Does Public Fear Affect Personal Behavior?

THESIS STATEMENT: The world’s media today seem to have more violence than ever. Video games have vivid depictions of accident catastrophes, fighting and murder. Television news programs generally lead with a violent story in order to gain an audience. This is free society people can stay what they want. ‘’ Media violence has many negative effect on youth today to commit crimes in society.’’

Assess sociological explanations of the role of the mass media in creating moral panics about crime and deviance:

There is a plethora of crime related movies, TV shows, video games, etc. Violent portrayals of crime are everywhere. As most Americans do not have any personal experience with the criminal justice system, public knowledge of how it operates comes mostly from the media. Dowler (2003) did a study on the relationship between consumption of such media and fear of being victimized by crime. He found that there is, in fact, a relationship and people who consume more of this media are more afraid of crime. “Regular viewers of crime shows are more likely to fear or worry about crime. Similarly, regular crime drama viewers are more likely to hold negative attitudes toward police effectiveness.” (Dowler,

The purpose of this paper is to explore the variables associated with the fear of crime and how serious can crime would be estimate. There are three factors that will be examined in this research. The first is that people have fear of crime by age, martial statues and education. This paper will attempt to explain these variances through literature review. The author of this paper will analyze the data from all three factors that explain the fear of crime and the seriousness. This paper will attempt to explain the seriousness of crime and the seriousness across the variables included. The three control variables that will be used are: Age of fear of crime, marital statues, and education dichotomy. The data indicates that the hypothesis is that when these three variables are included difference are among age and education when fear of crime increase.

The media's primary fixation on unfortunate behavior and viciousness, it absolutely impacts framing individual’s perception of crime by overstating it as well as showing it in a negative way. A part of media which reliably distorts crime i.e. terrorist attacks then different crimes is TV news this is fundamentally a confusing expression; “providing us with the skin of reality loaded down with a lie” (Congress.gov,

Pop culture media, like Law and Order, has a way of showing people how crime is portrayed. Case (2013), mentions that past studies about the representation of crime in the media has increasingly shown fear to the public and portraying unrealistic standards of how crime is in the real world. Media likes to exaggerate how things truly are in the real world, which is why people believe what the media portrays. People will believe that everything they see in a television show can truly happen in the real world, which certain things can happen but not everything. If people end up believing in how the media portrays crime then people will be living in fear of their society being more violent than it actually is (Case, 2013).

Already existing data and research proves that experience higher levels of fear of crime than. The article provides evidence for this and evidence of research that states that there is a correlation between gender and the consumption of crime related media. Combining these two angles of research not only creates a platform for the author's’ argument it creates an undeniable wall of evidence for their claim. The two authors of this article provide the research, the evidence, and then combine the two to provide

Crime is displayed in the media, on television shows, talked about amongst individuals, and seen in many neighborhoods causing many individuals to live fear. Many people begin to live in fear because they believe their likelihood of becoming victimized is high based on what they hear and visualize. In this paper I will be discussing how Fear of Crime is Worse than Crime Itself. I will introduce articles representing people living in fear when there likelihood of becoming a victim of crimes are low. The text book suggest that fear of crime can lead to “withdraws from communities and a breakdown in social relations among people. It can also suppress investment and discourage new business causing neighborhood deterioration and abandonment. Fear of crime causes anxiety and depressions for some individuals (p8).” In my paper I will explore many examples of how fear can lead up to these societal issues.

In his article, Chermak (1998) claims the previous studies completed on the representation of crime in the media contain major breaches in the content examined. Some examples include; how variation in

As (Newburn, 2013) distinguished, fear of crime is fundamental, but often deceptive concept to the

Discuss the influence of press and media in shaping the public's fear about crime. Use examples from recent press and media coverage of crime to illustrate your answer.

The importance given to certain crimes in the daily newspapers and other media sources shows us proof to the fact that crime is a topic that has the public’s interest and is a focus of their worries (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2001). It goes on to discuss the fact that crime as reported on by the media increases the public’s levels of fears and that there is little or no correlation to actual levels of violent crime in our society today.

The media holds a great deal of power in the portrayal of crime within a society; they have the authoritarian right to manipulate events of crime from their perspectives which is illustrated frequently as being reality without a definite underlying cause, therefore inevitably they influence the publics perspective towards crime and current the social order, the main relationship between the media and the crime is the effect it has towards the members of the society I.e creating a moral panic.

I will not say that media are the only responsible of the foolish general attitude of the public toward the crime, but it’s certainly the massive and dominant part

“The worst crime is faking it.” (Kurt Cobain) We use media every day in different forms, younger audience prefers to use social media to stay updated and older audience prefers more reliable sources. Media goes hand in hand with a lot of different issues. It is heavily involved with sexism , objectifying women and also it is closely related to the public 's fear of crime. Miss Representation, the documentary, describes all the ways that media objectifies women. For instance, advertising companies use women’s bodies to sell different kind of products, for example AXE ads where women are practically naked because sex sells. Similarly, media blows details out of proportion resulting in public’s fear of crime. Crime has always been a part of our society, but how is it that it seems to be growing every day. Is crime really increasing or is it that people now are just more aware of it. In addition, does media exaggerate to get its point across and blow little details out of proportion to create public fear of crime? U.S. annual crime report from FBI’s 2014 edition estimated that the number of violent crimes decreased 0.2 percent when compared with data from 2013. Likewise, the number of property crimes decreased 4.3 percent from 2013 as well (2015, September 28). Despite all the statistics, all that media portrays is mass shootings, mass bombings, sexual abuse, murder, rape, kidnapping, child abduction,etc. Why is media and public’s fear of crime so closely tied together? Using