The basic assumption of research on communication is that the media influence the public’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviour. Additionally, the media have an agenda-setting function because it is through the media that the public learn the importance of specific issues. The way in which news reports are framed not only define the nature of a problem and its causes, but also may suggest specific solutions.
Thus, the media have a significant role in influencing not only what issues are presented, but how these are perceived and the importance that the public should attach to them.
Crime has long been a newsworthy topic and a recent investigation 1 analysed how the three major daily newspapers covered sex offending in New Zealand.
During 2003 there were a total of 377 articles focusing on sexual offending, or an average of just over one article per day. The majority of these were either descriptions of offences or court reports, or related to offenders. Significantly, few articles focused on treatment (12) or education/prevention (9).
Around 70 percent of the reports were relatively straight-forward descriptions of the facts with information presented in a balanced fashion.
Of the 377 news items, 18 percent made some mention of treatment or rehabilitation. Of those, 31 percent expressed the view that treatment often works, while 17 percent indicated that treatment of this group of offenders has little positive to offer.
The most frequent source of information for the articles on sex offenders were police or legal representatives with almost 60 percent of the articles drawing on this source with “Government” being the next most frequent source. Significantly, only 15 percent of the articles drew on information from mental health specialists.
Published material was almost evenly split in terms of articles relating to sex offences against adults (39 perecent) and sex offences against children (36 percent). As has been the case in research on crime-reporting more generally, there was disproportionate coverage given to high profile cases. Nine specific individuals accounted for over one-fifth of all news coverage in New Zealand in 2003. The authors note that this coverage tends to provide a distorted image of the nature of crime in society, and that the media ‘face’ of sexual offending in New Zealand is represented by very high-profile sex offenders who may well be quite atypical of the group as a whole.
The authors conclude by noting the importance of the relationship between researchers and the news media. In the criminal justice area there is a significant body of research which has explored issues such as recidivism risk and treatment effectiveness for various types of offending, but this information is seldom the focus of newspaper articles. This is nowhere better illustrated than in the current investigation where only 3 percent of articles focused on treatment, and only 3 percent used university research as this source of information.
1 Thakker J and Durrant R (2006). News coverage of sexual offending in New Zealand, 2003. New Zealand Journal of Psychology, 35, pp28-34.
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