Crime is so hot right now
You do not need to look far to find a story covering the latest killing or terrorist attacks happening around the world. It is sprawled across the front pages of our magazines and newspapers, with nightly news reports detailing the horrendous acts of violence, and it is even trending on social media.
The sensationalisation of crime and criminals by the media inappropriately puts these offenders on a pedestal. After the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary school mass shooting Morgan Freeman Observed:
“Flip on the news and watch how we treat the Batman theater shooter and the Oregon mall shooter like celebrities. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris are household names, but do you know the name of a single ‘victim’ of Columbine? Why a grade school? Why children? Because he’ll be remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.”
Unfortunately Morgan Freeman is correct. Our obsession with crime, and criminals that commit them, gives rise to the victims becoming too easily forgotten. Sadly the media’s fascination of criminals is merely fueled by the public’s fixation on these people and incredibly tragic events
Last year Rolling Stone magazine was condemned for placing the face, of 19 year old Dzhoakhar Tsarnaev the ‘Boston Bomber’ on the front cover of their magazine, a right usually reserved for ‘rock stars’ or people of influence and power. However due to the fact that many businesses boycotted selling the issue, Rolling Stone magazine saw their sales double that month due to the fact that one of the ‘Boston Bombers’ was on the front cover. This addresses the issue that terrorist attacks are being carried out on innocent people and reiterates the postmodern idea that each of us are potential victims.
Rolling Stone magazine also defended their decision to run with the photo due to the fact that Dzhoakhar Tsarnaev is approximately the same age as many of their readers, and it is therefore important to examine the complexities of the terrorist issue and gain an insight into how a tragedy such as this could have occurred.
A little closer to home, the popular television series ‘Underbelly’ has dressed up the dirty deeds of criminals. The stylishly shot and slickly edited series consists of grizzly crimes being accompanied by a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack and gratuitous bare breasts, something that has become their trademark. Yet these real life criminals that are being depicted within these shows along with others, are becoming household names and Australian celebrities thanks to the media’s representation of them.
However these examples are merely one aspect of the way in which we observe and deconstruct criminals. Most criminals, or suspects, are instead condemned by tabloids, destroying their reputations.
In 2008 one of Australia’s highest profile trauma surgeons Thomas Kossman, was wrongly accused by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and other media outlets for ‘harvesting’ his patients for money. Kossman was famous for being at the forefront of the treatment of the Bali bombing victims and was head of Melbourne’s Alfred Hospital trauma centre, the countries largest. Yet after being slandered by the media he felt as if his career had been ‘assassinated’, he even had to put his life on hold for three years in order to battle law suit after law suit.
In today’s society it is no longer the fact that someone is innocent until proven guilty, instead it is now guilty until proven innocent. The media need to be mindful of what their tole is and remember that wrongful accusations, or even implications, can devastate a career or a life. In these situations, the blame is not only on the media, but also on society, as viewers and readers drive the content, as they know crime sells… ‘If it bleeds, it leads’.
Our attraction to crime and the media’s need to fuel that has seen an over-representation in crime within the news. Research has found that there is now an over representation of violent crimes, of children and the elderly as victims and of youth as the perpetrators. This format has seen a new creation of moral panic, with the public immediately believing what they have read and heard, directing their outrage at certain groups or individuals.
As a result, the messages about crime that people receive from the mass media are often out of sync with reality. We have now become far too obsessed with the perpetrator and their crime instead of the victims or the ‘truth’.
