ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on three themes of the crime news business that have evolved in the USA during the 20th century: the predator criminal as a media icon; the depiction of sexually violent crimes against women; and the portrayals of high profile police-citizen encounters. In short, the “mass reality of crime” has evolved to the point where certain domains or assumptions about crime and justice are no longer questionable. Mass-mediated visual culture occupies the “objective” space of dreamwork and imagination, having usurped the school’s role of providing symbolic coherence. Contradictorily, in the mass media, crime is behavior criminals choose freely, and media criminals are not bound or restrained in any way by normal social rules and values. Police and media interactions in both the Stuart and King cases reveal potentially very different approaches that the media can take in covering crime and crime control.
