NEWS MEDIA INFLUENCE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE

News Media Influence On Criminal Justice

News Media Influence On Criminal Justice

Mass Media and Crime Prevention

Crime prevention through the mass media can take a variety of forms and has the potential to impact crime in different ways. Kate Bowers and Shane Johnson show that the media (publicity) can be used for several purposes: increasing the risk to offenders, increasing the perceived risk to offenders, encouraging safety practices by the public, and reassuring the public. Successful use of the media may result in reduced crime and fear of crime. Examples of the use of media in crime prevention are the Take a Bite Out of Crime campaign, crime newsletters, information lines such as Crime Stoppers, and the recent growth of reality television shows. These efforts attempt to provide varying amounts of crime education, fear reduction, and crime prevention activity that, hopefully, will translate into lower levels of actual crime.

“The Supreme Court is known and referred to as many things such as, the court of judgment, a court of last resort, a court of instance, the high court or the highest court, and the final decision.” The Supreme Court is in most jurisdictions serves as the highest judicial body within that jurisdiction's court system, and whose rulings are final and not subject to further review by any other court. When analyzing the Supreme Court, the perspective of the Chief Justice becomes the generalization for the Court as a whole because, when each new Chief Justice is appointed, the view of the Court tends to change or alter.

The relationship between legitimacy and compliance has also been shown to exist in policing: people who believe that the criminal justice is unbiased, neutral decision-makers who show concern for citizens - including suspects - and do their best to make fair judgments are more likely to support the criminal justice as an institution, to obey officer commands, and even to follow the criminal law in general. Compliance, moreover, springs not from fear of official reprisal but from an internal, moral obligation to abide by society's rules. (Hall, 1980)

The United Kingdom's Way

Such dichotomies are at the heart of how every democratic government uses or abuses its powers, and each country attempts to find the answers in its own way. The following pages describe how the United Kingdom does it and has done it for almost a century, mainly through a system known colloquially as 'the D-Notice System'.1 This system exists for one purpose only: to provide advice to the media and to officials in the United Kingdom about the publication of national security matters.

The D-Notice System has no statutory basis; its use is voluntary for both officials and media, and its advice may be disregarded by them; it is independent in that it answers to neither government department nor media board, and the five senior officials on it are more than balanced by the 16 senior press, broadcasting, publishing and Internet representatives; and it is not perfect either in protecting secrets or in protecting ...