Reporting Crime: The Media Politics of Criminal Justice (Clarendon Studies in Criminology)

Every day we watch, read, and hear stories about crime and justice. This path-breaking book reveals how policymakers, criminal justice professionals, pressure groups, and the police in the United Kingdom compete in self-promoting struggles to shape their own images and policy agenda. The first new study in almost two decades of how specialist crime journalists work, this book brings to a wider public an influential new approach to the sociological study of journalism. Series of case studies, the authors pose a number of important questions. Does coverage of crime statistics promote fear of crime, or is the debate about the figures really about something else? By focusing on fear of crime have we therefore underplayed public fear of authority? Does the coverage of sexual crime encourage voyeurism? And finally, is television's growing obsession with showing us stories of real crime more about entertaining the audience than about helping the police with their enquiries?