Media, Emotions, and Criminal Justice

How the Media Impacts Public Perception

of the Criminal Justice System

 

I am always amazed at how some stories catch on in the media when the facts of a particular followed case is not much different than hundreds of other cases that are current around the same time.  There are far too many kids that come up missing, get abused or get murdered - but every so often one case will come along that becomes sensationalized - and become a regular story on the Greta show or CNN.  One thing I have noticed is that it seems to happen much more often on the TV than in print media.  I think what happens is that an emotional connection is made between the individuals who collectively make up the large audience, and the story.  The people sitting in their living rooms internalize the story between themselves, the news anchor they see every evening, and the relatives of the victim that they get to know through countless interviews.

 The media does have the power to shape the story.  As our class text points out, they have an ethical duty to be responsible in how they report the story (Banks, 2013).  The issue is once a story establishes an emotional bond with an at large audience - the television shows getting higher ratings.  I know I  get the feeling that a lot of stories are overemphasized and hyped - in order to keep or increase ratings.

There is a third piece to this phenomena, and that is politics.  The coming together of media stories, individual emotions that become shared amongst a large audience, and individuals who wish to become voted into office come together in a very dynamic environment.   This phenomena as resulted in things like mandatory minimum sentencing, which has had a great impact on the criminal justice system.  We see unintended consequences that often have to be rectified years or decades later.   Examples are Supreme Court cases which allows the shifting of more discretion back to judges to avoid some of the sentences given out that really don't fit the crime.

 Overall I would hope myself and the larger audience put some thought in how to react to media stories.  Is the story really a broad representation of what we find in real life, or is it focused and packaged in a way that might result in an altered state of reality?

 

Reference

Banks, C. (2013). Criminal justice ethics: Theory and practice (3d. ed.).  Thousand Oaks, CA:  SAGE Publications.