Six Decades of Media Routinizing Exaggerations Concerns and Fears

Abstract

ABSTRACT Comparing police crime-rates to newspaper reports for a period of over six decades this reasearch first examined crime reporting in the media. Second, it confirmed what we know: location of crime news in the paper (front page, center), reports length, tone, choice of words, gender, race or class issues. Third, it suggests a new challenging insight. Rather than have periodic, discrete crimereports, waves or moral panics, the data indicate that the media maintains inflated, consistent and continuous levels of crime reporting, thereby keeping a relative high level of concern and fear thus normalizing and routinizing these concerns and fears.