ABSTRACT
The relationships between crime and the media have long been the subject of intense debate. This chapter examines how crime news unjustly stereotypes groups in the orchestration of moral panics and thereby heightens public fear of crime. Developments in the American sociology of deviance, combined with the British statistician Lesley Wilkins’s understanding of ‘deviancy amplification’ laid the groundwork for analyzing mediated moral panics. Social media is used by activists and protesters to enact resistance in many different ways – ways that go beyond the reporting of police brutality through videos and pictures. There is a sense in which stories of transgression are central to every culture’s imagining of its origins, while the process of discovery is often said to be a universal function of all narrative fiction. The popular fascination with crime has a long history and the supposed harmful effects of the media on morality have been a recurring theme in social commentary.
