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41 Crime & Delinquency 3 (1995)

handle is hein.journals/cadq41 and id is 1 raw text is: Economic Conditions and Ideologies of Crime in the Media: A Content Analysis of Crime News Melissa Hickman Barlow David E. Barlow Theodore G. Chiricos This study explores the relationship between media portrayal of crime and conditions in the political economy. Based on a content analysis of articles about crime appearing in Time magazine during the post-World War II period, it is argued that news about crime is ideological, that is, it gives an inadequate and distorted picture of the contradictory reality of crime in the context of the capitalist political economy in the United States. The social, political, and cultural significance of media representation of crime and justice is a growing area of criminological inquiry. Among analyses of the content and production of crime news, a number of studies employ the concept of ideology and generally suggest that crime news distorts and/or frames crime and crime control in ways that support institutions of power and authority (Chibnall 1975, 1977; Fishman 1978, 1980; Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, and Roberts 1978; Humphries 1981; Hickman 1982; Christensen, Schmidt, and Henderson 1982; Cavender 1984; Voumvakis and Ericson 1984; Gorelick 1989). Hall et al. (1978), in their extensive discussion of the role of the media in a moral panic about mugging in London in the early 1970s, posited that media representation of the mugging crisis was related to economic and hegemonic crises within the advanced capitalist state. The basic position that media representation is ideological, in that it distorts the problem of crime in ways that support the interests of the capitalist class, has been criticized on a number of grounds. Left realists argue that the MELISSA HICKMAN BARLOW: Assistant Professor, Department of Social Change and Development, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. DAVID E. BARLOW: Assistant Professor, Criminal Justice Program, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. THEODORE G. CHIRICOS: Professor, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology, 1990. CRIME & DELINQUENCY, Vol. 41 No. 1, January 1995 3-19 @ 1995 Sage Publications, Inc. 3 from the SAGE Social Science Collections. All Rights Reserved.

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