Crime and Media Hysteria: Losing the Plot

How is a low-crime country like Ireland so frequently convulsed by moral panic about criminal justice, and how does it come to be gripped by the certain conviction that it has a major crime problem? By Dr Paul O'Mahoney.
The Martian bureaucrat who monitors and interprets Irish public life for his alien masters has had an especially perplexing task recently, sifting out the reality of the Irish crime problem from the media myths and political rhetoric that obscure it.  For more than a year before the last general election, both political discourse and the media in Ireland were in the grips of a relentlessly frenzied moral panic over crime.  As an opposition spokesman, the present minister for justice, John O'Donoghue, was ferociously dedicated to maintaining and intensifying the heat around the crime issue, and he was particularly adept at doing this by debasing an already far-from-enlightened level of debate.  He famously declared 1995 the year of the criminal – because, he argued, reported indictable crime had in that year breached the 100,000 mark for the first time.  He did this regardless of the fact that there were 102,000 reported crimes as far back as 1982 and despite the fact that this level of offending indicates one of the most favourable crime situations in the developed world. While in opposition, the minister's most successful, if crudest, weapon was “zero tolerance,” an ill-defined, elastic, but agenda-setting notion with which he effectively hijacked the pre-election debate on criminal justice.

But it is not the poor level of public debate on crime alone that would mystify our Martian observer.  It is the fact that the crime problem – which before June was so out of control, so urgent, and so serious, and supposed to be uppermost in everyone's minds and at the top of the political agenda – dropped almost completely out of sight in the months following the election. It was almost as if some high controller, somewhere within the media-political complex, threw a switch and simply turned off the crime issue. There was no great overnight transformation of Irish society.  In fact, crime went on much as before, particularly the tragic toll of murder – the increased frequency of which in recent years has fuelled much of the public's fear and anger about crime – but crime was apparently no longer a matter of such grave or urgent concern.

It can be argued that the sudden disappearance of crime from public, media, and political attention is the best possible verification of the view held by Vincent Browne and a few other isolated commentators that the so-called crime crisis was a mirage, a mere media bubble manufactured by politicians and given virtual life by newsprint and broadcast journalists and  editors.

There is, then, a core unanswered question about the reality underlying the image of the Irish crime problem as depicted by the media and politicians.  The growth in crime and hard-drug use of the last 30 years is undeniable. But around the world this is an almost universal feature of increased urbanisation, industrialisation, affluence and consumerism, and the Irish experience is reflected in all other Western industrialised democracies.  Although we have to acknowledge the extent of the deterioration in the quality of Irish life due to this growth in crime, it is surely essential to maintain a balanced, comparative perspective.

In fact, the differentials between Ireland and most other similar countries – which were very much in Ireland's favour in the early 1960s, when crime here was at an extremely low level – have been maintained, and our position, though disimproved, remains relatively favourable.  We and, more importantly, our politicians and media prefer not to keep these facts in mind, however.  It is not surprising, then, that we are unable to deal with our manageable crime problem with the rational, properly informed and balanced pragmatism with which many other countries address far worse crime situations.

A central question remains for the media themselves, though.  How is it that a low-crime country like Ireland is so frequently convulsed by moral panics about criminal justice, and how does it come to be gripped by the certain conviction that it has a major crime problem? It is regrettable that the media themselves have failed to examine both the key role that they play in the moral-panic process and the alternative, more constructive role that they should be playing.

There are several dimensions to the damage done by an Irish media that all too easily and frequently become the main platform for unrealistic moral panics about crime.

First, fear of crime is a major social problem in itself, even if – indeed, especially if – the fear is not soundly based on reality.  Unjustified fear damages social trust and can have a severely constricting effect on the lifestyles of vulnerable people, such as the elderly and the isolated. It can also have a negative general effect on the quality of normal, everyday interactions between people in society.
Second, when the media become the vehicle for intense and emotive political/public debate on crime, characterised by inflated rhetoric, narrowed vision, and a lack of adequate anchorage in facts and analysis, they become an essential part of the process that both propels and justifies hasty, panic-stricken political action, aimed more at optics than at real effects.  Recent years have seen a plethora of legislative changes, almost exclusively concerned with satisfying a presumed public demand for a more punitive and repressive law-enforcement system. Many of these changes have been ill-considered.

We were told that the bail referendum, for example, was urgently needed to provide for preventative detention. Now, more than a year later, this “urgent and vital” new law-and-order mechanism has still not been put into operation. Yet we hear nothing about this delay.  Indeed, as far as the media are concerned, the bail issue is as dead as a dodo.  Is it possible that the underlying rationale for this measure was as imaginary as its supposed urgency?

Because they reflect, but also help manufacture, the emotive and deliberately narrow debates that drive crisis-management tinkering with the criminal-justice system, the media have become unwitting but major partners in Ireland's well-established criminal-justice tradition of knee-jerk policy-making and band-aid solutions.  The mutual enthralment of Irish media and politicians, even though it is by no means always a cosy relationship, contributes to the process and helps generate a simplistic, single vision on criminal-justice issues.  Politicians, judges, the police and other powerful agents are often led, willingly or unwillingly, by media representations of the situation rather than by careful assessments based on their own hard-won experience. There are obvious dangers in this situation, as it is possible, and in Ireland not uncommon, for the real work of reform to be neglected in favour of action designed primarily to impact on ill-founded perceptions and media constructions.

There is a third, related dimension to this problem. This is the unnoticed down-side of the media's frequent feeding frenzies on the carrion of political crises in the criminal-justice system. The down-side is the starvation diet of publicity and coverage – two essential ingredients of a meaningful public debate – imposed by the media on certain kinds of issues and initiatives in criminal justice. There is a whole world of important activity and thinking, much of it constructive or enlightening, that gets next to no attention from a media that appear transfixed by the excitement of the latest or the breaking crisis.  A good example of this is the reaction concerning the Independent Prisons Board. The announcement by former minister Nora Owen that the running of the prisons was to be taken out of the hands of the Department of Justice was a matter of huge interest when it was made in the context of a bitter Dáil dogfight about the Judge Dominic Lynch de-listing débâcle.  When, in February of this year, the actual blueprint for the long-awaited Independent Prisons Board was published by the Department of Justice, it was greeted with almost total silence and a complete lack of serious analysis in all Irish media.

There are many similar examples, including the ground-breaking Department of Justice document “Tackling Crime,” which received some passing, ritual attention at the time of its publication but totally failed to ignite the kind of media interest that it deserved and that can be guaranteed if an individual politician's reputation or career is on the line. There is also the historic development whereby a handful of dedicated and courageous community activists in impoverished, drug-infested parts of Dublin have embarked on a programme of renewal that has transformed whole districts and has at last galvanised state agencies into something akin to effective action.  This sterling work has gone without recognition and analysis in the media, except when the irresistible element of dangerous confrontation was present. In many ways, in the phrase memorably used by Mary Robinson in the context of the UN, the media in Ireland have “lost the plot.”

With news-worthiness defined almost entirely in terms of short-lived dramatic potential and superficial human interest, many significant facts from the real world of crime and punishment fail to impinge on public consciousness, and many key initiatives and developments go unexamined.  This breeds cynicism not only in the media and in the public mind but also amongst those who struggle for reform. It also undermines the media's crucial role in informing the public and in bringing the system to account. In the present climate, there is no doubt that those holding public office are terrified of the power that resides in the media, in the role of avenging angels, to bring about sudden downfall. But, at the same time, the wise amongst them know that they can rely on the media's amenability, lack of continuity, forgetfulness and narrowness of vision when it comes to the more mundane task of monitoring the everyday performance of state agencies and of holding politicians to their commitments. Many politicians have pulled off the trick of garnering media praise for the renewal of quite modest, practicable commitments that somehow always fail to be fulfilled.

These are not trivial problems, and they do not by any means derive solely from the excesses of the tabloid media.  This is not merely a problem of sensationalism, selective reporting, gross exaggeration and the perhaps inevitable market-driven pandering to the public's salacious tastes. Nor should we be fooled into thinking that these problems are being addressed because some of the media's problems with the law – such as pre-trial publicity, photographs of murder victims and suspects, and the libel laws – do receive considerable attention. The media's specific failure to fulfil its potential for informing the public and bringing state agencies to account in the criminal-justice area is a question of the value-orientation of the media system as a whole, most especially at the quality, current-affairs end of the market. Indeed, the fact that we have these problems in Ireland is all the more worrying, because we are generally well served by an exceptionally industrious and talented media.

Dr Paul O'Mahony is the author of Criminal Chaos: Seven Crises in Irish Criminal Justice