Samantha Pegg

Nineteenth century newspaper accounts of a murder committed by an inmate of a Scottish asylum

This study explores an incident from the late nineteenth century in which an inmate at the Royal Dundee Lunatic Asylum murdered a fellow patient while working in the hospital grounds. The incident was reported extensively in the local press in the days following the event. Analysis of these reports reveals a picture, which while recognisable to the twenty-first century newspaper reader, does however depart from contemporary media reporting in some important ways. We argue that while the image of the unpredictable dangerousness of the lunatic has a long history and is deeply embedded in popular conceptions of mental disorder, shaping public perceptions of those with mental illnesses, it is the manner in which this is presented by the media that has bearing upon how the case is understood by wider society.

Enhancing Sensationalism: 1939–1960

This was a period when the challenge of broadcast journalism increasingly required strategic rethinking by print journalists and editors in order to keep newsprint relevant as a way of delivering news. One significant result was an enhanced emphasis on crime intelligence. The importance of broadcast news throughout this period was, for differing reasons over time, considerable, but can be summed up in the greater immediacy of its headlines at points in the day when people were accustomed to looking for news from morning or evening papers. Lacking an ability to compete on immediacy, newspapers had to rely on the detail they provided to flesh out those headlines. Here, they had enhanced opportunities to do this in ways that, it was believed on the basis of past experience, would attract and keep the most readers: by presenting those details in the most sensational ways possible. It was also to their advantage that print journalists were not constrained by a code of conduct when generating their reportage, as broadcast journalists were. Renewed editorial emphasis on sensationalism in reportage to attract readers encouraged further excesses. Coming after a period when crime news had been increasingly restricted to murders in daily practice, a wide range of criminal events were once again included in newspapers. There are clear echoes of the Victorian emphasis on crime, but this time the sensationalism had no accompanying didactic purpose. This reportage was essentially only to entertain. The scope of the change between pre- and post-war reportage is illuminated by examining crime reportage during the Second World War.

Introduction: A History of Crime News

This is a book about crime intelligence — intelligence in the sense both of the information provided through media formats (principally newspapers) and of the way in which it has been received, understood and used. Our focus here is an exploration of the ways in which crime has been presented in the media, using the print format for the obvious reason that newspapers were an important feature of the media landscape throughout the key period under discussion — the mid-nineteenth century to the present day. Essentially, the media are a means of mass communication that can purvey ‘news’ to a series of audiences. What has always made some events ‘newsworthy’ and others not is a combination of ‘values’, notably danger and conflict, the involvement of a well-known individual, scandal (in other words that which is morally if not actually legally offensive to society), and that which is ‘out of the ordinary’ in some way. Crime has always manifested several of these ‘news values’ and so has long been a media staple, as both criminologists and media studies experts recognise. But this is not primarily either a criminology or a media studies text, though it is certainly informed by both these disciplines.1 It is, rather, an interdisciplinary text drawing mainly on both history and law for its methodology and its analysis and

Positively Criminal? Press, Police and Politicians: 1960–2010

This chapter addresses a lengthier chronological period than any of the others; substantially because this is a period which, in terms of the details of crime coverage in the media, has been extensively addressed elsewhere by authors from Steve Chibnall to Maggie Wykes.1 It would be redundant to rehearse again that which has been so thoroughly investigated and analysed by other scholars. Instead, the chapter highlights aspects of the presentation of crime reportage which stress the continuities and changes with the earlier periods discussed. It thus locates the crime reportage of the last half century in its historical-legal context in order to aid comprehension of how the crisis of public confidence in print journalism arose, leading to the setting up of the Leveson Inquiry, in the aftermath of the sensationalism surrounding the trial of Levi Bellfield in 2011.

Challenging the ‘Golden Goose’? 1885–1900

This 15-year period saw some of the most mature and wide-ranging legal reportage, but also the shift towards a new approach for incorporating sensationalism into crime reportage, with a renewed emphasis on investigative journalism. Starting with W.T. Stead’s ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ campaign in 1885, such practices were to challenge the conventions established by lawyers as reporters and journalists for legally responsible and informed reportage with the emphasis on in-trial and post-trial journalism. In many ways, Stead’s reportage in the Pall Mall Gazette was a harbinger of things to come, because, though his own trial for unlawful kidnapping featured heavily in the newspapers, the contextual background to that trial was Stead’s own exercises in investigative journalism. The purpose behind Stead’s series had been to demonstrate the ease with which he and his coadjutors (including Bramwell Booth and Josephine Butler) had procured an under-age girl for the ostensible purposes of facilitating sexual intercourse with a certified virgin. The aim was to ensure that the Criminal Law Amendment Bill currently before Parliament would be passed before the session ended, unlike its predecessors since 1881. These had failed largely due to entrenched positions in the Lords. His investigations into matters then of more moral than criminal concern, in order to promote legislative change in the shape of what became the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, required him and his collaborators to break the existing law.

New Perspectives and New Informants: 1914–1939

The interest of professional journalists in pre-trial investigations was fundamental to the construction of a new set of relationships within the broad area of providing crime intelligence. Increasingly crime reportage was to be characterised by conflicting standards of behaviour and ideas of responsibility towards the community in shaping and presenting its subject matter for consumption. The involvement of lawyers in crime reportage during the nineteenth century had been encouraged by the belief that this ensured that coverage of a case would not breach safe limits. A first generation of professional journalists reporting from the courts worked with legal professionals and largely observed those same conventions. But those restraints and practices did not survive the war and the final withdrawal of legal professionals from active involvement in crime reportage. As a result, the interwar years were characterised by tensions between journalists and their police informants, and their view of what constituted acceptable reportage, and the legal profession. Senior figures in the legal profession increasingly criticised the ways in which some members of the various police forces shared details of their investigations with journalists that would previously only have come into the public domain during the formal trial process.

The Beginnings of Crime Intelligence: 1800–1860

If modern crime intelligence is constituted by a public audience informed by the media about crime and (at least to an extent) about the legal processes contextualising it, its origins lie within the development, in the sixteenth century, of the printed broadside or broadsheet ballad. These early print productions emerged as powerful cultural factors shaping how crime (particularly murder) was popularly understood within and between communities. While not addressing the legal process directly, they helped establish its importance as the key tool for managing crime and protecting the community.2 In broadsheet ballads, offenders, once caught, were tried, convicted and suitably punished, and increasingly that punishment was mediated through or at least sanctioned by a formal legal process.3 However, they made no attempt to portray the legal ‘truth’ of any criminal proceedings, concentrating only on their outcomes. Yet, for the first time, news of criminal events managed within a formal legal context could be spread with some uniformity to a mass, if not (strictly speaking) a contiguous, market. Broadsheets narrating crimes which caught the imagination could be copied and recopied; they helped to fuel the demand for more information about criminal activity, which resulted in productions such as the Newgate Calendar with its retrospective and moralistic framing of the more sensationalist narratives of crime.4

A ‘Golden Era’? 1860–1885

During the 1860s, the expectation that legally crafted reportage from the courts could work to improve the authority of newspapers and the public standing of the criminal justice process was firmly entrenched. Plainly, it was held to have proved its worth in the eyes of politicians and the legal profession as well as newspaper editors and proprietors, as witnessed by the increasing use of legally trained and active figures as key journalists, writing opinion pieces, including leaders. Early concerns on the part of the legal profession had been essentially allayed, and the parameters of both the habits of good law reportage and legally sound journalism were well established. Crucially, this came at a time when the newspaper press was expanding rapidly due to the repeal of stamp duty and technological advances, allied to a growing market for interesting newsprint, which was where crime reportage came in. Thanks to the increasing importance of the trial as the locale where the fullest, most accurate information was provided, it had proved possible to combine legal accuracy with a sensationalism that, if more sober than the reports of the penny-a-liners, was still attractive enough to readers of all classes to ensure newspaper circulations continued to rise.

New Journalism Triumphant: 1900–1914

At the start of the twentieth century, newspaper readers were still fascinated by crime, but other types of event and interests were also now being identified as news, competing for space with coverage of law-breaking in its various forms. The inexorable rise of the modern tabloid in the first decades of the twentieth century signalled the sustained market for this more commercialised and lucrative format for the popular press, relying on a compressed physical presence matched by a more succinct reportage. This contextualises a shift in attitudes towards the production of crime intelligence. From 1896 when Alfred Harmsworth launched the halfpenny Daily Mail with ‘the explicit object of entertaining as well as informing its readers’1 until the eve of war in 1914, there was a ‘rapid acceleration of newspaper chains’.2 The monopolies over the ‘new’ papers, showcasing the particular talents of the ‘new’ journalist, were established in the hands not of a range of regional and national proprietors, as before, but of only three dominant press barons. The original pioneers of the modern British tabloid came in the shape of the Harmsworth brothers (later Barons Northcliffe and Rothermere) with their Amalgamated Press, and Arthur Pearson, the creator of Pearson Publishing, who established the halfpenny Daily Express in 1900 as a direct competitor to the Daily Mail.3 The Harmsworth empire, due in particular to Northcliffe’s understanding of the intrinsic relationship between circulation and advertising, led the way in changing the media context. It was to have a profound effect on crime reportage, even if this was not immediately visible to contemporaries.

Online and Offline: Postscript 2011–2012

As this text finally goes to print, there are on the table two different drafts for Royal Charters to regulate the press in the post-Leveson era. One, agreed by all political parties on 16 March 2013, was evolved without input from the newspaper industry itself; the other (published on 25 April 2013) was evolved by that industry. Both versions accept the need for a Royal Charter under which investigative journalism should be regulated. One thing is plain from both versions, however: the original point of the Leveson Inquiry (an exploration of the negative impact on the criminal justice process of unbridled investigative journalism, including the generation of information via inappropriate ‘leaks’ or improper — even illegal — means, including payments to informants) has been relegated to the background of the debate. This is despite the fact that Operations Weeting and Tuleta (investigating hacking and computer hacking) and Operation Elvedon (investigating payments to the police) remain ongoing, and could be used to generate substantial evidence to consider whether or not modern methods of investigative journalism have created a type of crime news which has distorted the criminal justice process. For instance, in January 2013 former Detective Chief Inspector April Casburn was convicted of misconduct in a public office for offering to sell information to the News of the World in September 2010, and sentenced to 15 months’ imprisonment. Her defence, supported by many, has been that she asked for no money but simply went to the press as a ‘whistle-blower’. What that action certainly indicates is the extent to which titles like the News of the World were an automatic resource for police officers wishing for something to be publicised.1