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100
2 votes
Jun 23, 2015

No, our perception of the crime rate would change, however. If the news media reported less crime, the only way you would have of perceiving crime is if it happened to you or someone you know.

The problem is that the news media presents exciting stories because that's what people are willing to watch. "Man's House Is Burglarized While He's At Work" sounds a lot more exciting than "Man Went To Work; Nothing Happened to His House While He Was Gone." But that less exciting headline is about what usually happens to most people.

I think it's fine for news media to report crime, but maybe they ought to add balance to those stories by also showing overall crime statistics so people have a sense of what's usual versus what's unusual.

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100
opinion
2 votes
Jul 10, 2015

I think it would.

I think overexposure to (perceived) threats can have a detrimental effect on the (collective) perception of life. Especially when the viewer is presented with information they can't do anything about. This can create feelings of helplessness, depression, anxiety and/or agression. The (local) news should be about human interest in the most functional sense of the word: "how are things holding up for us and what are the best (most clear) examples of this? Can we perhaps even be so bold as to extrapolate the future from these events or should we leave this to the experts?". Not: "well, our current worldview dictates that drugs are bad and crimes are committed by this particular group so for your peace of mind here are some more examples that support this paradigm."

I don't think the news should be used to influence politics. (Good) politicians can see the gap in the road from a mile away, steer clear of it, and make sure it's fixed afterwards - that's what journalists should report. Not the other way around.

The other side of the coin is that the news should offer (more) follow-up stories. It's actually pretty unnatural to know so much about so many people from so many different countries: every day our attention is grabbed with this imposed sense of urgency by different stories, and most of the time we aren't informed (in my country anyway) how they end.

So why bring it up? Am I supposed to fly over to Nepal and check whether help instances are truly doing their job well? No wait, because chemtrails, migration, unemployment, ageing and low birth rates.

It (spitefully) only makes me more aware of my own situation, and I can imagine the same for people from a low(er) socio-economic background (which is a pretty relative/meaningless term if you ask me).

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100
1 vote
Jun 23, 2015

If certain media refrained from inciting hatred which influences violence, then yes, much crime would decrease.

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100
1 vote
Jun 23, 2015

I believe crime would decrease if the media started reporting more self defense news. It would send a message to the criminals that We The People are tired of being victimized.

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100
User voted No.
1 vote
Jun 29, 2015

Depends on what type of crime. Robberies and Murders and simple things like that should be broadcast sometimes they use it for good, for example with the two guys who broke out of prison and have been on the run in America, they're using it to help show their faces and find them (read more here). for organisations such as ISIS (ISIL) and Al Qaeda, they should not be broadcast on television and almost ignored as that is what they're looking for. They're after the world to watch them commit their crimes and at this stage that's exactly what we're doing.

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100
User voted No.
1 vote
Jun 29, 2015

No, it wouldn't decrease. The crime rate would stay around about the same. If the media decreased reporting crime, then we just wouldn't hear much about it and wouldn't know what is going on in the world. People would be even more oblivious than they already are.

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100
User voted No.
1 vote
Aug 10, 2016

No.

On the one hand, it is true that those who seek out attention might stop committing crime to get that attention. Then again, maybe they would escalate their behavior in order to force the media to speak and to let word of mouth do the work for them. In a world of social media, trying to avoid bad news spreading by keeping it out of "the media" is an inherently ludicrous task. There are no gatekeepers anymore. But even in a pre-social media age, or if social media sites participated in this gagging of all bad news,

On the other hand, many of those who commit crime today would revel in the lack of attention they're getting. From serial killers to terror suspects, without the media reporting on them, the success rate at catching them would decline. The media help deal with crime

Both of these effects are noise-level compared to the bulk of crime. The fact is that the vast majority of crime is committed for much more pedestrian reasons than the desire to seek immortality in the media's memory. People rob, commit burglaries, vandalize, assault, commit battery, defraud, libel, rape and murder for reasons having almost nothing to do with media coverage of anything.

The drivers of crime, at least at a macro-economic level, are very well understood. There's lots of factors, ranging from environmental poisoning like lead (a huge variable in America in particularly) which impacts later behavioral traits to socio-economic variables like poverty and unemployment to the strength of mental health infrastructure, and while there's still a lot of subtlety to suss out and plenty of variables to further understand, we have a pretty robust set of variables that let us understand crime. The media just doesn't rank as a variable in this way. Direct studies of the media do show that more consumption of crime drama does tend to lead to a fear of crime, but the effect is usually weak; moreover, there is a cyclical effect, where someone already predisposed to be interested in and/or afraid of crime for whatever other reasons will watch crime dramas more readily.

Preventing media discussion of the underlying causes of crime, which would count as "bad news", and of crime rates would rob the public of the ability to have an informed response to crime. The media already does a spectacularly bad job there; reducing the amount of information to zero would only allow misinformation to spread even more rapidly and fear to be even more entrenched.

The problem with this question is that it assumes that people are basically drip-fed cows herded by the media. They're not. The media are certainly important and influential in the formation of culture and political attitudes, but people have an array of beliefs inherited from other sources, from their own experience to early peer group socialization to churches and social institutions. Those in turn impact the media too. The media is not some separate cloistered group of people giving commandments from on high: they're people who emerge from our society.

This year is in fact an object lesson on the relative powerlessness of the media to stop someone from using fearmongering and spreading misinformation about "bad news". Many media outlets are loudly indicating to people that crime is going down, and yet demagogues like Trump insist that we're in greater danger than ever. And while some of that can be blamed on conservative media, that too is a cyclical factor: people watch conservative media instead of the media telling the truth about these variables because they already had a conservative predisposition. Moreover, Trump has exceeded even FOX in rampant dishonesty and deliberate sociological illiteracy.

It's not that the media reports "bad news". It's that the media reports "bad news" in a specific way: without context, often with implicit or even explicit racial bias, in order to push ratings and often push specific agendas, leading to bad policies like the Three Strikes laws. If the media did that, we would be more able to deal with crime, yes, but it would still be incumbent upon the population to actually push for and craft sensible crime policy.

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0
0 votes
Jun 23, 2015

No it wouldn't. Also, if the media stopped reporting on a lot of crime, there would be no incentive for politicians and police departments to increase their budgets or their enforcement. Then there is the issue of trust. Not all crime is reported. I'm sure we have all witnessed an accident or actual crime but see nothing about it on TV or in the paper. The media is selective, and tries to put out the most eye catching story they can. However, the public needs to know is there a crime wave happening, what is the cause, and what is being done about it.

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0
0 votes
Jun 23, 2015

The "across the board" crime rate in America is dropping now, and considering that the news is just as misguiding and fear-fraught as ever, then I would say that apparently the news doesn't affect the crime rate.

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