Coverage Analysis

Coverage Analysis

Introduction

Safety and ethical news has traditionally important part of the coverage. At the same time, it was found that levels of fear in the population to be victims of crime do not always run in the same direction (or have the same intensity) as the curve marked by the actual occurrence of the crimes. Because of this, political actors and academics have turned their criticism of the media, which are seen as leading to increases in fear and dread of citizenship. It is part of the base so that perceptions of the phenomenon (in the subjective level) must necessarily be tied to crime statistics (at the target). But the truth is that the perception of crime is a quite more complex than plotted for many discussions. The magnitude of the impact of the media in this phenomenon is not a matter of academic consensus.

Therefore, in this paper, the purpose is to provide the readers an advance identifying the main international currents that have come to explore the relationship between media and fear, as well as providing preliminary evidence for KUVE, which is characterized by production frugal studies. In the first part of this paper, we focus on analyzing news coverage of crime, based primarily on a comparative study of the British press (Wisnieski, et. al., 2013). In the second part, we examine the fear of crime and its relationship to the media. 

Discussion

A Distorted Picture of Crime

As many authors have shown in the past two decades, both in Britain and the United States, at least 10% of the news media are related to issues of crime and the justice system. However, there are considerable variations among these studies due to methodological reasons and other objective conditions of the media system. For example, in United States the television news in general, give more attention to the daily crime and, in the case of the press, so with tabloid newspapers regarding quality or broadsheets. Similar differences also appear in the Britain and Australia, where local television coverage exhibits higher levels of crime than national television networks. Studies also show that crime is not reported to occur uniformly since the violent crimes against persons are the most photographed. 

However, although there is a consensus on the characteristics of crime coverage, when it comes to explaining the causes of the phenomenon, the visions are in competition there. In fact, the literature is not possible to establish the development of complex models that integrate both, different types of influence, such as market, political, cultural and organizational values ??of the media (Paranitharan, et. al., 2012). What is found is rather monolithic approaches and, above all, artificial distinctions between external factors (such as political and economic interests) and internal (cultural and organizational determinations).

However, while in developed countries abundant research demonstrating the extent and ways in which the media portrays crime they are pretty slim. The study based on a quantitative analysis of the news, over a month, produced network television newscasts and the five major national daily circulation. The results showed that while in the press for ...