Studying The Media

"Crime through the imitation"- I looked into this quote from 'Studying the media' and the theorists behind it Peterson and Thurstone (1993)

Effects of the media as documented in the above book

• Short term behavioural effects such as when children imitate what they have seen


• Emotional effects such as being frightened, aroused or excited.


• Ideological effects, how representations of violence may effect ideas and attitudes- what is acceptable, who has a right to use violence to whom etc... These are long term effects and therefore cannot be assessed through research

I also looked into Albert Bandura and his bobo doll experiment. He stated that children are likely to copy adults and that crimes that they commit cannot really be their fault, but rather the media's because of the influence they have over the child initially. The picture above shows this.