The media and attitudes towards crime and the justice system: A qualitative approach

The role of the media in shaping attitudes towards crime and the justice system has been a heavily researched topic. It has obvious relevance to the procedural justice perspective, in that media representations may have a mediating relationship between the behaviour of institutions of justice and public perceptions of them. Most of these studies have used quantitative methods in order to establish a relationship between attitudes and media consumption. A relationship has been demonstrated on several occasions, but its causal nature has not been proven. However, the difficulty of identifying a direct causal media effect should not lead us to abandon completely the idea that the media have some influence in shaping attitudes towards crime and the justice system. We should look for more sophisticated theories to explain the formation of public opinion and the role of the media in it, and, in addition to the quantitative analysis of statistical data, we should move towards audience research and the use of more qualitative methods. The research reported here used focus group methods to understand how and how much people rely on the media when interpreting issues of crime and evaluating justice institutions.