ABSTRACT
To our knowledge, the majority of media studies carried out to date have been present-centred, concerned to shed light on contemporary correlations and effects.1 Fewer have been concerned with processes over time and fewer still with the long-term social processes that are at work in this regard.2 An implication of this has been a tendency to seek timeless correlations, generalizations about the media that take too little account of spatio-temporal variations. This chapter is a contribution towards remedying that deficiency. More particularly, it is a study of the newspaper reporting of football crowd behaviour in Britain over a period of approximately 100 years, and of the relationships between the changing patterns of such reporting and the changing patterns of behaviour of football crowds themselves.
