A Study on the Media Construction of Criminality: Encoding and Decoding Shock Documentary

This paper is about how media constructs criminality and how it encodes such notion in real life’s understanding of criminality. Nowadays, there is almost a consensus on simplicity of this idea that the media merely reflect a social event. The media highlight their own reading from a social event which is according to specific cultural assumptions, and consequently media representation of youth crime is obviously not an exception in this issue. The way of representation has been always at the center of attention in cultural studies tradition. Having wide audience and a key role in reconstructing the popular culture, by producing soap operas, documentaries and broadcasting criminal news, television is one of the most prominent media in representing youth's crimes and deviations. Accordingly, the study of different aspects of Iran's media representation of youth's crimes and deviations which have been neglected in academic research is vital. To study on representation of youth's deviations, in this paper, we have concentrated on a television documentary named "Shock", which deals with social deviations in Iran's society among youths and is being broadcasted weekly, and we have tried to use semiotics to show its implications. Unlike popular perceptions, documentaries do not merely reflect social facts but similar to dramas they follow narrative patterns and reconstruct a manipulated image of social facts. Similarly, “Shock” follows the archetype of hero and anti-hero (good vs. evil) and looks for themes related to youth culture such as fashion, underground music and alternatives. The main strategy for this documentary to make conflict between “The goodies- The baddies” is symbolization. Using symbolization, “Shock” has made relations between conceptions such as fashion, underground music and alternatives and SatanismConceptual Framework: For analysis, the subject of this paper, moral panic which is related to Social construction of crime theory and labeling theory is a hard core. Social construction of the crime theory explains how interest groups, moral entrepreneur, and social movements, making claims about a particular type of social behavior. The concept of moral panic becomes developed with different approaches. using this concept, Cultural criminology as an approach derived from the tradition of cultural studies and embedding serious criticism to using simplified media coverage of crime concepts problematize interaction between media, crime and culture. Based on Cultural Criminology approach, Meaning of crime and control is constructed by representation system. The results of this research indicate that the “Shock” documentary besides stating social damages in youth's area as its primary signifier has secondary signifiers and semantic implications which have been encoded in form of social, technical and ideological codes. “Shock” uses underground music as a mediator, makes a connection between fashion and Satanism and by means of stereotyping and misrepresenting groups of youths, seeks for reproducing and inducing its own ideology among public. This program has two groups of audience; the youth who should receive the official discourse message, and those authorities who should respond to the social deviations and be more sensitive about social disorders. Criminalization based on the rule of law is in exclusive jurisdiction of legislature. However, the effects of public culture or specific subculture of youths are criminalized primarily through media, manipulated news, and daily papers, and consequently the perpetrators are called criminal or deviant. Regardless of legal considerations, in all cases, media criminalization is happened since these behaviors are called corruptive behaviors. Indeed it should be noted that the relation between media criminalization and Criminal justice system is dialectic and reciprocal one. On the one hand, the court and the police represent the ruling ideology and affect producing media criminalization discourse; on the other hand, the media has an effective role in emphasizing parts of youth culture for criminal justice system authorities. The finding of our research state that police officials as the experts of “Shock” television documentary have an important role in creating Myths for youths and at the same time they use those Myths themselves. Media stereotyping and creating myths like what was happened in “Shock” are firstly encoded in police discourse in binary forms such as “Madonna-Whore” or youths who are worthy of support and those who are not, secondly, Iran's criminal legislation reproduce such stereotypes and myths in forms of legal construction such as "Offenses against public decency and morality".