Howard Tumber

Reporting crime : the media politics of criminal justice

Every day we watch, read, and hear stories about crime and justice. This book reveals how policy-makers, criminal justice professionals, pressure groups, and the police compete in self-promoting struggles to shape their own images and the policy agenda. In a 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 hhave we therefore underplayed public fear of authority? Does the coverage of sexual crime encourage voyeurism? And finally, is televisions growing obsession with showing us stories of real crime more about entertaining the audience than about helping the police with their enquiries?

Introduction Political Scandals and Media Across Democracies, Volume I

The purpose of these two volumes is to analyze similarities and differences in scandals across countries that might help us to understand contemporary media and political dynamics. Are there common developments that account for the rise of scandal politics worldwide? How does the study of scandals inform/ challenge/confirm a number of literatures and theoretical propositions in the field of political communication? What can be learned from scandals to understand the workings and practices of journalism in different countries? Scandals have not been unusual in the histories of democracies around the world. The political evolutions of many different countries, certainly some more than others, are packed with revelations of corrupt actions committed by public officials (see Longman, 1990). If corruption is as old as politics, scandals are not novel developments either. What is striking about contemporary politics is the periodical eruption of scandals. If corruption has been considered universal by classic and contemporary studies, scandals too have become ubiquitous worldwide. The themes of scandals do vary across countries, as some studies and contributions in these issues show, but scandals are not unique to some countries. Scandals appear to be recurrent rather than sporadic events. Scandals seem to be the norm rather than exceptional moments. Scandals are common in countries with dissimilar political trajectories and practices, economic standards, political cultures, media systems, and levels of corruption. The United States and India, Japan and Mexico, Italy and South Korea have been lately described as being in a state of “permanent scandals” (Getlin, 1998). Scandals have been described as frenetic events, media and political frenzies that initially capture a great deal of attention and later, gradually or suddenly, disappear (see Thompson, 2000). Unless investigative commissions are set up or political interests continue to orchestrate scandals through leakages and other means, the length of scandals hinges on media interest. The media’s notorious short-lived attention, however, makes scandals prone to have a brief existence.

DEMOCRACY IN THE INFORMATION AGE: THE ROLE OF THE FOURTH ESTATE IN CYBERSPACE

Journalism faces attack from two areas. From one direction it has to repel the pressures from its new owners, the media conglomerates, that have exacerbated the traditional problems of professional news. From another, new forms of political and government communication with the public are emerging. The Internet is displacing the journalistic role of providing information and interpretation for the citizen. This article assesses the future for journalism within the public sphere and asks whether journalism can perform its normative functions in the digital age.

Scandal and Media in the United Kingdom From Major to Blair

This article looks at the recent spate of political scandal news, both financial and sexual, in the United Kingdom during the Major and Blair administrations. Scandal revelations, especially those produced by the press, may be due in part to the audience-building strategies of the media. Dissenting views, in contrast, may possibly be offered as a result of the media’s own legitimation needs. Stories of scandal serve to undermine institutions in the public’s mind and can often provoke the setting up of government and parliamentary committees leading to the regulation of particular activities. This article shows how the accumulation of scandal stories may have serious repercussions for the popularity of governments and prime ministers and may influence the representation of all aspects of policy.

Crime and Criminal Justice in the Media

Our aim in this research project has been to explore how crime and criminal justice are handled in the British national media. We have tried to examine the whole communication process and therefore have studied the production of news and the content of newspapers, television news and current affairs programmes. To a lesser extent we have also examined some of the ways in which television audiences respond to programmes both factual and fictional about crime and criminal justice.

Taming the truth

coherence of modern government. The reliance on communications and information has become paramount for governments in their attempts to manipulate public opinion and to maintain social control. In Britain both secrecy and the control of information have become powerful weapons in the political fights over policy. The repressive nature of the information policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations has been monitored closely by Donna Demac, a communications lawyer working in New York. Demac argues that the Reagan administration, as the most skilful practitioner of executive branch public relations in American history, provided a grave lesson in the types of government controls that can be used to narrow the range of public discourse. The Reagan presidency’s programme to control the press and public opinion consisted of four main elements: a broad effort to reduce the

Relating news analysis and public opinion: applying a communications method as a 'tool' to aid interpretation of survey results

This article documents the methodological steps taken to use news analysis as a ‘tool’ for retrieving systematic information on political events to be used in the interpretation of findings from surveys on public opinion. The approach uses the selection function of mass media in producing ‘news’ as a proxy to identify the ‘political climate’ of a specific country at a specific time. This information on ‘political climate’ can be used to control whether ‘exceptional’ political events occurred during the period of fieldwork for surveys on public opinion that may have unduly biased the findings. Such a tool is especially useful for cross-national comparative survey research that is also longitudinal and the project described here was conducted within the framework of the European Social Survey (ESS). The specific news analysis method used to develop the tool draws inspiration from ‘claims-making analysis’.1

Editorial: Special 10th anniversary issue — the future of journalism:

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism, we look to the future. The future has always exerted itself on the present. In practices as wide-ranging as climate prediction, the projection of risk assessment in determining educational achievement and the actuarial methods used to determine the objects of law enforcement, the future lingers in ways that simultaneously have more and less relevance to how we engage with the present. The academy is not immune to the seductive charms and limitations of the future. Physics, probabilistic paradigms in economics and demography, celestial mechanics, and even the notions of causality all make the ability to predict and project the future central to an array of intellectual projects. So too with journalism. Journalism comes with a contradictory set of expectations. It is expected to wither in an age of fi nancial volatility, decreased revenues, porous borders, layoffs and buyouts, chipped prestige, diminished audiences, concerns about physical safety and variable content. Conversely, it is expected to fl ourish: information abounds and is more accessible than ever before, the varieties of content and form are unequalled in history, and more people are involved than at any other point in time as both journalism’s producers and its consumers. The task of auguring the future comes against these confl icting sets of expectations about journalism’s next stage of development. On the one hand, projecting the future could tempt us into thinking about coming changes with complacency, optimism and a renewed faith in all that we identify as news. On the other hand, it might intensify our concerns, jeopardize our hopes and leave us wondering what to make of a phenomenon that has been with us as long as information but whose durability is no longer recognizable or certain. Is it just human nature to lament about the present so as to keep us moving toward some future-oriented target for our actions? Or are we focused on a real and concerning set of problems?

Journalists at Work – Revisited

Abstract This article takes the opportunity to look in more detail at one of Jeremy Tunstall’s seminal works —Journalists at Work published in 1971. It was the first major social science study of specialist journalists in the UK. Tunstall began the research in 1965 at a time when no single social science study of British journalism existed. Tunstall’s study of British journalism set out to investigate specialist news gatherers on national newspapers constituting approximately fifteen per cent of the personnel in those organisations and representing about two percent of all British journalists.Three aspects of Tunstall’s study are discussed — news organisations and their goals, the source-media relationship, and the occupation of journalism — in addition to some comments about the context and the methodology of the research.

Journalism and the Invasion of Grenada 30 Years On: A Retrospective

Abstract The 1983 United States-led invasion of Grenada represents an important case study of journalism in the front line because it marked a changing point in the relationship between journalists and the US administration. The exclusion of news organisations and independent journalists at the time can be conceived of as a test in trying new forms of information management. The tensions experienced between journalists, government and military officers signalled the need to design alternative solutions to the problem of information coverage in wartime.