Criminal Visions

Paul Mason

• Publisher: Willan
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135990909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Media representations of law and order are matters of keen public interest and have been the subject of intense debate amongst those with an interest in the media, crime and criminal justice.

Despite being an increasingly high profile subject few publications address this subject head on. This book aims to meet this need by bringing together an important range of papers from leading researchers in the field, addressing issues of fictional, factual and hybrid representations in the media -the so called 'docu-dramas' and 'faction'.

Part 1

Criminal Visions in Context

Chapter 1

From law and order to lynch mobs: crime news since the Second World War

Robert Reiner, Sonia Livingstone and Jessica Allen

Introduction: Crime News Stories – Desubordination and Discipline

Deviance is the quintessential element of newsworthiness. Routine, predictable events – ‘dog bites man’, in the old cliche – are seldom reported (unless they involve major celebrities, as in the case of the Queen Mother's death). Events that appear to disrupt expectations, deviant occurrences, are the stuff of news, as all studies of news-gathering have confirmed (Ericson et al., 1991). The news media parallel the entertainment industries in their focus on stories of crime and deviance, and this is even more true with the relatively new cross-breed of ‘reality’ television and other forms of ‘infotainment’ (Leishman and Mason, 2002, Chapter 7).

The prominence of crime stories in the media has been a focus of anxiety and debate (Reiner, 2002). The longest-running concern has been about the potentially criminogenic consequences of mass-media representations of crime, including crime news. Respectable fears about the glamorization of deviance and subversion of authority have accompanied each new form of mass medium, from cheap books and newspapers, through cinema and television, to video and the Internet, generating a huge research literature attempting to test the effects of media representations. This primarily conservative anxiety has been challenged by a polar opposite, radical perspective. This sees the media preoccupation with crime stories as a source of exaggerated public fear of crime fuelling support for authoritarian crime control policies. In this view the media, whether controlled by the state or by large corporations, are an ideological apparatus reproducing existing patterns of power and domination. Both of these polarized perspectives have been challenged to an extent by research on processes of production, which suggests overall a more complex set of influences generating news and other media content (e.g. Schlesinger and Tumber, 1994), supporting what Chris Greer's thorough analytic overview has described as a ‘liberal pluralist’ reading (Greer, 2001, Chapters 2–6).

Research Methods

The research reported in this chapter was part of a broader project charting the changing media representation of crime in various forms of media in the half-century after the Second World War. Its general aim was to examine whether the trends in the content of entertainment and news media crime stories supported either the view of the media as primarily a source of desubordination of authority or of social discipline. Specifically, it sought to ascertain whether the broadly agreed analysis of the features of media crime stories that had been developed by numerous studies held up over a long period of historical change. Almost all previous studies of media content focus on relatively short periods, and most have been conducted since the 1960s. However, the postwar period has witnessed profound transformations in patterns of crime and control (Taylor, 1999; Young, 1999; Garland, 2001). In what ways are these reflected in and influenced by changes in media representations? We set out to shed light on this through a historical content analysis, both quantitative and qualitative, of cinema, television series and newspapers, and of audience perceptions of the changes. The research was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council of Great Britain (no. L/210/25/2029), for which we thank them. The results for the entertainment media have been reported elsewhere, as has an analysis of audience reception (Allen et al., 1998; Reiner et al., 2000a, b; Livingstone et al., 2001). This chapter looks at the implications of the newspaper material we collected (a briefer preliminary report was Reiner, 2001).

The press study we conducted analysed representative samples of stories from The Times, generally regarded as the British newspaper of record for most of the period, and the Mirror, a paper that contrasts with it in terms of market (tabloid versus ‘quality’) and politics (left rather than right-of-centre). Whilst this clearly is a limited base for generalization, and it would clearly be desirable to extend the analysis to more newspapers, it is a much larger sampling of stories across a broad period of time than has hitherto been assembled in the criminological literature. The quantitative analysis of the proportion of crime and criminal justice stories was based on a random 10 per cent sample of all ‘home news’ stories between 1945 and 1991 inclusive in the two papers. A more detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the way crime was represented was carried out for a smaller random sample of these stories. Ten days were selected randomly in both newspapers for every second year from 1945. In those issues all front-page stories, editorial pages and letters to the editor that primarily concerned crime were analysed, as were the crime news reports on the home news pages.

The Content of Crime News: the Established Model

As stated earlier, anxiety about the consequences of media representations of crime has generated a research industry examining the content of media crime stories. These have suggested certain recurring patterns, found in both entertainment and news stories. The basic finding of content analyses of media crime stories has been succinctly characterized as ‘the law of opposites’ (Surette, 1998: 47). The characteristics of crime, criminals and victims represented in the media are in most respects the polar opposite of the pattern suggested by official crime statistics or by crime and victim surveys. Content analyses often take the latter official measures as portraying the ‘reality’ of crime and thus regard the media picture as grossly distorted. However, given the problems and limitations of all official measures of crime, and even of independent research-based estimates, which have long been emphasized by criminologists (Maguire, 2002), it is necessary to be much more cautious about claims concerning the ‘reality’ of crime (Reiner, 2000). What is clear, however, is that there are certain distinctive features of media representations of crime that have been consistently demonstrated by content analyses of both entertainment and news stories. A recent overview of these studies suggests that the following characteristics of crime stories were regularly found by content analyses (Reiner, 2002: 378–93):

1. Stories about crime – both news and entertainment – are prominent in all media (the exact proportions varying according to different definitions of ‘crime’ stories).

2. News and fiction stories are overwhelmingly about serious violent crimes against individuals, primarily murder.

3. Offenders and victims portrayed by media stories are generally of higher status and older than those processed by criminal-justice agencies.

4. The risks of crime are presented as more serious quantitatively and qualitatively than the probabilities of victimization suggested by official statistics or victim surveys.

5. The effectiveness and the integrity of the police, and the criminal justice system more generally, are presented in an overwhelmingly favourable light. Crime Does Not Pay, as the title of a series of short films produced by MGM between 1935 and 1947 put it. Police deviance or failure tend to be presented within narrative frameworks that do not fundamentally impugn police legitimacy, for example by stressing that corrupt police officers are exceptional ‘bad apples’.

6. Crime news focuses primarily on reports of specific cases, and there is little about wider trends, causes, or policy issues.

Although these features characterize crime stories, news and entertainment, in general, there are variations between different media and different markets (Ericson et al., 1991). Television and print stories vary systematically in their presentation of crime, for example, as do newspapers and programmes aimed at elite, specialist or mass markets. The key question addressed in this chapter is whether there are also systematic variations over time, and if so, what these are. Specifically we consider how the media representation of crime and criminal justice has developed during the half-century after the end of the Second World War, a period of profound transformation in political economy and culture, and in patterns of crime and criminal justice policy. The next section will look at some of the quantitative aspects of change in crime news over this period.

Changing Patterns of Crime News

In many respects the quantitative analysis of the characteristics of crime news stories since the Second World War confirmed that the standard pattern outlined above applied throughout the period. However, within these broad features there are a number of significant changes of emphasis in the kind of crimes reported, the demography of offenders and victims, and the portrayal of the police and criminal justice.

The prevalence of crime stories

In line with the general conclusions from other studies, crime stories were a substantial proportion of all newspaper stories throughout the postwar decades. However, there was an increase in the prominence of crime news after the mid-1960s. Until then the overall percentage of home news stories that were primarily about crime averaged about 10 per cent in the two newspapers surveyed. Since the late 1960s this has doubled to around 20 per cent. For most of the period the percentage of crime stories was somewhat higher in the Mirror than in The Times, although by the 1990s the gap had closed. The proportion of stories about the criminal justice system also increased after the late 1960s in both papers (from around 3 per cent to 8 per cent), but remained a little higher in The Times than the Mirror.

The increasing proportion of crime stories itself suggests a growing concern with crime. This is underlined by the growing proportion of crime stories that feature multiple crimes. An increasing proportion of crime stories mention crimes other than the one that is the principal focus of the story. These secondary crimes (secondary not necessarily in seriousness but in their role in the narrative) can be of two distinct kinds. ‘Consequential’ crimes are ones linked to the principal crime, either as preliminary steps towards it or as results of it, for example stealing a car in order to commit a robbery, or to get away in afterwards. ‘Contextual’ crimes are ones not intrinsically connected to the principal crime in the story but mentioned as obiter dicta, for example remarks about the crime being part of a more general pattern of such offences. Table 1.1 shows the growth of such multiple crime stories.

There has clearly been a steady growth throughout the postwar period in the proportion of stories featuring consequential...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of tables and figures
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Visions of crime and justice
• Criminal Visions in Context
• Chapter 1 From law and order to lynch mobs: crime news since the Second World War
• Chapter 2 Video violence: how far can you go?
• Chapter 3 ‘Signal crimes': detective work, mass media and constructing collective memory
• Criminal Representations: Crimes and Criminals
• Chapter 4 Masculinity, morality and action: Michael Mann and the heist movie
• Chapter 5 Sex crime and the media: press representations in Northern Ireland
• Chapter 6 Organized crime: Mafia myths in film and television
• Chapter 7 Political violence, Irish Republicanism and the British media: semantics, symbiosis and the state
• Chapter 8 Mass media/mass murder: serial killer cinema and the modern violated body
• Criminal Decisions: Agencies and Agents
• Chapter 9 Photo stories and family albums: imaging criminals and victims on Crimewatch UK
• Chapter 10 Media representations of visual surveillance
• Chapter 11 Completing the ‘half-formed picture'? Media images of policing
• Chapter 12 Film lawyers: above and beyond the law
• Chapter 13 British justice: not suitable for public viewing?
• Chapter 14 The screen machine: cinematic representations of prison
• Index