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Abstract
Evidence about the relationship between exposure to media violence and criminal activity remains mixed. While some scholars argue that exposure to violent media content "triggers" crime and aggression, others contend that media may influence crime, but only as a source of information about techniques and styles, not as a motivation for crime. This debate has critical implications for criminal justice academics as calls for policy are regularly made on the basis of research in this area. This article contributes to this literature by presenting detailed empirical evidence of how media coverage of violent crimes affects homicides perpetrated by drug traffickers in Mexico, and their crime style. With an empirical model that addresses possible bidirectionalities between drug homicides and media coverage, we tracked 32,199 homicides, their stylistic characteristics, and their coverage by the press. Our results show that when media covers drug homicides it influences the probability that other criminals use similar styles of crimes, but it does not change overall rates of homicidal activity. This is evidence against the "trigger" hypothesis, and in favor of “copycat” effects.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes on contributors
Viridiana Rios is a visiting assistant professor of political science at Purdue University. She conducts research related to criminal justice policy and journalism, particularly related to Mexico.
Christopher J. Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University. He conducts research on media effects, including violent video games, thin-ideal media and suicide themed media.
Acknowledgement
Viridiana Rios would like to thank Mylene Cano for superb research assistantship, and Rosalee Clawson, Aaron Hoffman, Brad Holland, Jay McCann and Brian Phillips for outstanding feedback. A number of anonimous reviewers made this paper better.
Notes
1 Gathering data on media coverage of violen crimes, and copycat criminals is generally complicated due to self-justification and perception biases (Doley et al., Citation2013; Surette, Citation2011). Self-justification is problematic because criminals may want to shift the blame to the media or third parties. Perception biases are a problem because even if two crimes appear to be similar, scholars cannot be certain that they were inspired by the same source (Coleman, 2004; Stack, 2000; Surette & Maze, Citation2015). Initially, some studies tried to overcome this problem by "shocking" individuals with fictional media coverage of violen crimes, and measuring their reactions (Kaplan, 1984). Yet, this technique was questionable because it did not provide an accurate paradigm to understand how real-world violent media is delivered and consumed in normal settings (Felson, 1996; Freedman, 2002).
2 We use weeks as our frequency measure because media coverage measures were only available per week, starting on 6 October 20107 (Reforma, Citation2017). We restricted our dataset to 2010 because starting 2011, Mexican media signed an agreement to stop covering drug traffickers’ homicides, thus probably limiting our capacity to properly measure the quality of media coverage (Molzahn et al., Citation2012). All data will be a public for reproduction and validation.
3 These were (i) use of high-caliber firearms, (ii) signs of torture or severe lesions in victims, (iii) bodies found at the crime scene or in a vehicle, (iv) victims that were taped, wrapped, or gagged, (v) murders that happened in a prison and involved criminal organizations, and (vi) if one of several "special circumstances" occurred. Among these "special circumstances" are whether the victim was abducted prior to assassination (known as a "levantón" in Spanish), ambushed or chased, whether the victim was an alleged member of a criminal organization, and whether a criminal organization publicly claimed responsibility for the murder (Ríos, Citation2013).
4 All news used to compile the datasets were searched in Spanish language.
5 In the case of Mexican drug cartels, it has been documented that the drug lord Joaquin Guzman, alias “El Chapo”, thought that his media profile was an unfair image of his business (Rawlinson, Citation2016). Thus, attempting to run his own public relations campaign, he contacted famous actors, like Sean Penn, to direct a movie that was a fair representation of his motivations (The Economist (2016) cited by Rawlinson (2016)).