White Collar Crime
White Collar CrimeWithin today’s demanding news society, many contemporary issues receive daily coverage by all facets of the media. Some of the most highly debated coverage topics, including crime, drugs, and violence reporting have taken over as forerunners in continuous media coverage.
Generally speaking, we Americans are vehemently against all three issues, although the media’s coverage whether it be newspaper magazine Or television is not necessarily true nor objective For instance, the reason why a person commits a criminal act receives limited or no media coverage, but the person’s criminal actions itself as well as the punishment are the substantial and emphasized aspects of coverage.
White-collar crime is another classification of crime. This type of crime focuses on the safety of both consumer products and employees in the workplace. Not to anyone’s surprise, white-collar crime receives a small amount of media coverage because we, the public consumers, are told that we do not need to read, nor to hear about it. This type of crime in some respects may be even more detrimental to a portion of the public’s safety than is a person who commits a form of criminal action on the streets.
White-collar crime cover-ups, hence are not unusual. According to authors Lee and Solomon, the “criminal role of the banking industry” gets little media attention, despite the fact that The New York The New York Timess reported that “more than $100 a year in drug money flows through the nation’s banks (241).
Crime reporting in contemporary society has biased double standards in deciding what is covered says Lee and Solomon, despite the fact that Newsweek covered a story that said, “The crack nation includes all sizes, classes, and hues” (241). This sentence is contradictory to the cover photograph that is printed with it. No whites were in the photo, only Afro- Americans and Hispanics in handcuffs, stretched on the ground, and placed against a wall. While another story in Newsweek titled “White-Collar Shame” was written in a less harsh and demeaning tone about big money swindlers.
American society is consumed, mesmerized, and persuaded at times by media coverage. Jeffrey Reiman, a professor of criminal justice at American University said, “We have a system shaped by economic bias from the start. The dangerous acts of crimes unique to the wealthy are either ignored or treated lightly while for the so-called common crimes, the poor are far more likely than the well-off to be arrested, if arrested, if charged convicted, and if convicted sentenced to prison (Lee and Solomon 242). The media reports criminal acts of the poor daily, while the people who commit white-collar crimes go unnoticed.
According to attorney Gerry Spence, “the cost of corporate crime in America is over ten times greater than the combined larcenies, robberies, burglaries, and auto-thefts committed by individuals” (Lee and Solomon 242). To prove Spence’s statement, last month The New York Times reported that burglaries in New York City have drastically declined within the past ten...
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