On The Conflict Between The Crime News Reports In City Papers And The Social Norms

As time progresses, our legal life is keeping changing. Under this background to improve the public's ability to prevent crimes and to intensify their legal ideology is indispensable to establishing the socialist legal system. The crime reports in city newspapers, which have gained a wide range of audiences, have developed into an important way to perform legal education and to promote the public's legal knowledge."Crime"is a common word to be used in legal terms, but journalism offers a different perspective to defining"crime", which can help understand the category of crime. In the study of the concept of crime news, journalism gives the different characterization and meaning to"crime". It can be understood the scope of crime news reports better and grasped the elements of crime news reports throgh focusing on the social harmfulness of criminal behavior. The special content is also the important point to distinguish crime news reports with others.In recent years, city papers'crime reports have made great progress in their various forms and vivid plots have made them very popular among the readers. However, as the result of some journalists'shortage of professional and legal quality as well as other objective factors such as the limitation of the medium literacy, there are still some problems in reporting crimes. Our empirical study on the crime news reports in Sanxiang City Express indicates the problems include: high reporting frequency of crimes, attaching too much importance to violence cases, no or little guidance of the public opinions, over-exposed details and improper plots, and so forth. These serious problems offer considerable impetus to the phenomena such as newspapers trials and news infringement. The problems also make the conflicts between crime news reports and social norms such as ethics, social customs and legal norms even fiercer.Journalism offers a different perspective to defining"crime", which can help understand the category of crime. In the perspective of journalism, the cultivation theory and the catharsis theory can explain why these problems exist in the crime news reports. On one hand, the catharsis theory explain the necessity for the crime news reports to exist; on the other hand, the positive and negative roles of the reports'cultivation makes remarkable contributions to the interaction between the crime news reports and the audiences. To solve these problems, both moral and legal measures should be taken. Only when the cultural environment has been purified and the crime news reports have been standardized, can the crime reports in city papers take their social responsibilities and complete their social mission.