Crime and the media: myths and reality.
USA Today Magazine › Vol. 122 Nbr. 2588, May 1994
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Summary
The United States of Violence: A Special Section - Cover Story
Television and film portrayals and news media reports of crime give a distorted picture of the problem. Murders and other sensational crimes are overemphasized, and depictions of police and private detectives are unrealistic.See the full content of this document
Extract
Crime and the media: myths and reality.
ONE OF THE MOST successful films of recent years was "The Silence of the Lambs." It brought in healthy box office receipts and picked up most of the major Academy Awards. Like many other movies, it was about killing. The story pitted a novitiate FBI agent against two homicidal maniacs - one known, for the most part unseen, and largely unremembered; the other, the character everyone was talking about, Hannibal Lecter.
The movie epitomizes some themes that recur in the media's presentation of crime: that crime is mostly murder; killers are motivated by twisted psychopathic fantasies; criminals are fiendishly clever and methodical; and crimes are solved by even more clever and methodical law enforcement officers, often using computers and other high-tech...See the full content of this document
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