ABSTRACT
During the last decade, the mass media have grown larger, more influential, and more powerful worldwide. In 1922, M. K. Wisehart was the first to discover that the mass media influenced public perception of crime and criminal justice. The thesis that the portrayal of criminality and criminal justice results in consequences in personal as well as in social reality can be traced back to the theory of symbolic interaction. As crime reports and crime entertainment programs appear on the TV screen in the form of a variety program, and as crime entertainment programs frequently try to create the impression of reality. Criminality plays an important role in cartoons and comics, which immunize children and adolescents against feelings of sympathy and make them numb and insensitive to the sufferings of others. The criminological model of the distribution of criminality, which is based on modern empirical criminological research, has not yet been adopted by the mass media.
