SPECIAL EDITION blog post: The NSW State Election.

 I'm not going to lie. I'm a little bit late with this blog post and it would have probably been far more effective to write about the NSW State Election and the 'law and order campaigns' involved before everyone had voted last Saturday. Nonetheless, the issues surrounding elections concerning the crime, media and politics relationship can still be discussed as they will be relevant for many elections to come.

 It's accepted that most of the public are avid consumers of crime news and has been found that roughly 76% of people form their opinions about crime from what they see and read in news media (Marsh and Melville 2009: 1). So if millions of people are watching and forming opinions about crime from what they see in the media, it would make sense that politicians (especially around election time) would also use the media to present their solutions to our country's crime problems. This is what 'law and order politics' basically is.

 Much of the debate around crime and the assurances made by politicians to solve crime problems play on our ideas of what is needed to deter people from committing crime, dubbed 'law and order commonsense'. Some of the main themes of law and order commonsense include: 'soaring crime rates, "it is worse than ever": law and order nostalgia [and that] the criminal justice system is "soft on crime" and does not protect citizens'. (Hogg and Brown 1998: 21). This was one of the ways the political candidates running in the State Election tried to win votes, so to speak.

Let us take a look at what both parties had to offer - in relation to crime policy - in the weeks leading up to the election. The Liberals we offering a plethora of improvements to crime policy including: more police powers, a three-strike system for problem venues (goodbye Friday nights at the Railway Hotel) and a graffiti hotline and crackdown, to only name a few. The ALP on the other hand, did not provide as many answers to crime problems, but in what they had shared very similar premises with those offered by the Libs. So we can see that law and order campaigns are a very popular angle to take.

 Finally, I found this significant to note here: tonight as I watched the evening news I saw that Barry O'Farrell is claimed to have said that he intends to follow through with ALL of the policies put forward in the Liberals' electoral campaign despite having found a 4.5 billion black hole in the state's budget. This raises another question:

How much should we take at face value?



References:

Marsh, I. and Melvelle, G. (2009). Crime, Justice and the Media 1st ed. London: Routledge. p. 1

Hogg, R. and Brown, D. (1998). Rethinking Law and Order. New South Wales: Pluto Press. p. 21

i tweet, therefore i am.

 I think my consumption of crime and media news is relatively typical for a person my age studying Criminology. In so, I have pricked up my ears to crime-related news in the media a considerable amount since the beginning of the course. In our day and age the world has moved on in terms of media consumption, and because crime stories dominate the media, more crime-related news is being consumed in turn.

 I like to think that I'm an old-fashioned kind of gal; I still buy CD's and I don't even own an iPhone; but why not take advantage of a world that allows us to have a whole cyber world of information at our fingertips, quite literally (excuse the bad pun). I can't remember the last time I bought an actual, tangible newspaper. I'm pretty sure it was around the time that the Starbucks in my area closed down, where you could pick up The Herald for fifty cents with your latte. Now it seems far more conveniant (and cheaper) to browse through the seeminlgy endless amount of news content online. When Alyce told us in the lecture on Monday that there is the possibility that press companies might start charging us to view their online news I felt my heart break a little on the inside.

 I don't watch alot of TV, I prefer TV on DVD and go through phases of watching an assortment of shows, none of which have been crime fiction shows. If there's nothing much on TV I tend to go with watching the crime 'faction' shows such as Border Security and RBT. I hate to admit that I don't hate the reality shows. However, I do make an effort to watch the evening news and even more so when a major event is taking place, such as the upcoming state election.

 On the flipside, I find that it is sometimes hard to avoid the news when particular incident has been blown up by the media. The face of football player Benji Marshall has been plastered all over the news since he was charged with assault last Saturday. It's only natural to assume the excessive media coverage of this story is due to the celebrity status of Marshall. Stories of violent crimes such as this one, are difficult to avoid in the news.

 Moreover, social networking sites, such as facebook and twitter, which are used widely amongst the general public, provide a platform for personal opinion on such matters of crime. I find that even on these sites, news of current crime events is prominent. Only today did I see someone post:

' So are the police going to charge the 'victim' of Benji Marshall's punch for racial vilification? I don't agree with violence but what would you do?'

 This was one of the more nicely-put personal opinions.

  




.