Fear, Authority, and Justice: Crime-Related TV Viewing and Endorsements of Capital Punishment and Gun Ownership

By R. Lance Holbert, Dhavan V. Shah, Nojin Kwak. 2004

109 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We focus on the relationships among three types of television viewing (news, police reality, and crime drama) and attitudes toward capital punishment and handguns, as well as the likelihood of actually owning a handgun. A host of exogenous variables are treated as predictors of television use, support for police authority, fear of crime, and our criterion variables. A series of direct and indirect relationships are assessed. Analysis suggests that viewing police reality shows is both directly and indirectly related to the endorsement of capital punishment and handgun ownership, while also directly predicting a greater likelihood of actual handgun ownership. In addition, TV news viewing predicts fear of crime in audience members, and this fear contributes to the endorsement of capital punishment and handgun ownership. Crime drama viewing is positively related to support for the death penalty.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/325d46bacc5411318b52e174ead188ad3cdc0c83

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. M. Long
2. Michael D. Slater
3. D. Rouner
4. Juan-José Igartua
5. Riva H. Tukachinsky
6. Emily Moyer-Gusé
7. Jochen Peter
8. Patti M. Valkenburg

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Dan G. Drew
2. Michael D. Slater
3. Maria Elizabeth Grabe
4. Leo Poom
5. A. Wåhlberg
6. U. Foehr

Citations in the corpus

• Television Dramas and Support for Controversial Public Policies: Effects and Mechanisms (2006, background): “The effect of L&O on support for the death penalty is especially interesting given recent evidence (Holbert et al., 2004) in a national cross-sectional survey that crime drama viewing is associated with support for the death penalty.”
• Crime Cultivation: Comparisons Across Media Genres and Channels (2007, background): “This was accompanied by a strong law-and-order tendency, similar to what has been recorded in other surveys (Holbert et al., 2004).”