CRIME TELEVISION

Gender and sexuality in Crime television with a focus on CSI, Law and order and Murder



Gender and sexuality in Crime television with a focus on CSI, Law and order and Murder

Introduction

Entertainment television has long been enthralled with violence and murder. This paper examines presentations and explanations of murder in three popular prime-time television justice programs - Murder She Wrote, Law and Order, and Murder She Wrote - and compares these mediated presentations with pictures offered by official statistics and established study findings. The potential implications of these television presentations on viewer knowledge and understanding are discussed. The findings propose that murder is presented equitably accurately such that viewers should arrive away with a rudimentary understanding of the nature and circumstances surrounding murder, although they are probable to be somewhat misled that violence is common. In addition, the explanations offered for the commission of murder are heavily individualistic, precluding an adequate sociological understanding of murder by ignoring significant social factors (Dominick, 1973).

Discussion

Television has long been fascinated with crime. Indeed, both news and entertainment television have encompassed crime as a prominent feature over the past some decades. Estep and MacDonald (1984) note, for demonstration, that historically gender and sexuality in prime-time television has devoted at least one-third of its time to crime. Crime and law enforcement programs have virtually littered television programming for the past four decades and have included such diverse programs as “Murder She Wrote”, “Law and Order” and “The Job and C.S.I: Crime Scene Investigation”, this fascination with crime does not appear to be waning (Estep, 1984).

Television's persistent fascination with crime makes a study of contemporary justice shows imperative. The fact that both news and entertainment television have focused on crime and criminal justice means that, for the vast most of us, our exposure to crime, violence and the criminal justice system may be obtained largely through the media other than through personal experience or formal education. Television apparently stands as the most popular and most broadly utilised communication medium and there is little debate that television exerts a powerful leverage as a source of information about contemporary culture in today's society. This, of course, extends to information about crime as well as other social and cultural aspects. If our exposure to crime occurs mostly through mediated communication for example television, then television content, in the form of images and messages, may be a primary force in shaping viewer understanding of crime (Maguire, 1988).

Past analyses of entertainment-based television suggest that crimes of violence for example murder tend to be overrepresented in television programming. Violence furthermore appears to be a common theme in numerous reality-based television shows. The images and messages conveyed by these television programs about violent crime, in particular murder, may ultimately leverage what viewers arrive to believe about violent crime in terms of its prevalence and nature as well as possible explanations for its occurrence (Estep, 1984).

There is some evidence that images of crime offered through television programming are often inaccurate and grossly garbled, ...