One day, Chris McCormick was stuck in traffic because of a big car accident and realized he couldn’t wait to get home to see what happened.
The St. Thomas University criminology professor realized this was odd and had an epiphany.
“It told me a lot about the power of the media on the way we view the world,” he said. He then realized he needed to explore this topic more and ultimately published a book.
McCormick launched the second edition of his book, Constructing Danger: Emotions and the Misrepresentation of Crime in the News, on Friday afternoon in the Brian Mulroney Hall rotunda.
There was a great turnout of admirers as a psychology professor Suzanne Prior said the book is“engaging” and McCormick is a “gifted reader.”
The book is an in-depth critique and analysis of crime in the media, showing that sometimes crime is portrayed falsely and causes the audience to think of crime in an incorrect way.
McCormick focused on three particular topics in the second edition of his book: gender and crime, distortion in media, and law in media.
Prior is very interested in how media’s misrepresentation of sexual assault can downplay how serious it is, causing the victims to think it was their fault.
She said the book makes the reader angry to realize what the media is doing to us.
“We don’t actually trust our own experience,” McCormick said, adding that we depend too much on how the media portrays crime.
The first edition of Constructing Danger was published 15 years ago.
Since then, McCormick has added sample studies to each chapter, as well as an analysis of emotion which is unusual to criminal studies. He used the National Post for a lot of his material.
Although the book came out last January, McCormick is just launching it now. It’s being used in many STU criminology classes.
“It is a marvelous book to teach,” he said.
“In this edition I used more national…examples. In the original edition focused more on regional crime and news,” said McCormick.
He also focused on the fact that we only think of stereotypical examples of crime and “we never think we are going to be in danger going grocery shopping but in fact we are.”
For example, an acquaintance is more likely to be the predator in an assault than a stranger.
By writing this book, McCormick wants students and the public to think about crime and the media critically
