Crime in the National Press

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Crime in the National Press

This individual report will bring to a close the group project "Crime News in the National Press". The tasks required of the project were:

* To conduct a content analysis of the coverage of crime in one major national newspaper over a 2 week period.

* To process and tabulate the results

* To present your results in a 20 minute group presentation in front of the rest of the class and discuss their implications.

* To write a report of 1500-2000 words

The paper assigned to our group was The Daily Mail. Sunday issues of this paper were not to be considered. Articles that were to be included in the coding were only those that dealt with crimes located in England, Scotland and Wales. Only news stories and news features were to be considered, ignoring items such as editorials, comments, cartoons or readers letters.

The format of this report will be as follows:

. Brief introduction to the Daily Mail, The Sun and The Daily Telegraph

2. Designing the Content Schedule: Explanation of coding categories - What they included/didn't include and why? also what problems were encountered whilst applying the coding schedule - Which categories were difficult to code, why and how were they overcome

3. Charts and Diagrams - Which were used to show what results and Why?

4. How closely did our findings follow the pattern of official police statistics and the British Crime Survey (BCS) also explanation of anomalies

5. The role of dimensions of meaning within this assignment

6. Conclusions

Introduction

The Daily Mail is one of the more respectable tabloid newspapers. It is fairly 'middle of the road' in the nature of its articles. The paper is generally aimed at middle-class professionals. I would estimate that the readership of the Daily Mail is pre-dominantly female due to the large amount of features that are dedicated to females. The primary readership (the person who first reads a particular copy of the paper) of the Daily Mail is likely to be equally split across both genders, however the secondary readership (those who read the same paper second) will be predominantly female, due to the nature of the articles and supplements contained within the newspaper. I would also suggest that the Daily Mail is a 'family publication' and therefore crime stories will not go into too much graphic detail when describing a case. However due to the primary readers of the Mail being professionals it is likely that a detailed analysis of crime will be given and also the sources reported from would be professionals too i.e. solicitors/barristers, police reports, court cases etc. The Mail covered 43 crime-related articles during the sample period.
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The Sun however is aimed predominantly at the working class and this is reflected in its writing style, articles are written to shock or amuse predominantly rather than to inform. Much greater emphasis is placed on the entertainment industry and scandals within it rather than serious articles dealing with crime or the conflict in Afghanistan. The Sun covered 61 crime-related articles during the sample period; this was 2.4% of total news coverage.

The Daily Telegraph is a highly respectable broadsheet most likely to be read by upper-middle class professionals, Due to its greater size it does feature ...

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