The Media and Juvenile Crime In November 2003, AB

In November 2003, ABC News ran a series of television spots targeted at addressing the issue of juvenile crime in the United States. The spots were introduced with a run-down on 17-year-old then sniper-suspect (he has since been convicted) John Lee Malvo and his involvement in the spree shootings in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area last year. However, this introduction did several things other than merely introduce its audience to the subject of juvenile crime in America. This paper explores media portrayals of juvenile crime in America, particularly as it relates to the transfer of juveniles to adult court for trial and sentencing. The paper concludes that the media has played a significant role in creating a public environment amenable to increasingly harsh treatment of juvenile offenders.

The unknown snipers (Malvo acted into concert with John Allen Muhammad, a paternal figure) terrorized the tristate area last summer. Victims were shot down, obviously randomly, at hardware stores, gas stations, in front of schools. It was literally the stuff of nightmares. The police were initially caught flat-footed and people were afraid to leave their homes. These are the images and memories the ABC News segment touched upon in its audience by its choice of introduction. Thus, it encouraged its audience to associate those images and memories with the concept of juvenile crime and the Black face of juvenile crime - in America.

The ABC News segment discussed above i

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erence and ignorance. They were coming from a land with no fathers.. .. They were coming from the anarchic province of the poor. And driven by a collective fury, brimming with the rippling energies of youth, their minds teeming with the violent images of the streets and the movies, they had only one goal: to smash, hurt, rob, stomp, rape. The enemies were rich. The enemies were white" (Hancock, 2003, p. 38). Hancock argues that with this as a lead-in, many people who read subsequent reports detailing the facts that the boys had never been in any legal trouble and in fact came from fairly stable families only served to make their crime more horrific rather than raise questions about whether the crime had been portrayed correctly in the first place (Hancock, 2003, p. 38). Hancock also interviews David Krajicek, who covered the story for the New York Daily News. He recalled that editors pressured reporters into sticking with the dominant narrative, which soon took on a life of its own. He believes the result was media narratives that divided the city into two angry parts: white and black, Wall Street and Harlem, law-abiding adults and barbaric youth (Hancock, 2003, p. 38). In addition, Jim Dwyer, then of New York's Newsday, d

Category: Psychology - T