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Introduction
National media coverage of crime has increased dramatically in recent years (Media Monitor, 1994) and youthful crime, particularly "violent" and "gang" crime, is a major focus of this new media attention (Males, 1996). For example, a recent study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs revealed that while the homicide rate in the U.S. fell 20% between 1993 and 1996, media coverage of murders increased an incredible 721% (Washington Post, August 12, 1997: D1). Links between media trends and public perceptions are generally complex, yet the number of Americans naming crime as the nation's "most important problem" increased sixfold between June 1993 and January 1994 - at a time when official crime statistics and victimization surveys showed little change (Media Monitor, 1994). Certainly, criminology must begin to take account of media coverage in more systematic ways than it previously has.
Of fundamental import is that the media often "over report" crime-related news by "exaggerating the seriousness of events, the violence that occurred, and the damage caused" (Cohen, 1981), and by producing outputs of crime-related articles that bear little resemblance to official crime trends (Garofolo, 1981; Sheley,1981; Davis,1952). Even stories that are specifically about official crime statistics may misrepresent these figures by downplaying, ignoring, or focusing excessively on certain statistics and extenuating circumstances (Smith,1981). For example, the media may focus less on a 10% decrease in overall violent crime than on an embedded five-percent increase in aggravated assaults. Similarly, a 10% decrease in the crime rate may only be given passing mention in the back pages of a newspaper, while a five-percent increase may be automatic headline news.
The results of an interesting study on youth gangs in the media provide a useful component in this brief exploration of the complicated patterns and effects of media crime reporting. Decker and Kempf-Leonard (1991) queried groups of St. Louis gang members, non-gang juvenile detainees, police officers, and local policymakers with a questionnaire designed to establish how the respondents received most of their knowledge about youth gangs, as well as how accurate they believed media representations of youth gangs to be. While 100% of gang members, 85% of non-gang detainees, and 96% of police officers responded that most of their information came from first- or secondhand knowledge...