ABSTRACT
Anxiety about media representations of crime has flourished for as long as the modern media of communication have existed. Mediaphobia is particularly prominent in various discourses about why crime rates and patterns have changed since the Second World War (although such respectable fears have a much longer ancestry, as shown in Pearson 1983). The most familiar of these discourses is that of moral decline and fall: the media are said to sensationalise deviance more and more, to glamorise offending, and to undermine moral authority and social controls of all kinds. 1
