crime and the media

MY CONSUMPTION OF CRIME MEDIA

I think my fascination with crime began as a child watching gangster films. I was fascinated with the lives the characters in films like Scarface and Goodfellas lived- they were seemingly above the law and lived the life they wanted to, regardless of "the rules". Needless to say I thought this was pretty cool. Fortunately though, I was able to leave my fascination with crime to watching films and documentaries and reading books about the topic, although I do still have somewhat of a creepy fascination with serial killers. This is not always the case for kids who show an interest in the area of crime, which leads me to my more recent interests regarding crime. I became more and more interested in the views people hold on crime and criminals and particularly in the views of those people who take the approach that 'the rules are the rules and shouldn't be broken' - if someone commits a crime they ought to be punished, regardless of the circumstances preceding the event (more often than not completely unknown to these onlookers).

The naivety that is demonstrated by some people I have spoken to in the past really has ground my gears on occasions.  Some people do choose a life of crime out of reasons other than necessity or lack of options, however that is a whole different topic that requires it own discussion. What I am referring to in this post is the issue of accessibility to life options (or lack there of) and the effects this can have on the path people take and their subsequent involvement in actions that are perceived to be of a criminal nature. A phenomenon known as social inequality does actually exist and the disregard of this matter by many people both in positions of power and authority and in the wider community in general really pisses me off.

The bulk of crime media on television these days focuses on the more ‘glamourous’ side of crime. CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York, Law & Order, Law & Order SVU, Law & Order CI, NCIS, Criminal Minds etc. tend to portray the life of crime fighting as one big party chasing crooks who for  peddling drugs or killing a girlfriend for looking at a bloke the wrong way. We all know that in reality this is not the case. Much of the time spent by police officers on duty is filled with paper work or routine operations. More recently these side of crime fighting have been shown through domestic productions such as RBT, The Force, Send in the Dogs and the new AFP show.

I personally tend not to watch all that much television, however during the undertaking of this course I have forced myself to view more and more of these shows to get a feel for exactly what the media is doing by pushing all this crime related junk on us.

I must admit however that whenever I see a crime related story in the newspaper I am drawn to it and I suppose my consumption of this crime media is fuelling the fire of crime stories published day in and day out in all types of media.  

Maybe with the push in the US of a squeaky clean image of pop culture being chased by people like Justin Beiber all this fascination with crime will dissolve and ill soon be watching shows that teach me how to straighten my hair. Let’s hope so!