Depiction of Crime in News-Avoiding the 'Real Problem'?

In today's class there was a discussion about the reading 'Prime Suspects: The influence of Local Television News on the Viewing Public'. There were questions about if the news should censor the amount of crime we see on TV, and if crime on the news will have a negative effect on people. I think the problem is not just about the amount of the crime the media shows but definitely the way news shows crime. The news concentrates on an individual-the individual's race, actions, what weapon one used, etc. They show surveillance camera coverages, and interviews from witnesses. They need the audience'sattention, so they show fragmented, sensational, clear images of what the person(or people)did, over and over again, emphasizing the violent part of the crime. The news focuses on just the people who commited the crime.

However, crime is not necessarily about the 'bad' individual(s), but a more complicated problem interwined with social background, inequality, class, national welfare, law, politics, government policy, and so on. Problems such as national welfare and social inequality could be the basic reason of crime. For example, if a society does not provide enough resources for an unwed mother, the mother would have to find more work to provide for herself and her child. Also as a woman she could be less paid than a man, which makes her busy in earning the money she needs for life. So the mother is too busy to spend more time with her child, which can make the child fall into various trouble(gangs, drugs, and what not)without the parent being able to warn about or prevent beforehand. This, in the end, could lead to crime. Of course the example is too simple and it's all under assumption ofwhat 'might' happen, but it is possible. So crime cannot just be seen as an individual problem.

The news does not go into depth from this point of view, or address the problems of the system relating to crime. They might sometimes address the problems of the judicial system. However, those are the consequences of crime, rather than fundemental aspects of why something is happening, and how it can be prevented. This kind of media coverage has a negative effect, not that it would cause future generations to be violent, but to feel 'fear'-afraid of 'people', rather than making people try to think about how the system should be fixed. What is more problematic is that based on the news depictions of crime, the fear and prejudice could be toward certain class/race/gender. People would lose judgement about what is happening in the society they live, when they should be able to see that there is more to a crime than violence and a 'prime suspect(s)'. These days the media, which should be addressing the social issues behind the incidents, seem to be just avoiding controversy or complicated reporting in order to make the news more 'attractive'.