Setting the Public Fear Agenda: A Longitudinal Analysis of Network TV Crime Reporting, Public Perceptions of Crime, and FBI Crime Statistics

Dennis T. Lowry · Tarn Ching Josephine Nio · Dennis W. Leitner

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Media Studies and Communication Crime Patterns and Interventions Crime, Deviance, and Social Control

Abstract

Public perceptions of crime as the most important problem (MIP) facing the country jumped tenfold, from 5% in March of 1992 to an unprecedented 52% in August of 1994. This study analyzed the effects of three network television news predictor variables and two FBI predictor variables to determine what statistically accounted for this “big scare”. Based upon data from 1978 through 1998, results suggest that the 1994 “big scare” was more a network TV news scare than a scare based upon the real world of crime. The television news variables alone accounted for almost four times more variance in public perceptions of crime as the MIP than did actual crime rates.

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1972The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media 1973The Country and the City 1964The Press and Foreign Policy 1964Press and Foreign Policy 1994Growing up with television: The cultivation perspective.1973The Issues of the Sixties: An Exploratory Study in the Dynamics of Public Opinion 1981Sourcebook of criminal justice statistics, 1979 1981Agenda Setting for the Civil Right Issue

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