CSI: Mayo Clinic Researchers Find Television Shows Inaccurately Portray Violent Crime

CSI: Mayo Clinic Researchers Find Television Shows Inaccurately Portray
Violent Crime

VIDEO ALERT: Additional audio and video resources, including excerpts from an
interview with Dr. Lineberry describing the research, are available on the
Mayo Clinic News Blog.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Researchers at Mayo Clinic
compared two popular television shows, CSI and CSI: Miami, to actual U.S.
homicide data, and discovered clear differences between media portrayals of
violent deaths versus actual murders. This study complements previous research
regarding media influences on public health perception. Mayo Clinic
researchers present their findings today at the American Psychiatric
Association annual meeting in San Francisco.

Previous studies have indicated television influences individual health
behaviors and public health perceptions. Timothy Lineberry, M.D., a
psychiatrist at Mayo Clinic, says, "We make a lot of our decisions as a
society based on information that we have, and television has been used to
provide public health messages." Researchers chose to compare the crimes on
CSI and CSI: Miami to real homicides because of the shows' combined audiences
of more than 43 million viewers annually. They sought to determine how
representative the portrayal of violent death crimes on the two series
compared with data from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) National Violent
Death Reporting System.

When researchers compared the shows to the CDC data, they discovered the
strongest misrepresentations were related to alcohol use, relationships, and
race among perpetrators and victims. Previous studies of actual statistics
have shown that both perpetrator and victim were often under the influence of
alcohol and/or drugs when the crime occurred, differing from what the shows
portrayed. Also, CSI and CSI: Miami were more likely to have described the
victim and the attacker as Caucasian, which is misrepresentative. Finally,
according to the CDC data, homicide victims typically knew their assailant;
however, the television series were more likely to have portrayed the
perpetrator as a stranger. All of these findings were significantly different
when compared to the data.

Dr. Lineberry says, "If we believe that there is a lack of association with
alcohol, that strangers are more likely to attack, and that homicide doesn't
represent particular groups of people, it's difficult to create public health
interventions that the general public supports." Other authors contributing to
this study included Christopher Janish and Melanie Buskirk, both from Mayo
Medical School.

About Mayo Clinic
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in the world. Doctors from every medical specialty work together to care for
patients, joined by common systems and a philosophy that "the needs of the
patient come first." More than 3,300 physicians, scientists and researchers
and 46,000 allied health staff work at Mayo Clinic, which has sites in
Rochester, Minn., Jacksonville, Fla., and Scottsdale/Phoenix, Ariz.
Collectively, the three locations treat more than half a million people each
year. To obtain the latest news releases from Mayo Clinic, go to
www.mayoclinic.org/news. MayoClinic.com (www.mayoclinic.com) is available as a
resource for your health stories. For more on Mayo Clinic research, go to
www.mayo.edu.

SOURCE Mayo Clinic

John Murphy of Mayo Clinic, +1-507-284-5005 (days), or +1-507-284-2511
(evenings), newsbureau@mayo.edu