The Reporting Trajectories of Top Homicide Cases in the Media: A Case Study of <i>The Times</i>

Soothill, Keith; Peelo, Moira; Pearson, Jayn; Francis, Brian

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2311.2004.00307.x

Cited by 20 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…This was for three reasons. First, although newspapers are declining in circulation as they increasingly compete with multiple news sources including 24‐hour television news and Internet news providers, they remain powerful media actors and agenda setters (Castells 2001, p.198; Marr 2004) and are a rich resource for criminological study (see, for example, Silverman and Wilson 2002; Nellis 2003; Soothill et al 2004; Levi 2006; Groombridge 2007). Second, the reporting of immigration issues has a long history in the print media (Berkeley, Khan and Ambikaipaker 2006, p.24; Finney and Peach 2006) and notwithstanding all the caveats concerning media effects (see, for example, Livingstone 1996; Jewkes 2004; McQuail 2005), arguments do exist that newspaper readership and attitudes are linked (Duffy and Rowden 2005).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crime, Media and Moral Panic in an Expanding European Union

Mawby¹,

Gisby²

2008

The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice

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In the latest phase of European Union enlargement Bulgaria and Romania were admitted to EU membership on 1 January 2007. In the UK, media coverage of the accession process focused on the potential movement of large numbers of people from Eastern to Western European states; a particular focus was the crime risk associated with enlargement. This article examines how newspapers reported the perceived crime threats and assesses the extent to which the concerns can be understood as a moral panic. The article confirms the contemporary utility of moral panic analysis, albeit with some flexibility to reflect the modern media landscape.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Crime, Media and Moral Panic in an Expanding European Union

Mawby¹,

Gisby²

2008

The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice

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“…As an example, a female parricide offender who was alleged to have killed both of her parents with an axe generated a tremendous amount of attention; a son who boarded a train and traveled 700 miles to New York City in order to kill his well-known father in cold blood garnered unparalleled coverage, from arrest to trial to sentencing, an unusual coverage for homicides in newspapers (Buckler and Travis, 2005). The Walworth and Borden cases constituted the ''mega-cases'' (Soothill et al, 2004) of parricide in nineteenth-century America.…”

Section: History Of Temperamental Difficulty and Disreputable Personamentioning

confidence: 99%

Pre‐offense characteristics of nineteenth‐century American parricide offenders: an archival exploration

Shon

Barton‐Bellessa

2012

Journal of Criminal Psychology

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If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/ authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Previous criminological research has examined the causes and correlates of violent juvenile offending, but failed to explore the developmental taxonomies of crime throughout history. Theoretically, developmental trajectories of offending (i.e. life-course persistent and adolescence-limited offenders) should be identifiable irrespective of time and place. This study aims to examine the pre-offense characteristics of nineteenth-century American parricide offenders.Design/methodology/approach -Using archival records of two major newspapers (New York Times, Chicago Tribune), the study examines 220 offenders who committed attempted and completed parricides during the latter half of the nineteenth century .Findings -Results reveal that a small group of adult parricide offenders displayed antisocial tendencies at an early age that persisted into adulthood. These findings are consistent with the developmental literature, thus providing support for identification of pre-offense characteristics of parricide offenders across historical periods.Originality/value -The findings reported in this paper are of value to psychologists, historians, and criminologists, for they illuminate the similarities in predictors related to violent behaviors in a small subsection of adult offenders across two centuries.

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“…While the characteristics of mega cases differ, they are all rather ‘unusual’ compared to other homicide cases, which make them particularly interesting (Soothill et al, 2002). Following the reporting trajectories of 13 identified mega cases in the British Times , Soothill and colleagues (2004) suggest that mega cases follow a trajectory connected to both the process of the criminal justice system and case-related ‘incidents’ that generate peaks in media attention. However, the reporting trajectories of high-profile cases that become entangled with ‘wider societal agendas’ turned out to be rather unpredictable (Soothill et al, 2004: 1).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The high-profile case as ‘fire object’: Following the Marianne Vaatstra murder case through the media

Jong

M’charek

2017

Crime, Media, Culture

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In 1999 a girl named Marianne Vaatstra was found murdered in a rural area in the Netherlands. In 2012 the perpetrator was arrested. Throughout this period as well as thereafter, the Vaatstra case was never far removed from media attention and public debate. How did this murder become such a high-profile case? In this article we employ the concept of the ‘fire object’ to examine the high-profileness of the Vaatstra case. Law and Singleton’s fire metaphor helps to attend to objects as patterns of presences and absences. In the Vaatstra case it is in particular the unknown suspect that figures as a generative absence that brings to presence different versions of the case and allows them to proliferate. In this article we present four different versions of the Vaatstra case that were presented in the media and which shaped the identities of concerned actors. The unruly topology of fire objects, we argue, might well explain the high-profileness of such criminal cases.

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The Reporting Trajectories of Top Homicide Cases in the Media: A Case Study of The Times

Abstract: This study describes the reporting trajectories of the 13 cases that received the most coverage in a leading British newspaper, The Times, over a period of 23 years (

Cited by 20 publications

References 10 publications

Crime, Media and Moral Panic in an Expanding European Union

Crime, Media and Moral Panic in an Expanding European Union

Pre‐offense characteristics of nineteenth‐century American parricide offenders: an archival exploration

The high-profile case as ‘fire object’: Following the Marianne Vaatstra murder case through the media

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