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Idea concerning News on TV

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iamnotaparakeet
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10 Mar 2009, 8:25 am

I've noticed that when someone who has committed a crime is shown a picture of, that their picture is usually a poor one with them grimacing or looking ugly. Whereas people who are to be honored in some fashion are shown in pictures that are merry, showing friendly qualities.

The reason this is done is so that the criminals are dehumanized in reporting, but it is on the basis of their assumed guilt and all such like that.

My idea is that a criminal should have friendly pictures shown, and honored people should have unfriendly pictures shown, so as to just be opposite of the media highlighting of persons.



Arcanyn
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10 Mar 2009, 8:50 am

It's probably also done because people might get freaked out seeing criminals looking like ordinary, everyday people - much better to make them look like hideous monsters, to give the illusion that these people can be easily spotted. People don't want to believe that that guy they regularly see at the bus stop might be a rapist, or that the friendly greengrocer who always helps them carry their grocieries to the car might have ten chopped up bodies hidden under his floorboards. They want to think that the only people who do those sorts of things are ugly people perpetually wearing nasty expressions on their faces - it's not people they know that do those awful things, rather a seperate subspecies with nothing to do with them.



iamnotaparakeet
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10 Mar 2009, 10:48 am

Arcanyn wrote:
It's probably also done because people might get freaked out seeing criminals looking like ordinary, everyday people - much better to make them look like hideous monsters, to give the illusion that these people can be easily spotted. People don't want to believe that that guy they regularly see at the bus stop might be a rapist, or that the friendly greengrocer who always helps them carry their grocieries to the car might have ten chopped up bodies hidden under his floorboards. They want to think that the only people who do those sorts of things are ugly people perpetually wearing nasty expressions on their faces - it's not people they know that do those awful things, rather a seperate subspecies with nothing to do with them.


So, you would say it is for a calming effect in viewers that it is done this way?



Arcanyn
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13 Mar 2009, 6:32 am

I'd say so. And don't forget, the presenters are human as well, and are probably just as inclined to want to believe these people are hideous monsters as everyone else. It's likely a consequence of the fact that society as a whole does not want to believe that who seem pleasant on the outside could be evil. I think there's an overriding fear of this, which you can see manifested in horror movies - the villians people find scariest are not the ones with some hideous deformity, but the Hannibal Lecters - charming, pleasant, sophisticated, seemingly benign, but hiding a dark secret. People with a tag saying "I am a villain" are much less scary than those who hide in plain sight beneath a mask of sanity.