media massages and social justice

Mayo Clinic researchers recently presented a study that compared the incidence and type of crime depicted on popular CSI television shows and CDC data. The results are not all that surprising, but they point out that there are real public health issues related to how we conceptualize risk.

When researchers compared the shows to the CDC data, they discovered the strongest misrepresentations were related to alcohol use, relationships, and race among perpetrators and victims. Previous studies of actual statistics have shown that both perpetrator and victim were often under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs when the crime occurred, differing from what the shows portrayed. Also, CSI and CSI: Miami were more likely to have described the victim and the attacker as Caucasian, which is misrepresentative. Finally, according to the CDC data, homicide victims typically knew their assailant; however, the television series were more likely to have portrayed the perpetrator as a stranger. All of these findings were significantly different when compared to the data.

There are, of course, social justice issues involved as well as public health ones. If the only crime victims who we sympathize with are white, if we build up a fear of stranger violence and neglect intimate partner violence, if we forget that mastermind criminals are rare and drunks behaving stupidly are not, it influences what interventions and punishments we fund and how we conduct criminal justice in this country, which is often criminal but not always justice.

I’ve borrowed from the research of Joel Best, Philip Jenkins, and others to think about how anxiety is used in the formation of social issues (it’s something we also talk about in a course I teach) and how crime fiction reflects the manipulation of anxiety involved in claims-making in some interesting ways.

More about the study can be found here and on YouTube.

Hat tip to Free Range Kids.

we’d tell you where to vote …

. . . but then we’d have to kill you. Siva Vaidhyanathan posted an AP news story today that has a kind of zen-like strangeness to it. It’s almost a koan: what is the best response to terror but fear? How shall we have democracy? We should hide it. It’s truly one of the stranger responses to the “war on terror” that I’ve seen (and there have been some doozies).

Pa. Officials, Fearing Terrorism, Conceal List of Polling Places
MARTHA RAFFAELE
AP News
Oct 25, 2007 21:23 EDT

State officials have decided not to publicize their list of polling places in Pennsylvania, citing concerns that terrorists could disrupt elections in the commonwealth.

The Department of State was influenced by the terrorist bombings that struck just days before Spain’s national elections in 2004, spokeswoman Leslie Amoros said. Election officials consulted with state police, the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and the state Office of Homeland Security.

“The agencies agreed it was appropriate not to release the statewide list to protect the public and the integrity of the voting process,” Amoros said.

Information on individual polling places remains available on the state voter services Web site or by calling the state or county elections bureaus.

Critics say concealing the compiled list runs afoul of the state’s open records law and makes coordinating statewide voter-mobilization strategies more difficult. …

Siva comments, “in case you had any doubts that Bin Laden is laughing at us every day, here is all the evidence you need.”

(thanks to wilderdom for the image.)