Crime and violence in the media
More than a week after the tragic shooting incident in a public national high school in Tacloban City, Leyte, that left three students dead and multiple individuals injured, we are already saturated with violent images from both the old and new media. The showing of violent images has become normalized in the process of news reporting as journalists continue to deliver updates on the incident and help the public make sense of what happened.
The normalized culture of reporting violence, however, could be detrimental to our society’s aim to develop well-informed and sociologically grounded policies in protecting our children, our schools, and the larger community. The danger is borne out of the contemporary news media’s character and contradictory role in relentlessly delivering information through audio and visual images that normally don’t allow the public much time to process and deeply think about.
Crime stories are a favorite feature in Philippine news reporting. Academic scholars have various ways of explaining the reason for this practice, but most news media practitioners agree that crime stories are important in informing the public about a crime, so they can take care of themselves should they encounter a similar situation.
While this is true for most of us, it cannot erase the fact that constant exposure to crime stories could also manufacture a sense of fear, or even worse, paranoia. Scholars studying the effects of media violence call this phenomenon the “mean world syndrome,” where, because of heavy exposure to violent visual images, we may think of our immediate social environment or community as also violent, harsh, and scary, even if it’s not.
I think that our initial reaction to the Tacloban shooting incident is a normal societal response. From a sociological viewpoint, the news media’s role in delivering crime stories to the public is beyond just giving information and warning. When the news media prioritizes crime stories, it is its way of reminding all of us that the collective values we share and cherish are being threatened.
When three high school students were killed while peacefully attending their classes in San Jose National High School, we were not only shocked by the gravity of the incident. We were brought back to our senses and realized how our present systems of the family, school, and community are failing miserably to take care of our children.
What is not acceptable, though, is how some people seem to base their judgment on the issues, from the extraordinary character of the crime that happened, and how such a crime is covered and delivered to the public by the old and new media. Social media discussions are even more dangerous and detrimental to a well-informed policy debate because of their blatant disregard for privacy concerns and basic human decency.
We saw this in how the photos of students involved in the incident immediately circulated on social media despite the sensitivity of the case, not to mention that they are minors. Images are more powerful than words, especially in an age where most people prioritize speed over long and calm conversations online.
There is nothing wrong with reopening the policy debate on whether it is time to change the laws and policies related to child protection and accountability to those who are involved in heinous crimes, including the much-talked-about and yet often misunderstood issue of lowering the age of criminal liability in the Philippines.
What is wrong, in my view, is how some politicians and ordinary citizens rely on extraordinary crime stories like the Tacloban shooting incident to argue their case. Our policymakers must exert an effort to show the public how their actions and views about the issue are not driven by populist media discourse, but by solid empirical evidence and comparative studies about children in conflict with the law in the country and abroad.
I think that among the many factors that influence some people who may have a distorted view of this important issue is their overreliance on acquiring information from the modern news media in both the old and new platforms. No matter how extraordinary the Tacloban shooting incident is as a crime story, it must be considered as a threat to our collective values as a society, and not as a single major factor in revisiting our existing juvenile justice system.
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Dr. Ricky R. Rosales is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology of the Polytechnic University of the Philippines, and news anchor for DZXL 558 Manila.
