Crime holds an enduring fascination. Different subjects like criminology, psychology or linguistics have different methods to study this phenomenon and thereby answer different questions related to crime, criminals and victims of crime. This book takes a primarily linguistic approach to the study of crime. It aims at introducing linguistic text analysis, in particular the framework of Critical Stylistics1 (Jeffries 2010a), to criminologists to broaden their toolkit for analysing crime news reports as part of societal discourse on crime.
Before we get to the content of newspaper articles on crime, in other words to the text and its analysis, I start this book by taking a media and therefore producer perspective. Separating text and producer is based on a three-part distinction between producer, text and recipient as âthree loci of meaningâ (Jeffries 2015c) out of which this book focuses primarily on the meaning of the text, referred to as textual meaning. However, knowledge about the producerâs side helps to understand and separate textual meaning from producer meaning or recipient meaning. This means that we start with looking at the terms media and news as well as the profession of journalists before we move to textual meaning and explain what this book is about from Sect. 1.5 onwards.
Fowler (1991:1) argues that âthe âcontentâ of newspapers is not facts about the worldâ but instead ideas comprising beliefs, values, theories, propositions and ideologies. Therefore, reportage about people and events in newspaper articles is in fact a presentation of ideas about them and the world as presented by the text. As such people, whether police officers, judges, offenders or victims, have counterparts in reality, their construction in the text world of newspaper articles is necessarily a discourse of omission not least due to word or space limits. Based on the linguistic approach presented in this book, we are naturally less interested in what is omitted in crime news reports following from a selection process but instead in what is to be found in such texts.
Necessary limitations to some selected features like distinct character traits, prevalent social roles or outstanding circumstances of an offence open the gate for manipulation. Choices over how to portray a person or how to present a progression of events in a text are equally manipulative as are choices over what to include in a report and what to leave out or what to report on at all. Every reporter/editor has to make these choices as reality is far too complex to be reproduced comprehensively in a newspaper article. Choices, in particular stylistic choices, are at the core of this book and will be introduced in more detail in Sect. 1.5.3. Choices over what and how to report lead to news presented in the media and we begin by looking at these two terms.
1.1 Media
Newspapers belong to the category of âlegacy news mediaâ (Westlund 2014:136) which together with TV or radio are called âold mediaâ. The latter are contrasted by Devereux (2007:10) against the ânew mediaâ (internet, digital TV, etc.), a distinction governed by historical considerations.
The media owe their name to the fact that they provide a medium for communication between senders and receivers or recipients (Devereux 2007:10; Heffer 2005:5) and are a form of channel to present content, namely information (Durant and Lambrou 2009:26). This basic definition ties in with the producerâtextârecipient distinction mentioned before and is just one aspect of a broader definition of mass media with reference to the quantity of people they are available to. Taking a broader view, mass media and newspapers as an example thereof can be conceptualised in six different ways. Besides mass media being a means of communication, they are also industries, agents of social change and globalisation, agents of socialisation and sources of social meaning; mass media texts are commodities as well as cultural products (Devereux 2007:13). Taking these approaches into account allows for a holistic picture of what mass media actually are and leads to a better understanding of their power. Mass media are âa primary source of definitions of and images of social realityâ (Devereux 2007:11) and, in relation to crime, they shape âthe conceptual boundaries and recorded volumeâ of it (Reiner 2007:316). Thus, the picture of crime presented in the mass media and its analysis provide valuable insight into how society views crime.
Mass media are not to be confused with social media (e.g. see Page 2012; Page et al. 2014), the latter being an umbrella term for services like Twitter, generally defined as âInternet-based sites and services that promote social interaction between participantsâ (Page et al. 2014:1). Whereas mass media broadcast in a non-reciprocal or âone-to-manyâ way (Durant and Lambrou 2009:17; Page et al. 2014:1), social media have many senders and many receivers with the possibility of immediate reaction. Although social media are not eligible to replace newspapers or journalism (Cole and Harcup 2010:4; Gore 2014:52), they are regarded as âgame-changersâ (Gore 2014:53). Due to the internet it has never been as easy as today to immediately access free-of-charge news from many different sources (e.g. blogs, tweets, SMS news alert services, online news provided by search engines) in our globalised world. This together with changing human living patterns (Preston 2008:643) as well as the emergence of free print publications like Metro has led to considerable pressure on and change in the newspaper landscape in Britain to which we will return later.
1.2 News and news sources
As Robert Park, a sociologist, puts it: âDog bites man isnât news. Man bites dog isâ (quoted in Moore 2014:26). This example serves as a gateway towards a definition of the term ânewsâ. News, as its semantics suggests, is supposed to inform people about something new although sometimes known stories are warmed up with little or no new twist in them. As I am writing, the allegedly upcoming marriage of the murderer Charles Manson (which never materialised) as soft news might serve as an example. Soft news such as stories on art, sports, lifestyle and celebrities focus on entertainment in opposition to hard news covering catastrophic or life-threatening events, politics, economics, crime and so on. (Bell 1991:14; BusĂ 2014:16, 37). A type of hard news is breaking news which is referring to unexpected events (ibid.). For example, the original hard news about Mansonâs crimes is warmed up on occasion of his intended marriage. Crime news is thus hard news, sometimes even breaking news (e.g. terrorist attacks), and can occasionally provide the background for soft news.
An important distinction is to be made between a news event and a news story, the first referring to an event in the real world, for example, the actual crime committed, and the latter to a newspaper text or article which narrates this event (Bignell 2002:79, 87). When I use the term ânewsâ in this book, I mean news stories.
The informative function of news is to be distinguished from evaluation where opinion, interpretation or recommendation is offered, often in feature articles (Bell 1991:14). Harcup (2004:31f) holds that news is mainly about people doing or saying things. News does not faithfully mirror or list events but is rather considered to be a âselective viewâ of what is going on in the world (Harcup 2004:30). An advertisement in The Guardian once phrased it a bit more colloquially: âIsnât it amazing that the amount of news that happens in the world every day always just exactly fits the newspaper?â (quoted in Harcup 2004:32).
News is not out there; instead journalists construct facts and âa context in which these facts make senseâ and thereby reconstruct ââaâ realityâ (Vasterman 1995, 2005). Thus journalists do not report, find or gather but produce or construct news (ibid.). Devereux (2007:186) even states that media content is socially and culturally determined. This ties in with the conceptualisation of mass media as agents of socialisation and social change as well as sources of social meaning as mentioned above. This constructivist approach, to which we return in the next section, is covered in a semiotic definition of news as ânot just facts, but representations produced in language and other signs like photographsâ (Bignell 2002:79). News is rightfully named the âmost widely dispersed and understood discourse genre of modern timesâ (Durant and Lambrou 2009:77) which makes crime news a popular consumer product (Peelo 2005:20).
Not only news but also the reader or consumer of news is constructed by journalists by presuming what interests the reader (Randall...