Only abstracts of full articles are contained in these Web pages. Research notes and commentaries are usually not summarized into abstracts. Readers who need the complete texts should contact the CCJA and subscribe to the Journal. They can also purchase single copies of back issues that are still in stock.
HOW NOT TO THINK ABOUT CRIME IN THE MEDIA
Aaron Doyle
Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Carleton University
This article assesses the state of the art of current research on crime and the media. It argues that some key problems with previous research lie in simply assuming media effects, or in ascribing a reductionist unity to various aspects of the media and the ways they shape and are shaped by social relations and institutions. In reviewing various bodies of research on crime in the media, it indicates some of the limits of effects research. It further argues that the problematic question of the effects of influences of crime stories has been most effectively dealt with thus far by research that looks at the direct political and institutional effects of crime and the media. This should be supplemented by more interpretive research on the meaning of crime stories for particular audience members. Finally, it suggests that we need a sustained analysis of the interplay between crime news and crime fiction.
SEEING RED OVER BLACK AND WHITE: POPULAR AND MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF INTER-RACIAL RELATIONSHIPS AS PRECURSORS TO RACIAL VIOLENCE
Barbara Perry
University of Ontario, Institute of Technology
Michael Sutton
Nottingham-Trent University
The recent U.K. murder of Anthony Walker attests to the lingering antipathy, indeed hostility, toward intimate inter-racial relationships, especially those involving black men and white women. Seventeen-year-old Walker was brutally beaten, then fatally assaulted with an axe to his head – the “provocation” for the attack being this young black man’s relationship with his white girlfriend. This article assesses the historical and contemporary images and mythologies that continue to stigmatize inter-racial relationships. Specifically, we look at the representations disseminated through various popular media forms. The article suggests that these mediated constructs condition an environment that facilitates, if not encourages, violence against those in inter-racial relationships.
NEWS, TRUTH, AND THE RECOGNITION OF CORPORATE CRIME
John L. McMullan
Sociology and Criminology, Saint Mary’s University
This article is a study of how the press registered and re-registered news as truth about the Westray explosion and its aftermath from 1992 to 2002. The research examines 1,972 news stories and uses Michel Foucault’s concept of the “politics of truth” and Stanley Cohen’s ideas about cultural denial to understand the social organization of news production and the implications of the media for witnessing and accounting for Westray’s “truth” when corporate and state institutions stand accused. I argue that truth-telling exercises were diverse and divergent and produced “regimes of truth” around natural accident, legal tragedy, and political scandal. But the absence in the presence of these varied truth-telling exercises was a social vocabulary of corporate crime. This absence marked the limit of the press’s ability to tell the truth to powerful corporate and state interests, the place where their truth-telling was made coincident with the exercise power and where workplace crime was made invisible in popular culture.
