Is Irish Public Opinion towards Crime Distorted by Media Bias?

Despite relatively low crime rates, the Irish public believes itself to be experiencing a law and order crisis. In this article, it is argued that a plausible explanation for the public misperception is the distorted image of crime in the media. A sample of over 2000 Irish newspaper articles dealing with crime is analysed and it is argued that there are four ways in which the press skews the representation of crime. These are the bias towards extreme and atypical offences in terms of frequency, the bias towards those extreme offences in terms of newspaper space, the bias towards stories involving vulnerable victims and invulnerable offenders and the bias towards pessimistic accounts of the criminal justice system generally. By incorporating the cognitive heuristic of `availability', an elegant explanation of the relationship between biased media accounts and distorted public opinion can be offered.