Crime in the National Press
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.
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 ...
This is a preview of the whole essay
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 a larger amount of stories. The Telegraph does not carry many long news features reporting on a single viewpoint, it instead seems to have many shorter articles dealing with many different viewpoints and angles of a story. The Telegraph covered 31 crime-related articles during the sample period. I do not have an official percentage for the sample period, but I obtained one copy of the paper and out of the 134 articles in the paper, only 1 of them dealt with crime in England, Scotland or Wales. The issue I studied was however a Monday paper so would have been covering a whole weekend of sport reports for example that would have accounted for a large portion of the articles (over 50 covered sport).
Designing the Content Schedule
The coding was split into 3 different aspects focusing on:
* The Crime
* The Victim(s) and Offender(s)
* The Source and Voice of the article
N.B. Dimensions of meaning were also considered and this will be highlighted in the appropriate section.
We didn't use a coding frame to record our data, opting instead for a simple tally method in most cases. In retrospect a coding frame would have been much more suited to the nature of our analysis and using one would have probably made interpretation of our results simpler. Also using a coding frame would have aided dealing with articles that contained details of more than one felony, a rape followed by a murder for example. Or the Michael Barrymore case where both murder and drug offences were mentioned in the same item, we chose to categorise it under drug offences due to charges being pressed, in doing that we as good as neglected the more serious case of murder and possible rape.
To categorise the type of crime that was featured in the article we looked at the list of standard offences used in Britain (see appendices) however this list had no heading for Drug Offences placing them under Summary Offences instead. We decided to look on the internet to aid us further in categorising the crimes and eventually settled on the following categories using the Police Statistics of Reported Crime from 2000:
* Sexual Violence
* Robbery
* Drug Offences
* Criminal Damage
* Violence against the Person
* Theft and Handling of Stolen Goods
* Other Notifiable Offences
* Theft of and from a Vehicle
* Fraud and Forgery
* Burglary
'Sexual Violence' did not include bigamy, as this was not a violent crime, instead bigamy was included within 'Other Notifiable Offences' instead. Also as was detailed earlier, all drug offences now fell into one category whereas before they had fallen across 'Summary Offences' and 'Other Indictable Offences'
It was not whether an article gave details of the victims/offender and also what details were given. These were recorded using the following headings:
* Gender (male/female)
* Age (0-10, 11-30, 31-50, 51+)
* Occupation (Full-time employment, unemployed)
* Race (White, Asian, Black)
* What light (viewpoint) are the victims/offenders shown in (positive light, neutral, negative)
When collecting information regarding victims/offenders details it was important that no assumptions were made, thus a victim/offender could not be categorised as a certain race say, unless it was stated that they were of that ethnic group. It was more often the case that the ethnicity of the subject was mentioned but in some cases the ethnic origins of a victim/offender was unclear.
The occupation could and should have been further categorised to allow for whether the victim/offender was in professional employment (i.e. teacher or solicitor), general employment (labourer, cleaner) or unemployed. This would have shown whether the Mail was focusing on a certain type of victim/offender a lot better than our analysis does.
Sometimes the offender's details were not released because either they were not known at the time of going to press or because they could not be named for legal reasons.
The article's sources and voice were also recorded. The sources were split into 4 categories - Court Case, Police Enquiry, Coroners/official report, Unclear/Not stated.
The voices of the articles (that is who was quoted) were categorised as follows:
* Detectives/Police officers
* Lawyer
* Accused/Offender
* Eye Witness
* Victim
* Experts/Authorities
* Family/friend
* Other
Charts and Diagrams
Much use was made of charts and diagrams within our presentation. Pie charts are a great way to show the frequency of certain categories in relation to their counterparts and because of this we used this type of chart more so than a simple bar chart. We felt that they were a greater visual aid to the presentation than a bar chart.
Comparison of findings with official statistics
Upon comparison with official police statistics along with the British Crime Survey it became clear that there was not a great deal of likeness between these and our results. 54% of articles dealing with crime centred upon 'Violence against the Person' however this category only occupied 11% of the Police Statistics of Reported Crime for 2000. There are 3 main reasons for this, the main reason being that violent crime sells papers, thus causing the Mail to over report violent crime and sexual violence. For the same reason no stories concerning burglary, criminal damage or theft were printed in the Mail during the sample period despite the fact that 'Theft and Handling of Stolen Goods' had the highest frequency of reports in the official statistics. It must also be noted that the police are likely to have under-reported violence against the person and sexual violence so as not to create a panic within society. Also consider the fact that many victims of serious crime find it hard to talk about there ordeals to the police, indeed in some cases up to 40% of crime is not reported to the police so this too could have been responsible for these anomalies. The British Crime Survey was another source that we used to analyse our findings, it is a household survey centring on people's experience of crime, and it is independent of the police so would provide a less biased picture of crime within society. Caution should be exercised when using the British Crime Survey (BCS) as it has one glaring fault. Anyone who has been murdered cannot be considered in the BCS because they are not around to tell of there experiences, this revelation somewhat nullifies any comparison between the BCS and crime coverage in the Daily Press.
International terrorism and the war in Afghanistan must also be considered in this case because it was taking up a large amount of newsprint at the time. This may account for the almost non-existent reporting of more mundane crimes simply because there was not enough room within the paper for these articles and there newsworthiness will have been undermined by more important articles.
The Role of Dimensions of Meaning
Content Analysis does not take into account any dimensions of meaning, therefore the role a photograph plays in the way a victim or offender is portrayed cannot be monitored. This role must be mentioned because the way photographs were used differed greatly between the 3 newspapers. In the Sun photos were used very often in crime-related articles, it was often the case that a round or oval photograph was used to portray the victim and a square/oblong one for the offender. The harsh lines of the square border on the offender's photograph immediately portray a negative image of the offender. This was also the case in the Daily Mail. In an article surrounding the abuse of Lauren Wright, Lauren's photograph is in bright colour and is in a round frame, however the social workers who failed to spot her abuse are all photographed in harsh greyscale and the photos are oblong in shape. In one story relating to the Michael Stone murder case, Stone is pictured in black and white, the photo is a bad one and makes him look evil, this is accompanied with a smaller family photo of the Russell family prior to the murders, again placing a bias in the way the offender is viewed in the opinions of the reader straight away. The Telegraph however makes very little use of photographs mainly due to the large number of stories printed per page- it would be impractical to include photographs with every article.
Conclusions
As expected none of the papers reported an accurate representation of crime within society. Had the sample been taken at a different time I think it would have given different results, indeed without the war in some case the first 16 pages of the paper would have been available for more mundane stories. Also a bigger sample should have been used to give a broader scope to the results, perhaps coding 6 months of issues then results would be inline with the Official Police Statistics which are updated every 6 months. Newspapers are businesses and need to sell issues to make a profit, they are not bound by morals to provide an accurate representation of society, if items on events other than crime are more likely to sell papers then that Is what they will feature.
Sources: Researching communications (Deacon et al, 1999)
British Crime Survey 1997
Notifiable Offences recorded by the police 2000 (Home Office)
Appendices:
. Pie Chart to show Notifiable Offences Recorded by the Police for 2000
2. Pie Chart to Show Coverage of Crime in the Daily Mail
Practical Communication and Media Analysis 1A Tim Greveson A041857 23/04/07