Chris Greer

‘Trial by media’: policing, the 24-7 news mediasphere, and the ‘politics of outrage’

This article analyses the changing nature of news media—police chief relations. Building on previous research (Greer and McLaughlin, 2010), we use the concepts of ‘inferential structure’ (Lang and Lang, 1955) and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker, 1967) to examine former Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Commissioner Sir Ian Blair’s ‘trial by media’. We focus on the collective and overwhelmingly hostile journalistic reaction to Blair’s declaration in 2005 that: (a) the news media are guilty of ‘institutional racism’ in their coverage of murders; and (b) the murders of two 10-year-olds in Soham, 2001, received undue levels of media attention. A sustained period of symbolic media annihilation in the British mainstream press established a dominant ‘inferential structure’ that defined Blair as the ‘gaffe-prone Commissioner’: his position in the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ was shredded, and his Commissionership de-legitimized. The unprecedented resignation of an MPS Commissioner is situated within the wider context of ‘attack journalism’ and the rising news media ‘politics of outrage’.

Media justice: Madeleine McCann, intermediatization and ‘trial by media’ in the British press

Three-year-old Madeleine McCann disappeared on 3 May 2007 from a holiday apartment in Portugal. Over five years and multiple investigations that failed to solve this abducted child case, Madeleine and her parents were subject to a process of relentless ‘intermediatization’. Across 24–7 news coverage, websites, documentaries, films, YouTube videos, books, magazines, music and artworks, Madeleine was a mediagenic image of innocence and a lucrative story. In contrast to Madeleine’s media sacralization, the representation of her parents, Kate and Gerry McCann, fluctuated between periods of vociferous support and prolonged and libellous ‘trial by media’. This article analyses how the global intermediatization of the ‘Maddie Mystery’ fed into and fuelled the ‘trial by media’ of Kate and Gerry McCann in the UK press. Our theorization of ‘trial by media’ is developed and refined through considering its legal limitations in an era of ‘attack journalism’ and unprecedented official UK inquiries into press misconduct and criminality.

The Sir Jimmy Savile scandal: Child sexual abuse and institutional denial at the BBC

This study advances research on scandal through an empirical examination of one of the most extraordinary UK institutional child sexual abuse (CSA) scandals in the post-war period. Sir Jimmy Savile (1926–2011) was a BBC celebrity, showbiz friend of the establishment and philanthropist. In October 2012, one year after his death, an ITV documentary alleged that Savile was also a prolific sexual predator who for decades had exploited his BBC status to abuse teenage girls. As we demonstrate, this incendiary documentary triggered a news media feeding frenzy that in less than one week destroyed Savile’s reputation and thrust the BBC – the institution that made him a star – into a multi-faceted, globally reported CSA scandal. This study has four purposes. First, we propose a model of institutional CSA scandals that can account for critical transitions between key phases in the scandal process. Second, we apply this model to analyse the transition between the ‘latent’ and ‘activated’ phases of the Savile scandal. This transition corresponded with a dramatic transformation in the inferential structuring of Savile from ‘national treasure’, who had devoted decades to working with children, to ‘prolific sexual predator’, who spent decades abusing them. Third, we demonstrate how the BBC’s denial of responsibility for Savile’s sexual offending and its subsequent institutional cover-up triggered a ‘trial by media’ which in turn initiated the next phase in the scandal’s development – ‘amplification’. Finally, we consider the significance of our analysis of the Sir Jimmy Savile scandal for understanding the activation and development of scandals more generally.

It’s the image that matters: Style, substance and critical scholarship

Much has happened at Crime, Media, Culture since our last editorial at the beginning of Volume 2. As we launch Volume 3, we can report that CMC has recently been awarded a major international publishing prize and has continued, we hope, to promote the best in critical scholarship at the intersections of crime, media and culture. As is to be expected after two years, our Associate and International Editorial Boards have undergone some restructuring. While the changes to the latter are too numerous to list in detail here, we would like to extend our sincerest thanks to all the Editorial Board members who have worked with us over the past two volumes, and to offer a warm welcome to those new members who have come on board. It is also a pleasure to welcome Katja Franko Aas, Mark Hamm, Maggy Lee, Meda Chesney-Lind and Russell Smith as Associate Editors, and to confi rm that Alexandra Campbell and Majid Yar have joined us as Review Editors. In addition, we have created a new editorial position – Visual Arts Editor – which will be fi lled by Cecile Van de Voorde. Refl ecting our scholarly interest in the visual, we believe this new role will further cement CMC’s distinctive and innovative approach to visual issues. In this context it is the visual, and its signifi cance for explorations of crime, media and culture, that we wish to address briefl y in this editorial. Today, the visual constitutes perhaps the central medium through which the meanings and emotions of crime are captured and conveyed to audiences. Indeed, we would suggest that it is the visual that increasingly shapes our engagement with, and understanding of, key issues of crime, control and social order. The proliferation of news and entertainment media has generated growing competition for audience attention, a sort of infl ationary spiral of shock and enticement. Producing a visually arresting product which can ‘feed the mind and move the heart’, as Rupert Murdoch (2006) recently put it, has become one of the major challenges for media practitioners seeking to maintain their commercial buoyancy. In the midst of rapidly developing production technologies across a 24/7 mediascape, and multiplying screens and surfaces, the visual becomes paramount. However, while there is no escaping the ‘politics of representation’ (Hall, 1993), a scholarly engagement

Media Representations of Dangerousness

Media representations reflect a wide conceptualisation of ‘dangerousness’, which often bears little relation to professional definitions. This article considers the press representation of ‘dangerous offenders’ and wider notions of ‘dangerousness’ and ‘risk’, and discusses their construction in terms of both the determinants of newsworthiness and as a wider sociological phenomenon.

Investigating the crisis of the present

As we begin Crime, Media, Culture’s fourth volume, the need for serious and sustained scholarly engagement with the intersections of crime, media and culture has never been greater. Around the world, genocidal criminality competes with global warming and a Spice Girls reunion for media attention. The United States gears up for a presidential election sure to be decided by distorted images of terrorism, gender, and crime. The Guardian declares that, with some 138 journalists now killed, Iraq has become a war ‘no longer . . . accessible to public scrutiny or to democratic engagement’, and so evidences ‘the end of the media as a major actor in war’ (Bunting, 2007: 17). In the heartland of the United States, a distraught young man murders eight people at a mega-shopping mall and then kills himself, all in the hope that ‘now I’ll be famous’. Meanwhile, a little girl goes missing – and the media are mobilized. Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in Portugal has generated a torrent of international media coverage – coverage that may in fact be ushering in a dangerous extension in the hyper-mediatization of crime and control. Images of Madeleine are ubiquitous, and can be spotted not only in the media, but in airports and other public venues around the world. Two points arising from this story are worth briefl y dwelling on here. First, in November 2007, charities released fi gures indicating that more than 600 children have been missing in the UK for as long as Madeleine McCann, and are still unaccounted for (Woolf, 2007). Among them, dozens have disappeared from local authority care, and many more have been identifi ed by police and immigration offi cers as traffi cking victims: 40 are considered to be at particularly ‘high risk’ of harm. Many of these children have no parents to launch an appeal and few have achieved any kind of media visibility. None has attracted the levels of attention devoted to the McCann case. Secondly, the intensity and relentlessness of the media focus on the McCanns becomes all the more interesting when we consider the dearth of verifi able facts in the case. Indeed, all we ‘know’ at the time of writing is that a little girl has gone missing. No body has been found, no clear information regarding Madeleine’s whereabouts has been uncovered, and no one has been offi cially charged with an offence. Yet Madeleine’s parents – Kate and Gerry McCann – have been subjected to nothing short

Theorizing institutional scandal and the regulatory state

One by one, UK public institutions are being scandalized for corruption, immorality or incompetence and subjected to trial by media and criminal prosecution. The state’s historic response to public sector scandal—denial and neutralization—has been replaced with acknowledgement and regulation in the form of the re-vamped public inquiry. Public institutions are being cut adrift and left to account in isolation for their scandalous failures. Yet the state’s attempts to distance itself from its scandalized institutions, while extending its regulatory control over them, are risky. Both the regulatory state and its public inquiries risk being consumed by the scandals they are trying to manage.

Editorial: Global collapse and cultural possibility

This fi fth volume of CMC comes along at a particularly precarious time in global history. The current crisis of global capitalism is of course a crisis of human meaning and sustainability as well; more is at stake, always, than markets. As global capitalism shudders under the weight of its accumulated contradictions, other dimensions of human life are shaken as well: local cultures, familial arrangements, immigrant opportunities, even the provision of daily sustenance. And if Marx and Merton were even half right, these tremors will rattle the social order in ways that produce new strains on legitimate achievement, new tensions between social classes, new experiences of perceived deprivation and material want, and so new sorts of crime and predation. Mix all this with the global mediasphere ‐ with a live-on-demand mediascape that confounds causes and consequences, images and their effects ‐ and it’s easy to imagine the madness that may lie ahead. Yet a shuddering social order can shake loose new hopes and possibilities as well. As seen in the recent US presidential election, a well-timed social crisis can help produce results unimaginable decades before, perhaps even days before. The media saturation of daily life can convert every moment of progressive resistance into a made-fortelevision commodity; but a citizenry armed with video cameras and mobile phones can also invent the sort of instantaneous communication that makes meaningful political resistance a viable alternative. A world where commodity consumption no longer defi nes everyday life can punch a hole in citizens’ acquired sense of self, but the possibilities emergent in that world can also begin to fi that hole, perhaps, with a new sort of economic and cultural self-suffi ciency. Now is no time for despair, or for drawing back from the task of critical, culturally engaged analysis. Dangerous times demand at least a modicum of intellectual courage. It is in this cultural context, and in this spirit, that we move into CMC’s fi fth year of exploring media, crime, culture, and politics. Media and politics have, of course, for decades been inseparable; yet with the 2008 US presidential election the use of new and alternative media as tools for political campaigning was taken to a new level. Clearly understanding that ‘traditional’ or ‘conventional’ media forms ‐ print and broadcast news, billboard and television advertising ‐ no longer suffi ce to capture the attention,

Borders breached, conventional claims questioned

Welcome to Volume 2 of Crime Media Culture: An International Journal. At a time when many of our geographical and cultural borders are ever more closely guarded, it seems apt to reflect on the intellectual and artistic borders breached and intersected across the pages of CMC. As the scholarship appearing in CMC suggests, these borders – most notably, but not exclusively, between criminology, media studies, and cultural studies – are often porous, and at times fully permeable. Indeed, this journal could scarcely exist otherwise. The diverse contributions to Volume 1 of CMC, we feel, clearly illustrated the high quality of academic research, intellectual debate, political commentary and artistic engagement that can result from a truly cross-disciplinary interrogation of crime, media and culture. We are pleased to report, then, that the eclectic, cross-cutting intellectual revolution we spoke of in our first editorial appears to be well under way. Despite this, though, we would suggest that meaningful and sustained analysis between and across disciplines remains an important and pressing challenge. Even the most cursory glance at publishing catalogues and university prospectuses reveals that mediaand culturally-oriented criminology is a rapidly expanding area. Yet how many criminologists possess the methodological and conceptual tools to adequately deconstruct a crime film? How many have the journalistic or literary training to untangle the complexities of popular crime writing? At the same time, while scholars working within the realms of media and cultural studies routinely speak of issues of crime, deviance and control, how many can claim the socio-political and historical understanding of crime and penality so central to the work of many criminologists? Answers to these questions suggest that while there is clearly a burgeoning body of work exploring the interrelations between crime, media, and culture, we have only begun the conversation; there is still much to be gained from a critical and reflexive dialogue between people working at this crucial nexus. Continuing to stimulate and nourish such a dialogue remains one of CMC’s key aims. Recently, one of us attended the launch of a book which collects contributions under the heading Participating in the Knowledge Society: Researchers Beyond the University