During the studying, I learned the essentials of great interconnection between crimes and the media that talk about these crimes. The main factor here is that the media form the perception of people about the crime level in a community and police response to it. It is common situation when local media create the picture of predatory world full of murderers and crimers, while the statictics can say the opposite. To be an intelligent user of media sources, a person should have skills to weigh different points of view to formulate the true findings and rely on reputable statistics on crime.
The modern American society lives in the world of numerous media coupled with the “new media” in forms of blogs, social networks profiles, and personal sites. As a result, “the line between fact and fiction” is blurred because inexperienced Internet users can find irrelevant sources and believe in imaginable crimes (Surette, 2011, p. 217). These “fake news” can also frame readers’ perception of the event or of a particular problem in a false way based on inaccurate information.
Finally, the modern trend is that political polarization sustains the ideological differences among media sources. It creates the situation when one criminal case can be interpreted in different ways in different media. The vivid modern example is the case of Kyle Rittenhaus, who fatally shot 2 men during protests but avoided prison because of the court decision that it was self-defense. In far-right Breitbart news, the story was framed in the way to emphasize that Rittenhaus tried to stop violence rather than provoke it (Pollak, 2021). At the same time, left-wing media MSNBC published the blog with the title “Kyle Rittenhouse trial was designed to protect white conservatives who kill” (Jones, 2021). It is evident that the way how an average person will interpret the case will be influenced by the choice of media outlet. Thus, the political polarization impacts the way how crimes are understood in society.