Media plays a vital role in the way people perceive police officers and the whole criminal justice system. There is a strong relationship between the media and the crime and justice because the way people see and form their opinion is largely dependent on how the media reports the law enforcement officers. Media plays a significant role in providing information to the public members, and it is almost certain that people now trust the mainstream media more than anything else. The media can affect the way people perceive the crime and justice system because they shape the attitude of people towards law enforcement. A recent study has shown that media always tend to portray police officers negatively to the public and ignores the positive side of it. The United States is currently fascinated with crime and justice. From the books, magazines, newspapers, radio and television broadcasts, there is much discussion about crime and justice ( Nix & Wolfe, 2017 ). The mass media continue to remain at the central point in the construction of criminality and the criminal justice system. Their portrayal in the mass media largely determines the public's perception of victims, criminals, deviants, and law enforcement officials. The media has been at the forefront in negatively covering the law enforcement thus making the public members form a negative perception about the law enforcement officers. The central point of argument has been on the reason why mainstream mass media would choose to focus too much on the negative and ignore the positive side of the law enforcement officers. However, there has been a growing body of evidence to indicate that human beings have a tendency to prioritize the negative over the positive news content.
The recent media coverage has made people form a perception that the law enforcement has taken on the persona of racist, violence and bloodthirsty traits instead of taking a kind and committed character. All over the United States, media is buzzing with the news of police brutality and racial profiling which makes the members of the public lose their trust in the law enforcement system ( Nix & Wolfe, 2017 ). The constant coverage of the police officers negatively poorly portray them in public and lead to the members of the public forming a wrong perception of the police officers. Members of the public have a lot of trust on what the media reports and as a result, they will believe all the negativity reported about the law enforcement officers even if it is all bias. Newspapers and magazines are full of negative stories about the conduct of the police officers and little or no positive reports about them. Does it mean that the police officers do not do anything good worth reporting? Why would the media focus only on reporting the negative stories about the police and ignore the positive ones? The effective functioning of the crime and justice system depends on the public trust in the system, and the media is the key determinant on how people view the crime and justice system.
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Scholars have long noted the role of the media in shaping the attitude of the citizens towards law enforcement. Reporters have changed the way they portray police officers in public by putting much attention on something negative done by anyone within the law enforcement as they ignore the positive stories about law enforcement professionals ( Surette, 2014 ). An example is a report in the CNN titled “We are not seeing more police shootings, just more news coverage,” which reports the police officers in a negative way by noting that they have been killing innocent blacks for many years. The reports of police brutality against the blacks have been reported by many media mainstreams thus creating a bad image of the police with the public members and leading to loss of trust. Such negative reports are sometimes reported and even broadcasted on the televisions, yet the media does not have any clear statistics about such information. Such headlines make the citizens and even the foreign countries to think that the country is experiencing a continuous wave of police violence, a perception which may not even be the case.
A look into the reason why media could choose to cover the police in a bad way has gathered a series of evidence and confirms that human beings have a tendency to prioritize negative over positive news content. People have a habit of prioritizing to read negative news over positive news and by using negative titles on the newspapers and magazines, people are more likely to get attracted to such news than when it is a positive one ( Surette, 2014 ). However, researchers have questioned why people pay much attention to negative news than the positive news. However, an article published in Political Communication, which draws from the field of psychology notes that people are psychologically predisposed to focus on negative information. Drawing from the evolutionary biological concept, it states that humans can decide to prioritize the negative information when they feel that it is advantageous and that the potential costs of negative information outweigh the potential benefits of positive information. Human brains have been predisposed towards focusing on the negative information because they feel it is advantageous than positive information. Based on this argument, the media does not report the law enforcement officers negatively because there is any conflict between them, but because that negative information is what the public demands.
Majority of the mainstream media are in business, and they make more money when they sell more articles, magazines, and newspapers. A recent study has found that there is a relationship between the tone of the magazines' covers and the volume of sales of the magazines. When the cover page of magazines and newspapers contain negative titles about the police, people tend to buy more than when it contains the positive titles ( Barak, 2013 ). Therefore, to draw the attention of the audience, many media reporters tend to produce what the people want, and that is to focus more on the negativity than positivity. Many headlines in the magazines and newspapers contain information that seems to portray the police as violent and as professionals who are bloodthirsty and racists. A research one by psychologists suggests that negative news headlines tend to increase both the arousal and attentiveness as compared to the positive police news headlines ( Barak, 2013 ). An individual who was browsing through his phone while there was a news broadcast in television is more likely to stop browsing and focus on the news when he hears the headlines such as “ten blacks murdered in yet another police brutality case.” This shows that it is the members of the public who have turned their brains to focus on negative news thus subjecting the media to respond by regularly reporting police negativity than positivity.
However, the media bias towards the police has had severe negative impacts on the law enforcement officers. The continuous reporting of the police officers as biased who are racially targeting the blacks to arrest and harass has created a bad public image and increased hatred of police by the blacks. A report written in the City Journal stats that, “The most poisonous claim in the dominant narrative is that our criminal justice system is a product and a source of racial inequity” ( Chaney & Robertson, 2013 ). This title portrays police as racists who only arrest blacks because of their color and not because they have broken the law. In many media coverage, it has always been reported that police are constantly killing the innocent blacks because of their race and this has led to blacks seeing police officers as enemies. To prove this report wrong, however, the data by FBI shows that out of the 800 people killed by the police in 2014, half were whites and only quarter were blacks. This is against what the media reports that the police brutality towards the blacks is increasing.
A group of scholars has also claimed that the reason why media portrays the police negativity than positivity is that they act as a watchdog to the institutions in the society including the government. The aim of the media is to uncover any rot in our institutions by acting a whistleblower. By reporting the negative stories of the police, the media is blowing the whistle so that the public can understand that there is some rot in the law enforcement agency ( Nadal & Davidoff, 2015 ). However, whistleblowing should be always be backed with facts unlike the media which covers negative information about the police, some of which has got no data to back up the claim. A confirmation of the media bias towards the police was evident when on the same day, a police officer in Michigan found a lost girl, purchased her meal and then contacted her parents to pick her. On the same day, there was an incidence of a police shooting where one person died. The media only reported the killing by the police officer and no reports were even mentioned about the show of kindness by the Michigan, police officer.
The minds of the public have all along been filled with the wrong perception of the police and tuned in a way that the only good news they can love to read is anything that criticizes the police. Touching on positive police conduct tends to attract no attention and people may not send their time reading such news. It is usual to see a person perusing every page of the newspaper searching for a topic that is either controversial or talks negatively about the police. This is because people focus much on the negative news than the positive and media have adopted the system always to give cover controversial and negative topics.
In conclusion, the role of media in informing the public perception about the law enforcement officers cannot be understated. As they constantly negatively portray the police, the media creates a perception amongst the citizens. Because the brain of humans has been predisposed to pay much attention to the negative news, the media tend to respond by covering what people like to read. The society’s focus on the negative police conduct and ignoring any positive actions amounts to bias.
References
Nix, J., & Wolfe, S. E. (2017). The impact of negative publicity on police self-legitimacy. Justice Quarterly , 34 (1), 84-108.
Surette, R. (2014). Media, crime, and criminal justice . Nelson Education.
Barak, G. (2013). Media, process, and the social construction of crime: Studies in newsmaking criminology . Routledge.
Chaney, C., & Robertson, R. V. (2013). Racism and police brutality in America. Journal of African American Studies , 17 (4), 480-505.
Nadal, K. L., & Davidoff, K. C. (2015). Perceptions of police scale (POPS): Measuring attitudes towards law enforcement and beliefs about police bias. Journal of Psychology and Behavioral Science , 3 (2), 1-9.
