the selective focus on working-class street crime serves ruling-class interests. It diverts attention from white-collar and corporate crime, which does more harm in total, and supports tougher policing of the poor. See the Marxist theory of crime. Neo-Marxists such as Stuart Hall go further, arguing that the 1970s moral panic about mugging served to divide the working class along ethnic lines at a time of economic crisis. See my post on neo-Marxist approaches to ethnicity and crime.

Pluralists reject the idea of a deliberate ideological agenda. From a pluralist perspective, the media simply give audiences what they want, and dramatic crime stories sell. The distortion is a by-product of the market, not a conspiracy.

Active audience theories criticise the assumption, shared by many of the arguments above, that audiences passively absorb media messages. If audiences interpret and reject media content, both media-caused crime and media-created fear are weaker than the arguments suggest.

Finally, the media do not only distort crime. Appeals for witnesses, CCTV images and programmes like Crimewatch help the police solve crimes, so any evaluation should recognise that the relationship between the media and crime runs both ways.

Exam application

Media and crime is examined on Paper 3 (7192/3), so remember that it is a crime paper, not a media paper. Use media concepts where they help, but anchor your answer in crime and deviance theories.

For a worked 10-mark answer using an item, see two ways the media may contribute to an increase in crime.

For a 30-mark essay on the relationship between the media and crime, a workable plan is:

• Introduction: sociologists see the media as distorting crime, possibly causing it, and possibly increasing fear of it
• Representations: Jewkes’ news values, simplification, the over-representation of violent and sexual crime
  • Evaluate: pluralists see this as audience demand, not bias
• Moral panics: Cohen’s Mods and Rockers, folk devils and deviancy amplification
  • Evaluate: audiences are more media-literate today, and some concerns labelled moral panics may be justified
• The media as a cause of crime: imitation, desensitisation, relative deprivation
  • Evaluate: the evidence for direct effects is weak, and audiences are active
• Fear of crime: exaggeration of risk
  • Evaluate: left realists argue fear can be rational; causation is hard to establish
• Marxist and neo-Marxist views: the focus on street crime diverts attention from crimes of the powerful
• Cybercrime: new media create new opportunities for crime
• Conclusion: take a position on how far the media shape crime and perceptions of crime, rather than summarising

Crime and deviance revision notes

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my crime and deviance revision notes bundle – which contains the following:

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Signposting and related posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying the crime and deviance topic, as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course.

The next post to read is moral panics and the media, which covers Stan Cohen’s study of the Mods and Rockers and the idea of deviancy amplification.

For the evidence on media distortion, see the exaggeration of violent and sexual crimes in the media and the sensationalisation of crime in the media.

What is Cybercrime? looks at the new types of crime that new media have made possible.

For the wider theory of how the media work, see the Media hub.

Please click here to return to the Crime and Deviance hub.

Please click here to return to the homepage – ReviseSociology.com