Racial composition of television offenders and viewers' fear of crime

Scholars, politicians, criminal justice professionals and members of the general public frequently link the media to the United States' crime problem. Although many scholars have noted the televised construction of young black males as the stereotypical criminal, no study has ever measured how the race-specific content of media messages may be related to viewers' perceptions and fears relating to crime. This article breaks with past research that analyzes fear of crime by program genre, and instead explores the impact of the racial composition of television offenders on viewers' fear of crime. The data include a content analysis of twenty-six crime-related programs and a telephone survey of 1492 adults to explore the relationship between television viewing and fear of crime. For African Americans there is a correlation between time spent viewing television and fear of crime. For Whites, the relative frequency of African-American offenders in the television programs is more important for predicting fear of crime than the amount of television they watch. © 2002 Kluwer Law International.