What do you think?
Rate this book
News, Crime and Culture
Crime is always newsworthy. But is crime reporting as value-free and objective as we would like to think? Is crime reporting concerned exclusively with issues of good and evil, justice and the law? Or is it part of a broader and much more specific ideology, underpinned by an essentially conservative agenda? The link between news reports of crime or disorder and public perception becomes increasingly clear, as public reaction to the murder of Sarah Payne and the fuel crisis has shown. News, Crime and Culture explores these links, assessing the relation between culture, criminality and social control, and in particular the ways in which news reports reinforce particular responses to race, poverty, class and gender. Maggie Wykes uncovers these links through a variety of high-profile events featured in the news, spanning the last twenty years of the twentieth century. She examines such issues as child abuse, football hooliganism, homelessness, youth culture, inner-city crime, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and domestic violence. Using case studies and a range of methodological analyses, Wykes turns the business of crime reporting inside out, revealing the hidden agendas that not only report but shape our view of the world in often insidious ways.
240 pages, Paperback
First published February 20, 2001
3 people are currently reading
20 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
September 1, 2014
I liked this book very much. Heavily influenced by Foucault and Fairclough, it would be hard for me not to like it, to be honest. This asks many questions about the nature of crime and what it is that the media does when it reports on crime. Crime is socially constructed, and so certain kinds of crimes are considered much worse than other kinds of crimes. The easy way of knowing which are likely to be considered worse are those that are committed by ‘others’. Others tend to be pretty well anyone that doesn’t fit into the stereotype of those with the most power in society – males, whites, middle class, able, English speaking, heterosexual – any deviation from this ‘norm’ is suspect, any offence perpetrated by someone outside this norm is to be punished with the full force of the law.
Now, those crimes that are perpetrated by someone from within the established power structures are not necessarily ignored, even if they frequently do not go punished. Compare how someone who robs a bank with a gun is treated as opposed to someone who destroys a banking system with equal greed. I hope you have been keeping count of all of the bankers sicne 2008 that have been charged with smashing the world economy through their illegal activities. To date, I believe that is a sum total of none.
This book provides similar conclusions about how the media treats single mothers (they get pregnant just to get access to public housing, you know), miners (this was written around the time of Thatcher’s little excursion into destroying the British Trade Union movement) and sport. The stuff on sport is really interesting – I’m not sure why I find social theory on sport so much more interesting than I find sport itself, but there you go.
There is a view that the media provides the first go at history – you know the score, all the news that’s fit to print. This view is born of the idea that the media merely reflect what has happened in the world, or that they provide the world with objective content, or that the content they provide aligns with their audience’s desires. However, there is more selection involved here than there is reflection. The media filters the world according to ‘news values’. But what are these news values? As is pointed out here certain kinds of violence always make for news – those who watch television news, in particular, are prone to believe the world to be a much more violent place than it really is – this is all to do with the ultimate ‘news value’ that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’.
But the kind of violence we are likely to see on television helps us to see the world in very particular ways – ways which are not all that accurate in how the world actually is, but also in ways that help to reinforce the power relationships that exist in society at the same time. A case in point. In Australia this year, up to the other day, a Facebook group I belong to tells me that 50 women have been murdered by their partners, they are keeping a running total – that is, 50 women have been victims of domestic violence. How many of these murders have been reported on the nightly news? I actually can’t remember hearing about any. But if a woman is murdered in the street, or sexually assaulted in a car park or on her way to a train, it is covered by just about everyone – and with CTV images of the suspected guy and so on. As is pointed out in this book, about three-quarters of all rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. Most women who are murdered are murdered by their ‘lover’. Given what ‘media values’ decide what is ‘news worthy’ it is hardly surprising that many people might find these facts about the world quite different from what they might otherwise expect given their experience of the news. The author makes the point that a lot of our popular culture also, and perversely, has very dangerous women – your archetypal ‘black widow’, going about killing men. That this is vanishingly rare is also something that ought to make us wonder why it can also be so often a part of our mythologies.
The main point that this book makes is summed up in these two quotes:
“It seems to me that media theories which claim that audiences are told what to think, or even simply what to think about, are no longer adequate or viable in increasingly (in form and message) mass-mediated societies of culturally diverse, literate and educated audiences. Rather, I think the news media offer audiences ways of thinking: ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1973) the world.” Pp.193-4
and
“News matters because it purports to tell us the truth about the world beyond our immediate experience. Crime matters because it generates the moral boundaries within which state and subject are oriented – it marks the normal from the deviant.” Page 194
I liked this one an awful lot. I really do recommend it.
Now, those crimes that are perpetrated by someone from within the established power structures are not necessarily ignored, even if they frequently do not go punished. Compare how someone who robs a bank with a gun is treated as opposed to someone who destroys a banking system with equal greed. I hope you have been keeping count of all of the bankers sicne 2008 that have been charged with smashing the world economy through their illegal activities. To date, I believe that is a sum total of none.
This book provides similar conclusions about how the media treats single mothers (they get pregnant just to get access to public housing, you know), miners (this was written around the time of Thatcher’s little excursion into destroying the British Trade Union movement) and sport. The stuff on sport is really interesting – I’m not sure why I find social theory on sport so much more interesting than I find sport itself, but there you go.
There is a view that the media provides the first go at history – you know the score, all the news that’s fit to print. This view is born of the idea that the media merely reflect what has happened in the world, or that they provide the world with objective content, or that the content they provide aligns with their audience’s desires. However, there is more selection involved here than there is reflection. The media filters the world according to ‘news values’. But what are these news values? As is pointed out here certain kinds of violence always make for news – those who watch television news, in particular, are prone to believe the world to be a much more violent place than it really is – this is all to do with the ultimate ‘news value’ that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’.
But the kind of violence we are likely to see on television helps us to see the world in very particular ways – ways which are not all that accurate in how the world actually is, but also in ways that help to reinforce the power relationships that exist in society at the same time. A case in point. In Australia this year, up to the other day, a Facebook group I belong to tells me that 50 women have been murdered by their partners, they are keeping a running total – that is, 50 women have been victims of domestic violence. How many of these murders have been reported on the nightly news? I actually can’t remember hearing about any. But if a woman is murdered in the street, or sexually assaulted in a car park or on her way to a train, it is covered by just about everyone – and with CTV images of the suspected guy and so on. As is pointed out in this book, about three-quarters of all rapes are committed by someone known to the victim. Most women who are murdered are murdered by their ‘lover’. Given what ‘media values’ decide what is ‘news worthy’ it is hardly surprising that many people might find these facts about the world quite different from what they might otherwise expect given their experience of the news. The author makes the point that a lot of our popular culture also, and perversely, has very dangerous women – your archetypal ‘black widow’, going about killing men. That this is vanishingly rare is also something that ought to make us wonder why it can also be so often a part of our mythologies.
The main point that this book makes is summed up in these two quotes:
“It seems to me that media theories which claim that audiences are told what to think, or even simply what to think about, are no longer adequate or viable in increasingly (in form and message) mass-mediated societies of culturally diverse, literate and educated audiences. Rather, I think the news media offer audiences ways of thinking: ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 1973) the world.” Pp.193-4
and
“News matters because it purports to tell us the truth about the world beyond our immediate experience. Crime matters because it generates the moral boundaries within which state and subject are oriented – it marks the normal from the deviant.” Page 194
I liked this one an awful lot. I really do recommend it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review