ABSTRACT
Understanding the construction of newsmaking requires an examination of the conscious and unconscious processes involved in the mass dissemination of symbolic consumer goods. Commonly referred to as information or as ideas, these symbolic bites or commodities of news production and the pictures of social reality that they create are inseparable from their cultural history. Media images or characterizations of crime and crime control in the United States are constituted within the core of the social, political, and psychological makeup of American society. Mass news representations in the "information age" have become the most significant communication by which the average person comes to know the world outside his or her immediate experience. As for the cultural visions of crime projected by the mass media, or the selections and presentations by the news media on criminal justice, these representations are viewed as the principal vehicle by which the average person comes to know crime and justice in America.
