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The Scary World of Online News? Internet News Exposure and Public Attitudes Toward Crime and Justice

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Abstract

Objectives

A substantial body of literature indicates that certain forms of media consumption may increase anxiety about crime and support for social controls. However, few studies have examined whether Internet news consumption is positively associated with such attitudes. The void is significant given the public’s increasing use of online news sources. This study addresses this research gap.

Methods

We draw on data from four national surveys conducted between 2007 and 2013, which collectively include interviews with more than 13,000 Americans. Using OLS and logistic regression, we assess the relationships between exposure to traditional and online media and perceptions of victimization risk, support for punitive crime policies, and views about police powers.

Results

Consistent with prior work, we find positive relationships between exposure to traditional forms of media—television news and crime programming—and anxiety about victimization and support for harsh crime policies. In contrast, Internet news exposure is generally not associated with anxieties about crime or support for getting tough on criminals. However, there is evidence of an interactive relationship between political ideology and Internet news exposure.

Conclusions

The results provide little support for cultivation theory in the context of Internet news consumption. We discuss the import of our findings, and suggest new lines of research to explore the correlates and the effects of exposure to online news sources.

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Notes

  1. Although not examining public attitudes, two recent studies of college students separately explored whether the amount of Internet news exposure influenced students’ fear of crime (Kohm et al. 2012) and punitive attitudes (Waid-Lindberg et al. 2011). The two studies provided little evidence that Internet news consumption significantly impacted students’ views. Another recent study analyzed data from a convenience sample of Washington state residents and found that general Internet usage, rather than Internet news consumption specifically, was unrelated to support for the death penalty (Britto and Noga-Styron 2014).

  2. The argument here is not that perceived victimization risk or attitudes toward crime control affect Internet news consumption, but rather that general interest in crime news, relative to other news content, may affect Internet news consumption.

  3. Response rates to surveys now commonly fall far below the 40 % mark (McCarty et al. 2006). Fortunately, there is now clear evidence that survey response rates themselves are not predictive of nonresponse bias in resultant data (Groves and Peytcheva 2008; Keeter et al. 2006).

  4. Scholars recommend reporting a participation rate in lieu of a response rate in research using volunteer web surveys (Baker et al. 2010).

  5. Detailed information on the sampling procedure and attrition across waves is provided in (Jackman and Vavreck 2009).

  6. In each wave, this question followed a series of questions that asked about the TV stations the respondent watched the previous day.

  7. Note that for model 11 in Table 1, which evaluates the effect of local news consumption on death penalty support for Sample 4, the sample size is 8517. This is because the local news measure is an additive index, and thus only respondents who were asked the respective question in each wave are included. This did not change the findings: if only the local news question from the baseline interview is used, the sample is 11,536, and the effect of local news consumption is unchanged (b = .349, p < .001).

  8. Although research shows that factors such as age, education, and income are associated with the frequency of Internet use (Zickuhr and Smith 2012; Perrin and Duggan 2015), we disaggregate at the median for three reasons. First, the differential reception hypothesis predicts that group differences in media effects will exist not because of differences in frequency of use, but because group characteristics and group-specific experiences should moderate the effect of media consumption on attitudes (Chiricos et al. 1997, 2000). Second, as noted above, prior research provides inconsistent evidence about the groups for whom media consumption matters most (Eschholz 1997, 2003). Third, there is no existing theoretical scholarship that suggests a reason to split the sample at specific values, and thus we believe that any decision to dichotomize at specific ages, education levels, etc. would necessarily be arbitrary. Our decision to consistently dichotomize at the median across all samples avoids this arbitrariness.

  9. In Sample 2, we were unable to use the cutting point of under versus over 25-years-old, because there were too few respondents between the ages of 18 and 25 (N = 14) to estimate models separately for this group. Accordingly, for Sample 2, we only used the cutting point of under versus over 35-year-old in the supplementary models.

  10. In Sample 2, for respondents under age 35, Internet news exposure was significantly and positively associated with perceived victimization risk (b = .641, p < .05), but was not related to punitiveness. However, the relationship failed to replicate for the same age group—persons under age 35—in Samples 1 and 3, which also included measures of perceived victimization risk.

  11. Another possibility is that individuals using the Internet to obtain news content may seek out information that corresponds with their pre-existing attitudes, and thus that has minimal impact on those beliefs.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by funding from the University at Albany, SUNY’s Faculty Research Award Program (FRAP)—Categories A and B. The authors thank Shawn Bushway for his help with collecting data for one of the samples, and Kate Hart for her comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript. An earlier draft of the manuscript was presented at the 2013 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology in Atlanta, GA. The data from the four samples have been used previously by the authors, either in published or unpublished research, to test other hypotheses.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminal Justice, University at Albany, SUNY, 135 Western Avenue, Albany, NY, 12222, USA

    Sean Patrick Roche & Justin T. Pickett

  2. College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL, USA

    Marc Gertz

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  1. Sean Patrick Roche
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Correspondence to Sean Patrick Roche.

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Roche, S.P., Pickett, J.T. & Gertz, M. The Scary World of Online News? Internet News Exposure and Public Attitudes Toward Crime and Justice. J Quant Criminol 32, 215–236 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10940-015-9261-x

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