Law-and-Order News

An analysis of crime reporting in the British press

Steve Chibnall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136422560
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1977 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

1	Crime reporting and mass communications research

In selecting law-and-order news to illuminate both newspaper ideology and the professional practices of journalists this study is at odds with much of the social science research tradition in the field of mass communications. Crime reporting has habitually been rather ignored by academic researchers or treated as essentially apolitical.

It has been of interest primarily as an example of the worst excesses of journalistic superficiality and sensationalism, a curiosity of no more than marginal importance to the understanding of mass communications. The only aspect of crime reporting which had received academic consideration in Britain until the 1970s was its social and psychological effects, but this was merely a small part of a wider inquiry into the effects, usually upon children, of media portrayals of sex and violence.

This situation might well have continued if it had not been for the developments occuring in the late 1960s which saw a convergence of both style and content between social deviance and political marginality (Horowitz and Liebewitz 1968) and a concomitant ‘politicization’ of much criminological theory (Taylor, Walton, and Young 1973; 1975). The recognition of crime and deviance as essentially a result of, or a response to, conditions of life in capitalist society rather than as a consequence of personal inadequacy has given a new significance to crime reporting. It is this significance which is explored in this study. The established tradition of academic inquiry provides little help or inspiration in this task because it has tended to operate with a limited problematic which has handicapped attempts to confront the central problems of media content and journalistic practice.

Most recent critics agree that academic, social science research into the mass media lacks theoretical integration and methodological consistency. Denis McQuail (1969: 17) writes of ‘a lack of coherence and a fragmentation of effort’ which, in the words of Peter Golding (1975:8) has produced ‘a patchwork of structured information not always comparable, reconcilable, or even complementary’. Research has almost invariably been financed by commercial and government interests and has not simple confined itself to the practical concerns of its sponsors, but has frequently been based on woefully inadequate theoretical foundations. Given the nature of its sponsorship, it is not surprising that the great bulk of media research has been aimed at expanding knowledge of the media's audiences — the way in which they use and are influenced by media products[1]. Much less attention has been paid to the social and political content of media products and the conditions of their production.

Analyses of the content of media products have too often been based on naive and simplistic assumptions about the value of quantitative methods, leading to a slavish, mechanical, and largely fruitless counting of words and phrases[2]. The principal problematic of content analysis has been that of bias i.e., to what extent are the media impartial in their coverage of affairs, particularly political affairs? In this, research has reflected the practical concerns of the major political parties and media organizations.

Among the broadcasting media in particular, the quest for impartiality has become a fetish. Television producers and presenters go to enormous lengths to ensure that their programmes appear politically ‘balanced’, that the healthy dynamics of controversy are not permitted to degenerate into sterile propaganda. Arguments are aired, spokesmen of more-or- less equal ‘weight’ are selected to represent the various cases, and the television company supplies a professional umpire to see that the contest is carried out fairly and that one side does not monopolize all the play. All is open. The structure of the debate favours neither one side nor the other. Such strict impartiality is not required of newspapers. They are allowed a certain political colouring. They are expected to express opinions, provided they do not allow those opinions to obscure or determine the reality of events. Reporting must continue to appear objective even though we are aware that it cannot be entirely divorced from the opinionizing of the leader columns. Providing one organization does not command a monopoly of the news, partiality is a luxury we can afford. Serious difficulties in the system are only generally seen to arise if the preponderance of papers supporting a particular political party becomes overwhelming, or if papers violate popular expectations of responsibility and objectivity by launching deliberate ‘smear campaigns’. Generally speaking, however, the play of market forces ensures that a wide range of opinion is represented in the press as effectively as strict controls ensure that impartiality is maintained by the broadcasting media. As Sir Max Aitken has expressed it: ‘“Reduced a little in numbers, the Fleet Street newspapers today offer the public a complete range of opinion and expression totally free from outside direction”’ (O'Higgins 1972:113).

Researchers who accept this conventional wisdom, however, are allowing an important truth to be concealed i.e., the apparently ‘wide range of opinion’ is really only a limited range. All the major media voices sound within a framework of legitimate discourse delineated by the mass parties of our parliamentary system. Opinions and world-views which occupy the margins of that system or fall outside it receive very little representation indeed. Thus the media are, as Stuart Hall puts it ‘oriented within a framework of power’ and consequently ‘structured in dominance’, by which he means that they show a systematic tendency to reproduce definitions of reality derived from the political elites. What he says of television programmes is equally applicable to newspaper stories:

‘The broadcasting institutions exercise a wide measure of editorial autonomy in their programmes: but ultimately they operate within the mode of reality of the state, their programme content is, in the last instance, governed by the dominant ideological perspective and is oriented within its hegemony.’

(Hall 1972:1)

It should be stressed that this does not mean that journalists and broadcasters never interpret events in ways which are unacceptable to establishment politicians, but that, in the vast majority of cases their interpretations and accounts are grounded in the shared perspectives of the ‘liberal consensus’. The range of opinion generally extends from the moderate ‘Right’ of the Conservative Party to the moderate ‘Left’ of the Labour Party. While Fleet Street newspapers may exhibit different or shifting allegiances to the two major political parties they are united in their oppositions to policies and parties which seek to alter the social or economic organization of society in any fundamental way. This type of statement might seem banal and obvious when we think about it, but its value lies essentially in the fact that we do not normally think about it. We tend to take for granted the constraining parameters within which media discourse takes place, allowing them effectively to circumscribe a paramount reality which is subject to neither questioning nor thought. This means that we may notice differences of opinion and approach between papers but we are unlikely to draw out the implications of what they share in common — a basic commitment to the established social and economic order, and a characteristic way of interpreting the world. The recognition of this essential similarity of world-view involves us in a new problematic. Issues of bias are no longer central to our appreciation of the significance of the news media and are replaced by a concern with broader questions of ideological disposition. The significant problem is not whether most newspaper reports betray a partiality towards one political leader rather than another but rather what type of concepts and assumptions do newspapers employ in identifying and making sense of political events. What is the nature of the paramount reality and how is it created and presented to the media's audiences? Certainly, that paramount reality routinely appears to us in a reified form — self-evidently true, a matter of ‘common-sense’, what any reasonable man would believe — but, in the final analysis, it is a human creation:

‘Reality is socially defined. But the definitions are always embodied, that is, concrete individuals and groups of individuals serve as definers of reality. To understand the state of the socially constructed universe (of meaning) at any given time, or its change over time, one must understand the social organisation that permits the definers to do their defining. Put a little crudely, it is essential to keep pushing questions about the historically available conceptualisations of reality from the abstract “what?” to the sociologically concrete “says who?”.’

(Berger and Luckmann 1967:134)

When we ask this question in relation to the definitions contained in newspapers we direct attention to two areas of inquiry:-

1. The ownership and control of newspaper businesses.
2. The world of the professional communicator.

The social science tradition of theory and research has certainly not concerned itself greatly with the first of these two areas of inquiry. In Britain, it was not until the early 1970s that the interpénétration of Marxism and academic social science produced a theoretical overview of trends in the economic organization of mass communications pinpointing the relations between the different media sectors. The findings ofthat study (Murdock and Golding 1974a), however, leave little doubt about the importance of patterns of ownership and control in understanding media products. The authors draw our attention to the accelerating tendency towards monopoly in the media industry, the concentration of ownership in fewer and fewer hands, and the progressive absorbtion of media organizations by large capitalist corporations with interests in a wide range of industries. All this can only restrict the diversity and range of media voices still further while encouraging a reliance on proven formulae and a desire not to ‘rock the boat’, especially in the choppy economic waters of the seventies. Murdock and Golding (1974b) have indicated the specific implications of concentration for the press:

‘As far as the newspapers are concerned, economic pressures mean less space; fewer journalistic resources, especially correspondents; less scope for gathering background material; and increased reliance on a handful of news agency sources. In addition, the overall tone is likely to become politically blander and less sectional in order to avoid offending audience groups necessary to the maintenance of revenue.’

Turning to the second area of inquiry, the world of the communicator, we can say that there has been more research than in the first area, but its contribution to the understanding of British journalism has been less than we might desire. Firstly, the research has been primarily American[3] and secondly, it has usually operated with a central concept of limited utility: the ‘gatekeeper’ concept[4]. Its deficiencies stem from its foundation in a model of news production which is apparently unable to cope with the creative aspects of communicative work. That model is essentially mechanistic in its conception of the process of news production as a system of cybernetic filters reducing the flow of information reaching the audience. Professional communicators are dichotomized into ‘news-gatherers’ and ‘newsprocessors’ whose activities relate to the two stages of production. In the first stage reporters collect the news stories and pass them on to the gatekeepers in their news bureaucracies. Here, in stage two, the stories undergo a process of selection, abbreviation, and organization and those lucky enough to survive in some form emerge at the end of the news funnel and are received by the audience.

While superficially attractive, this model is misleading and can blind us to vitally important elements and processes of news manufacture. The reporter does not go out gathering news, picking up stories as if they were fallen appies, he creates news stories by selecting fragments of information from the mass of raw data he receives and organizing them in a conventional journalistic form. As Curtis MacDougall (1968:12) correctly points out ‘The news is the account of the event, not something instrinsic in the event itself. But in the process of news construction the reporter will only rarely utilize his own direct perception of an event. More usually, his raw materials will be the selected and selective accounts of others — his sources. In most reporting situations, the reality of events must be processed by others before the reporter can render his own account. It is within this context of reporter /source interaction, a context largely taken for granted by the conventional news flow model, [5] that the significant ‘gatekeeping’ takes place. If we wish to understand the selection and construction of news stories, we must examine the procedures which journalists adopt to identify potential stories and select appropriate sources, as well as the ideologies and stocks of knowledge which inform those decisions [6]. We must scrutinize the process of exchange which takes place between the journalist and his source, the bonds which bind the one to the other, and the interests and pre-dispositions of each. This is not to ignore the role of sub-editors and news room executives for their importance lies in the occupational socialization of the reporter rather than in the selection of his copy [7]. By the time that copy reaches the sub-editor the most significant decisions have been made — events have occurred, they have been experienced, accounts of experiences have been constructed for particular audiences, accounts of those accounts have been fashioned and these have either been stored away or transformed into fully- fledged news stories. At every stage selection and processing has taken place.

The gatekeeper concept, then, does nothing to help the integration of the social science tradition of theory and research. The tradition continues to lack a coherent theoretical framework which will enable the different moments in the process of news production to be analyzed as related parts of a whole rather than as discrete events.

These introductory remarks have served as both a theoretical context and a rehearsal for some of the arguments to be developed and documented in the course of this study. It will centre upon the social construction of knowledge by professional communicators, assessing the influence of newspaper ideology, news values, and source relationships on the writing of newspaper stories. I have selected the work of crime reporters for particular attention because theirs is the core specialism of law-and-order news. They form an elite corps of journalists occupying a strategically important position in the process of news creation and dissemination. There are less than twenty-five full-time crime specialists on Fleet Street papers, but the control they exert over our knowledge of the worlds of criminal and policemen is much greater than their numbers might suggest. Their accounts of crime and deviance may often be fragmentary and superficial, but for most of us they are the most complete and detailed available. This makes them powerful accounts, capable of shaping opinion and understanding.

In the course of the study I interviewed fourteen specialist crime correspondents representing eight of the ten Fleet Street daily and Sunday papers which employ such specialists. In addition, a further twenty or so journalists whose experience appeared relevant to the understanding of law-and-order news were interviewed. These included leader writers, journalists who had reported the Northern Ireland troubles, and journalists on the fringes of the crime reporting field. All requests for interviews were made directly to individuals, rather than through organizations and resulted in a surprisingly high response rate of around 75%. Insights gained from these interviews were supplemented by extensive reading of the memoirs and other published works of journalists and policemen, an interview with a Scotland Yard press officer, and brief periods of observation at the Yard's Press Bureau. I have attempted to integrate materials gathered from these sources with others gathered from a careful monitoring of law-and-order news in the national press over the period January 1971 to December 1975 and research into the reporting of earlier selected case studies. The eclectic and pragmatic approach to data collection is one which it is hoped the reader will judge appropriate to the overall aim of the study: to understand newspaper content by relating it to the beliefs, practices, and interests of newsmen and their sources.

The plan of the book

Chapter 2 begins to explore, in general terms, the relationship between the polictical ideology of newspapers and the professional news values of their journalists. The two are seen to intermesh closely enough to constitute mutually dependent elements of a single ideological system.

Chapter 3 moves towards the detailed study of l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Crime reporting and mass communications research
• 2 Press ideology: the politics of professionalism
• 3 Blood-soaked cheque books: the golden age of crime reporting
• 4 Bombers, muggers and thugs: the press and the violent society
• 5 Black sheep and rotten apples: the press and police deviance
• 6 Yard man speak with forked tongue?: sources and the management of news
• 7 Conclusion
• Chronology of Law-and-Order News 1945–75
• References
• Notes
• Index