TRUE CRIME
This exercise is designed to:
• Encourage you to begin to think about the many ways that crime permeates our culture and seeps into our lives.
• Improve your ability to identify and critically evaluate the characteristics of certain events that make them newsworthy.
• Make you a more critical (hence better)
consumer of crime/culture.
Getting started: Begin by closer paying attention to the world around you. Focus your attention on the different forms of media that circulate in our culture.
• When you are in a public place (restaurant, bar, barbershop, salon, convenience store) is a TV on? What is on that TV?
• What are the headlines of the papers at the convenience store? To Do
Assignment Details
TRUE CRIME
circulate in our culture.
• When you are in a public place (restaurant, bar, barbershop, salon, convenience store) is a TV on? What is on that TV?
• What are the headlines of the papers at the convenience store?
• What do are the magazines at the supermarket checkout selling?
• If you share your home with a roommate, or live with family, what are they watching, reading, listening to?
• What are commercials advertising?
• What is the government (police, public health, local government) telling you about crime?
• On your phone, what is the news telling you?
• When you seek a break from the world, what do you do?
• What are you watching? What is the message?
• How are the physical landscapes you live in (campus, city, stores, etc) influenced by, even organized around crime? To Do
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TRUE CRIME
The project:
From now until the due date, you will keep a journal that documents all the different ways that crime seeps into your life. If you’ve had research methods, what l am asking you to do is to create and maintain ethnographic field notes about the life you live, paying specific attention to the variable CRIME.
Be reflexive, ask questions. Ask yourself questions:
Do you fear crime? Or do you desirecrime? Maybe a bit of both?
Sharpen your tools:
In the next few class periods we will discuss
“newsworthiness” which will help you to begin to understand why our crime/culture appears as it does. To Do
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TRUE CRIME
Chapter 2 presents 12 news values (below) that help explain why some things rise to the level of
“news commodities” and others don’t. Pay attention and see if these criteria are useful to your analysis.
• Threshold – what makes this crime/event/case unusual?
• Predictability – could coverage of this event been planned in advance?
• Simplification – does this reinforce simple beliefs about human behavior?
• Individualism – is this boiled down to a single cause rather than a complex social one?
• Risk – does this elaborate the inherent uncertainty of modern life?
• Sex – is this of sexual nature?
• Celebrity or high-status persons – does it involve a famous person?
• Proximity -Spatial, refers to the geographical ‘nearness’ of an event, cultural to the ‘relevance’ of an event to an audience (did this happen close to home).
• Violence or conflict – is this particularly violent, does it relate to ongoing violence? Violence or conflict – is this particularly violent, does it relate to ongoing violence?
• Visual spectacle and graphic imagery – does include or invoke stunning images? To Do
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TRUE CRIME
FORMAT
You must write a minimum of ten entries.
If you are writing about a specific event in the news, be sure to include a brief summary of the event, an excerpt, title, etc. and then respond to it in your words. You can include images that you think are particularly important, notes or anything else you find interesting. You can be creative/artistic if you want, too.
All assignments are typed: 12pt font, 1-inch margins. Always cite any and all resources in APA or ASA format, you can use footnotes here.
For this assignment, length is not as important as news worthy and up to date. To Do
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TRUE CRIME
Don’t just write up evaluations of ten randomly selected stories the night before this is due.
Start today. Show me that you have been thinking about our subject. To Do
EXAMPLE:
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Crime Diary:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-
9590321/NYPD-cops-8-year-old-autistic-son-froze-garage-family-dog-slept-inside.html
A Possible Entry: Describe why you think this made the news? What about the perpetrators and victims isimportant? How are images used? Etc.
Some questions to guide you:
• What types of crimes draw attention?
• How are those involved portrayed?
• How are race, class, gender, sexuality, age, addressed?
• What causal explanations are offered? Do
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Some questions to guide you:
• What types of crimes draw attention?
• How are those involved portrayed?
• How are race, class, gender, sexuality, age, addressed?
• What causal explanations are offered?
• Is a crime conceptualized differently or is an event covered differently across different types of media (print online) between news organizations (Wall Street Journal vs. New York Times) does coverage vary by region?
• How are crimes represented compared to other public issues?
• Are behaviors and events described as criminal, not serious or perhaps not crimes at all?
• How do images and video figure in?
• Who is making claims and interpreting the world for you?
• How does this relate to the course material?
• How does this relate to your life?
• Why should we care?
