ABSTRACT
According to Cohen and Young (1973: 9), the mass media “are in the business of manufacturing and reproducing images. They provide the guiding myths which shape our conception of the world and serve as important instruments of social control”. In other words, the media has a signifi cant role to play in the social construction of public opinion regarding all matters of life, not excluding crime and the specifi cs of the criminal justice. As Cohen and Young (1973: 18) argue in a rather old yet still relevant quote, the media neither distort the real world nor do they accurately refl ect real events; rather, the media offer a translation of reality into simplifi ed stereotypes, and particularly those stereotypes carried of deviants. And even though I, too, would not go to the extent of arguing that media discourse determines the way in which readers think about the world around them, I am in agreement with Schulz (1990 [1975], cited in Jeffries, 2007: 8) when arguing that we can “conclude something about the attitudes of society by what that society has encoded in its discourses”. And this is where language comes in:
Journalists, in their drive for a scoop, and in their attempt to sell, frequently use infl ated rhetoric, responsible for the introduction of highly emotional vocabulary into the language of the news. They also construct catch phrases, which through constant repetition become the clichés reproduced again and again by the media, and by the authorities communicating with the public through the media. The value-laden, simplifi ed picture of the world as represented by the media becomes the world for its recipients.
