The Representation of Mainstream and Corporate Crime in the Media - Essay Example

?Corporate Crime. Introduction: The representation of mainstream and corporate crime in the media. Crime is one of the favourite topics of contemporary mass media because it contains all the elements of a gripping narrative: key characters who play the roles of perpetrator, victim, observer, detective, and also judge and jury if responsibility for criminal harm is identified. Factual reporting is the aim of most newspapers and current affairs broadcasts and webcasts, but studies have shown that what is reported as fact is normally subjected to extensive selection, “framing”, presentation and stylization so that what the public eventually receives is somewhat different from any original event. Most media are operating in a competitive business environment, and they constantly have to balance a need for authenticity and fact with a strong pressure to provide commercially attractive copy which tempts the reader to buy newspapers or tune in to radio television and web outputs. This paper examines the way that corporate harm is reported in the media, and asks who decides which stories are worth reporting, who provides the information which forms the basis of that reporting, and what effect the media have on public perceptions of corporate crimes. Media “framing”: who decides which crimes are reported in the media? It is generally recognised that although violent crime is relatively rare compared to other kinds of crime, it nevertheless dominates the media. A recent Australian study demonstrated that the general public has a tendency to overestimate the incidence of violence and underestimate other kinds (Indermaur and Roberts: 2005, p. 143) This observation was found to be the result partly of individual experience of crime, in high crime areas at least, but also to do with the way that people utilize different kinds of media sources. Local news, for example, is a source of information for most working class people, while more educated people tend to read highbrow newspapers or internet news for their information on crime. It seems that people choose to view media which echo their own views of crime, and this creates a growing tendency to focus on sensationalism and crime, rather than a more balanced and accurate range of offences. Similar results were found in an earlier American study of police, newspaper, television and public images of crime trends for the seven FBI index crimes in the United concludes that people are increasingly dependent on television, rather than newspapers, and that the condensed timescale of television news bulletins results in distortion: “Hence, there is an emphasis on soft (scheduled) news – the human interest story – rather than on hard news – crime events … Therefore, there is a focus on homicides, fires and accidents.” (Sheley and Ashkins: 2009, p. 494) Corporate crime is rarely reported in local television and newspaper media, and it is likely that these media lack the resources to pursue major investigations, and these crimes are in any case deemed to be less newsworthy in culture that is seeking attention-grabbing drama rather than sober analysis. Some British analysis goes further than this and claims that there is an orchestrated effort going on to make sure that individuals who commit violent crime are more often reported than companies and their managers who commit white collar crime including all sorts of quite serious failings which can even result in death and injury to many people. Tombs and Whyte (2007: p. observe that corporate safety crimes are largely “invisible”, partly because they are not widely reported, but partly also because governments and commentators so often redefine corporate safety crimes as “infringements” and many statistics do not formally record the deaths and injuries that occur in an occupational context as crimes. The vocabulary used to comment on this area of criminal activity reveals a downplaying of responsibility and a reference instead to “accidents”, which implies that no-one is to blame: “In our view, then, the predominance of the language of accidents (and associated terms like ‘tragedy’) - along with derivatives reserved for multiple fatality incidents such as disaster – to refer to workplace deaths and injuries carries with it several reinforcing sets of implications, each of which even in isolation renders it even more likely that the events and processes thus observed can be viewed as crimes” (Tombs and Whyte: 2007, p. 71) In the analysis of Tombs and Whyte the silky media rhetoric encourages a silencing of these serious societal issues, and this in turn sets up an expectation that the general public will accept these loaded definitions of what has happened without applying any critical questioning. It appears, then, that by defining some events as neutral acts of chance, the whole question of corporate harm is neatly sidestepped, allowing the focus to be on the dramatic effect on the victims rather than the scandalous negligence of employers. It has long been recognized that there is no such thing as a completely fair and neutral media account of criminal events, because the process of making a media story changes the way events are seen, and often becomes part of the ongoing aftermath of a crime. In the words of one critic: “The mass media do not merely report on events but rather participate directly in processes by which events are constituted and exist in the world.” (Ericson: 1991, p. 219) There have been many empirical studies by criminologists and media specialists to examine just what kinds of bias can creep into journalistic reports on work related deaths. One extensive analyisis of newspaper reports following the deaths of 25 chicken factory workers in North Carolina concluded that there was a reluctance to report the event in terms of violence or crime, and very little interest in reporting the criminal convictions of company managers that followed after the event. (Wright et al. 1995) It seems that when companies are involved there is a subtle shift in the ways that responsibility and fatalities are interpreted. It all becomes an amorphous “failure of systems” rather than a criminal act. In some media reporting, there is also analysis of a subtle shifting of responsibility for harm from the employer to the employee, with suggestions that some people are naturally more “accident prone” than others, and that this absolves the employer from any responsibility. (Tombs and Whyte: 2007, p. 74) If the person who is harmed is deemed wholly, or even partly responsible for any harm suffered, then the use of terms like “crime” becomes inappropriate. In an attempt to remedy this unjust and inappropriate tendency in society to misrepresent and conceal the criminal nature of corporate harm, Tombs and Whyte suggest that terms like “corporate violence” should be more often used, both in academic commentaries and in wider public spheres, in order to bring home to people what corporations, with government and media collusion, seek to hide. Kort-Butler and Hartshorn (2011) investigate a rather sinister new programme making tendency which merges the documentary genre with entertainment, presenting real detectives, policemen, judges etc, in a cut-and-paste assembly of snippets including some actual fly-on-the-wall recordings and some sections which are dramatized reconstructions using actors. The viewing public is thus fed a mixture of real and artificial, packaged in such a way as to present the filmmaker’s own agendas. Such programmes can define the way that people perceive sectors of the criminal justice system precisely because they seem so realistic. Media manipulation: who provides the information for media reporting of corporate harm? An interesting question to explore in the study of the reporting of corporate harm is the question of responsibility for providing information. Journalists have to obtain their material from sources which are regarded as in some way credible and reliable, and this often means in effect that they seek respected government officials and or high level corporate spokespersons. These trusted sources, especially in the initial phases of reporting wield significant power in terms of what factual information they reveal, and what they conceal, and this, along with the spin that journalists add to the mix, is how news stories are “framed.” Corporate responsibility is most often located in the senior echelons of a company, and it so happens that these are the very same individuals who are contacted by the press when informed opinion and analysis is required. Likewise, most government agencies are closely attached to the industries for which they have responsibility, and the net effect of these close and senior level linkages is that a truly objective opinion is unlikely to be forthcoming. When one adds to this the huge power than many corporations possess in terms of ability to hire top lawyers, and the danger of litigation from bottomless corporate coffers if commentators make accusations of criminal behaviour, well founded or otherwise, it becomes increasingly obvious that corporate criminals have many ways and means to suppress allegations which they may find uncomfortable. In the case of corporate crime some of the personal and individual elements are hard to pin down, and this makes it difficult for journalists to adopt their usual “victim and perpetrator” narratives. If a crime is not violent, it can be dismissed as “victimless” and such stories do not sell newspapers nearly so well as the more dramatic mainstream crimes like assault and murder. This hides the fact, however, that a great deal of corporate harm is economic, for example when maladministration and corruption leads to the demise of a company and innocent employees lose their livelihoods. The consequences of even such paper based crimes can be severe, resulting in illness, stress and even deaths which could have been avoided if the managers had adhered to the regulations pertaining to their area of business. Recent banking scandals in Iceland, Greece and to a lesser extent also in the UK show that capitalism depends on a system of trust in regulatory systems, and that the consequences of corporate crime can be national disasters with long term repercussions for thousands and perhaps millions of people who are forced to make good the ensuing deficits in order to rebuild confidence in the financial system. Another example of paper based crime is the huge corporate scandal which resulted in the demise of Enron. It is interesting and somewhat paradoxical that the worldwide media feeding frenzy which followed served in the end to play down the severity of the crimes commitred, rather than to create awareness and intolerance of corporate crime. The sheer scale of the economic impact of the Enron incident brought corporate crime to the forefront of media attention in a way that has rarely been seen before or since. In a perceptive analysis of over 300 media articles on the Enron affair, Williams (2008) concluded that the incident resulted in a theoretical and defensive exploration of shady capitalist practices, many of which are regarded by insiders as part and parcel of daily business life. One of the major issues in reporting the facts of corporate crime when it occurs, and most notably major disasters which involve large and powerful corporations is that there is invariably an attempt by the corporation to cover up the extent of the harm done. This, too, is regarded as good practice, and part of the subtle art of “reputation management,” regardless whether there are genuine crimes afoot, or whether there are perceived threats which have no cause within the organisation. There are good business reasons for doing this, since the corporation has to manage any consequent negative reactions from shareholders, customers, employees, and the general public, but at times this tendency can distort the media representation of events. In the case of Enron the repercussions reached all the way to Wall Street and the global finance markets, and so interest quickly shifted from the actual criminal acts within the company itself to the wider implications for capitalist societies across the whole world. Because of the scale of the failure, American regulatory system were drawn into the debate, and they in the end rallied together with the perpetrators to concoct a smokescreen which detracted from the case in hand. Because of the unequal power structures in industrial societies it is likely that such patterns of behaviour will be repeated again and again when attempts are made to hold leading organisations to account for their deliberate crimes and their failures of omission. Following one of the biggest health and safety negligence cases in world history, the Bhopal chemical disaster involving American company Union Carbide, the corporation took an active role in “managing” the international reporting of the disaster, providing falsely upbeat reports of the extent of the harm. The company repeatedly minimized the severity of the disaster, seeking to blame local managers rather than taking its duty of care for workers seriously. Media interest in the West shifted quickly from the desperate suffering of the victims and their families to the wider implications for chemical companies outside India, and it is no coincidence that these two trends worked to the advantage of Union Carbide, especially because: “the waning of media attention before long-term issues have been resolved, and the reporting of some erroneous details characterize reporting of many hazards.” (Singer and Endreny: 1993, p. 31) Concusion: The effects of media reporting on public perceptions of corporate harm. We have seen how mass media in the modern world are preoccupied with drama and narrative “human interest” themes which favours a focus on so-called “mainstream” crime and especially violent crime. This contrasts with a tendency to overlook corporate criminality, even when there are serious human interest consequences such as employee deaths. The problem is compounded by a tendency of companies to divert attention from their responsibility and lead media into a discussion which uses terminology like “accident” or “disaster” which implies some unnamed external agency but not human responsibility. They use their wealth and their access to experts and officials to reframe the narrative of what has happened so that companies as well as individuals appear as victims of chance rather than actors who should be held responsible. This distorts the true nature of crimes committed by corporate entities and individuals within them, and results in a culture where corporate crime is taken less seriously, and corporate criminals are less likely to face criminal proceedings. Even when negligent employers do face court proceedings, their trials receive less coverage, and media debates on the overarching regulatory systems helps to exonerate them from the stigma that normally attaches to convicted criminals. The general public are therefore kept in a state of partial information because scrutiny of some of the crucial issues is deflected by those who have most to gain from invisibility. The only way to counteract these trends is to reframe corporate crime in clear and unambiguous language, replacing words like accident with words like violence, thus highlighting the transgressive nature of corporate failings. This would, over time, change public perceptions and create more awareness of the full range of criminal activities in our society. This approach would include the acts of privileged upper layers instead of focussing on the crimes of those who are relatively disadvantaged and have no spokesperson to deflect accusations or reinterpret their actions in terms of neutral forces rather than criminal intent. References Ericson, R. V. 1991. Mass Media, Crime, Law and Justice: An Institutional Approach. British Journal of Criminology 31 (3), pp. 219-248. Available online at: http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/content/31/3/219.full.pdf+html Indermaur, D. and Roberts, L. 2005. Perceptions of Crime and Justice, in S. Wilson (ed.) Australian Social Attitudes: The First Report. University of New South Wales Press, pp. 141-160. Kort-Butler, L. A. and Sittner Hartshorn, K.J. 2011. Watching the Detectives: Crime Programming, Fear of Crime, and Attitudes about the Criminal Justice System. The Sociological Quarterly 52, pp. 36-55. Sheley, J.F., and Ashkins, C.D. 1981.Crime, Crime News, and Crime Views. Public Opinion Quarterly 45, pp. 492-506. Singer, E. and Endreny. P. 1993. Reporting on Risk: How the Mass Media Portray Accidents, Diseases, Disasters and Other Hazards. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Tombs, S. and Whyte, D. (eds) 2007. Safety Crimes. Portland, Or.: Willan Publishing. Williams, J. W. 2008. The Lessons of ‘Enron’: Media accounts, corporate crimes, and financial markets. Theoretical Criminology 12 (4), pp. 471-499. Wright, P., Cullen, F. and Blankensip, M.B. January 1995. The Social Construction of Corporate Violence: Media Coverage of the Imperial Food Products Fire. Crime and Delinquency 41 (1), pp. 20-36. Read More