Celebrated Crime Cases and the Public's Imagination: From Bad Press to Bad Policy?*
| Author | Kathleen Daly |
| DOI | 10.1177/00048658950280S102 |
| Published date | 01 December 1995 |
| Date | 01 December 1995 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Celebrated Crime Cases and
the
Public’s Imagination:
From Bad Press to Bad Policy?*
Kathleen
Dalyt
The theme for the 1994 criminology conference is the intersections of
empirical research, theory, and public policy formulation. Alas. I shall
advance the argument that there is little intersection between criminological
research, theory, and public policy. Instead, I find that public policy toward
crime and justice is largely driven by media-generated stories (including
celebrated crime cases) instead of social science research. Because media
sources for crime news are not typically criminologists or those with some
knowledge of socio-historical patterns of crime, media stories often misinform
readers and viewers. By framing crime and ‘the criminals’
in
individualist and
crisis-oriented terms, media-filtered knowledge contributes to a punitive,
law-and-order response to crime by policymakers who see
in
‘the crime issue’
a way to capitalize on their popularity, future election, or continued time in
office.
My argument may not
be
especially controversial, but I make it with
uneasiness for several reasons. First, it is a large claim that is hard, perhaps
impossible, to ‘prove’: it assumes we have information not only about media
reporting of crime and its impact on policy, but
also
about research on crime
and its impact on policy. My remarks shall focus on the former more than the
latter set of relationships. That is, I am particularly interested
in
the strength
of
media influences rather than the weakness
of
social science influences on
public policy toward crime and justice.’ Secondly, it would be inaccurate to
construct a linear, cause-and-effect story about the relationship between crime,
media, and public policy. The relationships are reciprocal and interactive, and
none
of
us lives outside mediated understandings of the social world. Despite
these reservations, I advance my argument to raise questions about what we
as academics, researchers, and journalists wish to do about the current state of
mediated knowledge about crime.
From a review
of
the literature on media and crime,
I
make these
observations. We know a good deal about differences between official
*
This paper was prepared for the plenary session at the Australian and New Zealand Society
of Criminology Tenth Annual Conference (Sydney, September
1994).
Some of the ideas in
it were presented in a lecture
for
the Kent State University Honors Week (April
1994).
and
I
wish to thank Edna Erez for the invitation. While
I
have amended and updated portions of
the text given at
the
ANZ Society of Criminology Conference,
I
have retained the argument
as
I
gave it at the conference without responding to the discussants’ critiques.
I
am grateful
to these colleagues who read and responded to the paper at various stages: Gregg Barak,
Gray Cavendar, Gloria Gibson, Stuart Henry, and Richard Sparks. My deepest thanks and
appreciation
go
to the conference organizers, and especially to Lisa Maher, for inviting me
to speak at the conference.
t
Law Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University,
Canberra, ACT
0200.
6
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Crime, Criminology and Public Policy
7
statistics on crime and media representations of crime; we also know a good
deal about variation in media representations by different news media
(television, radio, and print). Although we know something of crime news
content, we know comparatively less about how journalists and editors
construct crime news stories. We know even less about how readers, viewers,
and listeners of crime news form beliefs and attitudes about crime; and how,
in turn, such beliefs and attitudes are related to public policies toward crime
and justice. Criminological-orientated scholarship and commentary are either
absent in crime news or contained within the limits of ‘expert opinion’?
My question then is this: do we care that media stories depict crime and
justice in the ways they do? Several years ago, Gregg Barak put the question
this way in calling for a ‘newsmaking criminology’:
Will academic criminologists
and
criminal justice educators remain spectators
of
the
mass-mediated construction
of
crime
and
crime control or will they engage actively
in
producing crime themes
for
public consumption?
(Barak
1988586)
Can we
-
that is, academics, researchers, journalists
-
transgress our
professional boundaries in building more responsible depictions and
explanations of crime and justice? Before I address these questions, I note
several caveats and tell you what moves me to examine the
crime-media-public policy nexus.
Caveats
The words
crime, the media,
and
public policy
are large and disputed; each has
a long history of internal debates. When
I
use the term
crime,
I
take it as
axiomatic that scholars continue to problematize its standing as a social, legal,
and historical construction.
The term
the media
has not one, but many referents. Journalists will say
there is no such thing as ‘the media’. Rather, as one journalist put it, ‘There
are a whole bunch of reporters doing this job’ (New York Times 1994:62).
Although I would not wish to make a monolith of the media, it
is
more than
simply ‘a whole bunch of reporters’. It includes organizational and corporate
practices, some of which are highly concentrated, multinational, and strongly
consumption oriented, and others (fewer in number) that are smaller,
alternative, and public-access oriented. My remarks will center on crime
news, not crime drama or entertainment shows.
I
would note, however, that
this distinction has blurred in recent years in the
US
with the genre of
info-tainment shows or television tabloids; ten such shows are aired weekly
during prime-time viewing hours (Barak 1994:22).3
The tern
public policy
may be the most difficult to pin down. In part (and
this is from a
US
perspective), the problem is a multitude of jurisdictions (the
50
states and the federal system), plus local-level variation. Stuart Scheingold
(1991) shows that it is not possible to infer city-level policies or practices from
national-level measures of media attention to crime. Moreover, there are
myriad policies and practices that could potentially fall into the category of
‘public policy’. These range from policies and practices of police departments,
prosecutors, and social welfare workers to those more abstractly framed in
legislation.
I
shall use the term public policy to refer to a general stance
toward ‘the crime problem’: law-and-order and crime control oriented, or
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