ABSTRACT
There is a powerful ‘common-sense’ view that the relation between crime and ‘the news’ is a simple one: crime occurs – the police act to apprehend the criminals – the courts punish them: all this is news – and gets reported, as accurate information, in the media. The aim of this paper is to challenge, and, if possible, to overthrow this viewpoint; for it seems to us naive and misleading. There is no consistent relationship between the rates for different kinds of crime in the Criminal Statistics and the relative frequency with which these are reported in the press. The post-war ‘crime wave’ does not seem to have been accompanied by a major increase in press coverage; but also, the decline in the official rate between 1950 and 1955 was not accompanied by a corresponding decrease in news coverage. Though the rates for different kinds of crime vary, the patterns of crime news remain remarkably constant. Some of the distortions are also strikingly consistent. For instance, more serious crime or crimes of topical social interest are consistently over-reported: murder is consistently ‘very markedly over-reported’: so are more serious punishments. Thus, though crime news must and does bear some relation to the rates of reported crime, this relation is neither simple nor transparent. (Roshier, 1973: Hauge, 1965)
What in fact we are dealing with is the relation between three different definitions of crime: the official, the media and the public definitions of crime. Each of these definitions is a socially constructed social event not a fact in nature; each is produced by a distinctive social and institutional process. The official definition of crime is constructed by these agencies responsible for crime control – the police, the courts, the statisticians, the Home Office. This definition is the result of the rate of reported crime, the clear-up rate, the focussed and organised police response to certain crimes, the way the patterns and rates of crime are interpreted by judges and official spokesmen in the crime control institutions and so on. The media definition of crime is constructed by the media, and reflects the selective attention of news men and news media to crime, the shaping power of ‘news values’, the routines and practices of news gathering and presentation. The public definition of crime is constructed by the lay public with little or no direct experience or ‘expert’ knowledge of crime. It is massively dependent on the other two definitions – the official and the media definitions. The selective portrayal of crime in the mass media plays an important part in shaping public definitions of the ‘crime problem’, and hence also (through further feed-back) in its ‘official’ definition. So we must replace the simple equation: crime = apprehension = news about crime, with a more complex model, which takes full account of the shaping power of the intervening institutions. Thus:
The ‘common sense’ equation – crime = news – suggests that the primary function of ‘news’ is to give the public, accurate information about crime in society. But ‘crime news’ serves other, equally important, but less strictly informative, functions. Erikson reminds us that ‘confrontations between deviant offenders and agents of control always attracted a good deal of attention’ in the past; there was good reason why ‘the trial and punishment of offenders were staged in the market place’. The reform which abolished Tyburn and the other public spectacles of retribution, Erikson noted, ‘coincided almost exactly with the development of newspapers as a medium of mass information’. Crime is thus one of the oldest, most perennial topics of public interest. Similarly with punishment which has a symbolic as well as an instrumental value and must therefore be seen to be done as well as done. As Sir Charles Curran noted, ‘social rejection is part of punishment’. The stigmatisation of the wrong-doer is a critical part of the punishment process and for stigmatisation to work, it must be made public – publicised. ‘News’ about crime and punishment thus plays an important social function in demonstrating where the moral, legal and normative boundary lines which define ‘society’ fall and how they are applied. Society needs to be continually reminded where these normative boundaries, which define it as a community, lie: how they are being tested, redesigned or undermined: who is transgressing them. It also needs public reassurance that, despite these transgressions, the boundaries remain intact. Society is fascinated by this endless unfolding drama between order and disorder, consensus and dissensus. Since crime breaches our ‘normal’ expectations about the world, the people rely on the control institutions to define, place and ‘make sense of ’ the illegal, the ab-normal, the ‘unthinkable’. And if control is to be applied in defence of the interests of ‘society as a whole’, society needs to have publicly provided those explanations and rationales which legitimate that control. In Erikson’s memorable phrase – ‘In a figurative sense, . . . morality and immorality meet at the public scaffold, and it is during this meeting that the line between them is drawn’.
