The Role of Media in Shaping Crime Narratives

Turn on any news channel during prime time and chances are you’ll find a crime story dominating the screen – a murder mystery, a high-profile arrest, or a grisly incident replayed with dramatic background scores. Switch to OTT platforms, and the top trending titles are often crime thrillers, gangster sagas, or true-crime documentaries. The media isn’t just reporting crime anymore; it’s narrating it, shaping how we perceive criminals, victims, and justice itself. This selective storytelling has profound psychological consequences, influencing everything from public fear to policy decisions.

How the media selects which crimes to tell 🔗

Not every crime makes it to the front page or the 9 PM bulletin. Editorial decisions about what qualifies as “newsworthy” follow a surprisingly predictable pattern, and the resulting distortion is stark. Research on media portrayals of crime shows that violent and sexual offences dominate coverage far out of proportion to their actual occurrence. For instance, one study found that sex offences made up just 2% of crimes but accounted for 20% of crime-related media stories, while another found violent crimes made up only 7% of actual crime but half of all media reports.

Three factors largely drive this selection:

The availability of visual content 🔗

Television news thrives on visuals. A CCTV clip of a robbery, a dashcam video of a chase, or mobile phone footage of a mob attack will almost always secure airtime, while a complex financial fraud involving spreadsheets rarely will. This visual bias skews coverage toward crimes that happen in public spaces and can be dramatized, leaving behind-the-scenes offences – corporate fraud, environmental violations, bureaucratic corruption – relatively invisible to the general viewer.

The involvement of notable individuals 🔗

Crimes involving celebrities, politicians, or socially prominent families receive disproportionate attention. The 2008 Aarushi Talwar double murder in Noida is a textbook example. As legal commentators have observed, news channels broadcast “new angles” as breaking news without verification, turning a family tragedy into months of speculative television. The same phenomenon played out with the Sushant Singh Rajput coverage in 2020, where entertainment, politics, and criminal investigation blurred into one continuous spectacle.

Commercial interests and TRP wars 🔗

Commentators writing on Indian journalism have noted that newspapers have developed a mastery of the “hyper-local” crime report, mimicking the language of a police FIR to create a “theatre of the real.” The motivation is not public interest alone – it’s readership, ratings, and advertising revenue. The Centre for Media Studies (CMS) found that prime-time news on major Hindi channels had seen a significant shift from political reporting toward crime and Bollywood gossip, with TRP pressures fundamentally reshaping editorial priorities.

When crime news becomes entertainment 🔗

The line between reporting and performance has thinned considerably. Dramatic re-enactments, ominous voiceovers, red “Breaking News” banners, and speculative panel debates have turned crime coverage into a form of infotainment. This matters because the psychological effect on audiences is very different from straightforward reporting.

A 2026 study published on the psychological dimensions of crime representation found that higher exposure to crime-focused media correlated with increased fear, heightened perceptions of crime severity, and declining confidence in law enforcement and judicial systems. Sensationalised framing, in particular, intensified emotional arousal and threat perception far beyond what contextualised reporting produced.

The “law of opposites” and distorted perception 🔗

Criminologists use the term law of opposites to describe how media coverage tends to present an inverted image of actual crime statistics. Because viewers rely on media as their primary source of information about crime, these distortions shape what psychologists call the cultivation effect – the gradual formation of beliefs about the world based on repeated media exposure. Someone who watches crime news for hours every day comes to believe the world is far more dangerous than official data suggests.

Media trials and the presumption of guilt 🔗

The Indian legal system rests on the principle that an accused person is innocent until proven guilty. News coverage rarely honours this principle. In high-profile cases, suspects are often declared guilty by prime-time panels long before a court verdict, and their families harassed by roving reporters. Such coverage influences not just public opinion but potentially even judicial proceedings, creating what legal scholars call a parallel trial in the public sphere.

How crime dramas rewrite our moral compass 🔗

If news coverage distorts perceptions of what crime looks like, fictional crime dramas reshape how we feel about criminals themselves. The golden age of Indian crime cinema – from the 1970s “angry young man” films to today’s sprawling OTT gangster sagas – has consistently produced charismatic, morally complex antiheroes whom audiences genuinely root for.

The anti-hero paradox 🔗

Think of the enduring fascination with characters like Vijay Deenanath Chauhan, Don, the Wasseypur patriarchs, or Ganesh Gaitonde from Sacred Games. These figures are often portrayed with such charisma, wit, and emotional depth that their crimes become secondary to their personalities. Critics have pointed out that films like Don, the Dhoom series, Once Upon a Time in Mumbaai, and Raees tend to emphasise the larger-than-life persona of the criminal, glamorising his life and making it appear cooler than reality. The “good guy” – usually a police officer – is deliberately cast with less star power, nudging audience sympathy toward the wrong side of the law.

The psychology of identification 🔗

Why does this work on us? Delhi-based psychologist Neelam Mishra, quoted in a report on Bollywood’s influence on crime, explained that the basic phenomena of human psychology suggest people choose and follow whatever makes their image appear powerful. When aggression, dominance, and misconduct are shown as pathways to respect or love, some viewers internalise these as acceptable behavioural scripts – especially adolescents who are still forming their moral framework.

This concern isn’t theoretical. A 2019 Civic Studios report that analysed more than 30 mainstream Indian films, TV shows, and web series from the crime and courtroom genre between 2016 and 2019 raised concerns about how portrayals of “heroic” policemen glorifying extrajudicial violence may feed public enthusiasm for harsher punishments and weaken support for due process. Lawyer-commentators in the report observed that when people see a case in court, they sometimes declare the accused guilty simply because “it looked like something from Sony TV.”

Sex, violence, and dramatisation 🔗

Dramatic crime content skews heavily toward sexualised violence and graphic brutality, not because these represent typical offences but because they drive engagement. This has two problematic effects. First, it normalises depictions of violence against women as a storytelling device. Second, it creates public confusion about what real-world crimes actually involve – the infamous “CSI effect,” in which juries and the public expect investigations to resemble the polished, tech-driven processes shown on screen rather than the slow, painstaking work real detectives do.

Who else shapes the narrative 🔗

Beyond journalists and filmmakers, several external stakeholders shape how crime is represented in public discourse:

Law enforcement agencies control access to information. Police press briefings, selective leaks, and official “encounter” narratives can significantly shape how a crime story is told before any independent investigation is done. Politicians use crime stories to push agendas – whether it’s demonstrating a tough stance on law and order or using a tragic incident to shift public focus. Advocacy groups highlight certain crimes to draw attention to particular causes, such as communal violence, caste atrocities, or gender-based violence. Each of these actors has legitimate interests, but their cumulative effect is coverage that serves many agendas other than accuracy.

The real-world consequences 🔗

These representational choices don’t stay confined to screens – they ripple out into policy and everyday life.

Fear of crime and social trust 🔗

Repeated exposure to violent crime coverage heightens anxiety, especially in urban middle-class households where television is the primary source of information. Parents restrict their children’s movement, women curtail public presence after dark, and entire communities are labelled unsafe based on a few highly publicised incidents. Research on the psychological effects of crime reports has documented how exposure to such coverage is associated with increased social avoidance, decreased social trust, and greater stress.

Punitive policy and “justice by spectacle” 🔗

When the public demands “instant justice” after a horrifying crime, governments often respond with harsher laws rather than investing in prevention or systemic reform. The post-2012 Nirbhaya case reforms brought crucial legal changes, but the accompanying media climate also fuelled a lasting appetite for capital punishment, fast-track trials, and police encounters – responses that criminologists generally find ineffective at reducing crime.

Marginalisation through selective coverage 🔗

Which victims get sustained coverage and which don’t is revealing. Crimes against affluent, urban, or upper-caste victims typically get more airtime than comparable crimes against Dalit, tribal, or rural victims. This selective empathy reinforces social hierarchies and signals whose suffering matters in the public imagination.

Toward more responsible crime storytelling 🔗

None of this means the media should stop covering crime or that crime dramas should disappear. Crime reporting serves vital public interest functions – exposing institutional failures, holding power accountable, and informing citizens of genuine risks. The question is how it is done. Responsible approaches include providing statistical context rather than isolated shock, covering a wider range of offences (including financial and environmental crimes), practising solutions journalism that explores prevention alongside incidents, and treating suspects with the legal presumption of innocence they’re entitled to.

For audiences, media literacy is the most powerful tool. Recognising how crime is framed, asking whose interests a particular narrative serves, and cross-referencing sensational claims with official data can help individuals form a more accurate picture of the society they live in.

What do you think? Have you noticed specific moments when a news story or a crime drama changed how you perceived a community, a profession, or your own safety? And when the next big crime story breaks, which voices do you think we should be listening to first – and which ones might we be over-amplifying?

References

1. https://johnhoward.ca/blog/media-portrayals-crime-create-problems/
2. https://medium.com/legalnow/is-indian-media-plagued-by-sensationalism-3f71a5929a0c
3. https://www.theweek.in/columns/shashi-tharoor/2026/01/31/the-high-price-of-headlines-how-sensationalism-fails-victims-and-society.html
4. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/400212349_Media_Mind_and_Crime_Psychological_and_Communicative_Dimensions_of_Criminal_Representation
5. https://www.scoopwhoop.com/why-do-bollywood-films-glorify-gangsters/
6. https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/10/26/can-movies-motivate-crimes-in-real-life
7. https://www.filmcompanion.in/features/can-bollywood-cop-movies-influence-real-life-crimes-a-report-finds-out
8. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02848-2