Crime News in Modern Britain: Press Reporting and Responsibility, 1820–2010 PDF
Preview Crime News in Modern Britain: Press Reporting and Responsibility, 1820–2010
Crime News in Modern Britain Frontispiece: The Lawyer as Pin-Up Crime News in Modern Britain Press Reporting and Responsibility, 1820–2010 Judith Rowbotham Director, SOLON: Promoting Interdisciplinary Studies in Law, Crime and History Kim Stevenson Associate Professor in Law, University of Plymouth, UK and Samantha Pegg Senior Lecturer in Law, Nottingham Trent University, UK © Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson and Samantha Pegg 2013 Foreword © Joshua Rozenberg 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-30359-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN 978-1-349-33827-6 ISBN 978-1-137-31797-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137317971 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Contents Foreword vi Joshua Rozenberg Preface and Acknowledgments viii Introduction: A History of Crime News 1 1 The Beginnings of Crime Intelligence: 1800 –1860 14 2 A ‘Golden Era’? 1860–1885 39 3 Challenging the ‘Golden Goose’? 1885–1900 6 0 4 New Journalism Triumphant: 1900–1914 84 5 New Perspectives and New Informants: 1914–1939 1 14 6 Enhancing Sensationalism: 1939–1960 1 43 7 Positively Criminal? Press, Police and Politicians: 1960–2010 171 8 Online and Offline: Postscript 2011–2012 202 Bibliography 2 24 Index 233 v Foreword This is an auspicious time for a book about criminal reporting. When the authors started work, their book was to be about the reporting of crime. By the time they finished, people were more interested in the alleged criminality of reporters. The 190 years it covers have seen the rise and fall of crime reporting. If the authors can be persuaded to update their work in a decade from now, they may well find themselves chronicling its demise. There may well be more crime to report in 2020 but there are likely to be fewer printed newspapers in which it can be reported. Until I read this well-researched book, I had no idea that many nine- teenth-century crime reporters were trained lawyers, writing anony- mously. The authors explain how lawyers working in and for the press transformed the trade of journalism, making it a respectable career for educated, middle-class young men. Those lawyers replaced the ‘penny- a-liners’ – freelances who had a financial incentive to make things up. Plus ça change . The late nineteenth century saw the rise of investigative journalism, with W.T. Stead finding himself arrested for demonstrating how easy it was to buy a girl of 13. Many of his successors have found themselves living life on the edge and there is every chance that some of them will be following him to prison. For others, though, journalism is a nobler calling. From Stead onwards, reporters and commentators have played an important part in exposing miscarriages of justice and promoting law reform. Without the campaigning work of the press, it is unlikely that the government would have established the Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. Many other reforms have followed. During the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, there were increasing restrictions on what journalists could report. Most of these restrictions were arguably in the interest of justice. But, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, the judges were opening up their courts, recognising the public’s right to know. A ban on taking photo- graphs in the courts of England and Wales was introduced in 1925. It was lifted, very slightly, in 2013 when television cameras were allowed into the Court of Appeal. The courts began to welcome bloggers and tweeters, citizen journalists using new methods of communication. vi Foreword vii Despite what some people may believe, journalism is not a profes- sion. Nobody can license me to report the news and so nobody can take my reporter’s licence away, even if the Leveson plans for press regula- tion proceed apace. Freedom of expression is the mark of a free society. However ill informed some of the press may be, I would not have it any other way. Joshua Rozenberg April 2013 Preface and Acknowledgments This book has been longer than expected in the making, but the instiga- tion of the Leveson Inquiry, coming as we completed an early outline of the book, forced us to rethink and recontextualise our approach to this survey. At that point, we felt that it provided a convincing, compelling and timely framework against which to present and review the histor- ical development of crime news, in that we had identified a significant decline in the quality of that news in terms of its legal accuracy. In writing this book, we wished to explore the reasons for and the impact of differences in the reportage of crime on popular understandings of crime and criminality, and consequently of the ways in which justice was (or was not) meted out to offenders. The events of 2011 demanded that we also highlighted and reflected upon the pre-existing causational factors that occasioned such a high profile denouement to our retro- spective review. In 2013, crime reportage features in the news in ways that were unex- pected in 2010 when we started to write this book. A conviction of the need for a better understanding of the presentation of crime through the media was the original impetus, because it is through that lens that the majority of citizens obtain their understanding of crime and justice. We were aware that there was a contrast between the levels of public support for the criminal justice system in the post-1850 Victorian era and the more negative attitudes found at the start of the nineteenth century. What role has the media played in creating, and then sustaining or undermining, that support, especially in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries? Having used newspapers as sources to under- stand historical and modern attitudes towards types of crime including murder, rape, burglary and domestic violence, we were conscious that the attitude of the media towards the criminal justice system at least mirrored, if it did not create, public support (or lack of it) for the daily operation of that system. Media presentations of individual trials, at all levels of the court hierarchy, could suggest, explicitly or implicitly, whether or not ‘justice’ was being appropriately delivered. We had become very conscious that there was a significant difference in the legal content (and accuracy) of such daily reportage of crime, intended for popular consumption, between the post-1850 Victorian era and the modern era. But was that simply an inevitable corollary, as viii Preface and Acknowledgments ix many have implicitly assumed, of an increasingly complex legal system? We did not think the reason for this diminution in legal quality was so simple. But seeking to explore any wider complexities meant that we had to think about the strategies for reporting law from the perspec- tive of the law as well as taking into account the different demands and expectations of the criminal justice process from a historical perspec- tive. In planning this text, we were consequently driven by a sense of the need for a genuinely interdisciplinary approach which would incor- porate a historical perspective, paying appropriate attention to cultural contexts, but also a real and substantial appreciation of the criminal law. Only in that way, we believe, is it possible to comprehend the complexi- ties of the issues involved from all sides. What we could not have imagined was how our historico-legal anal- ysis of the production and dissemination of crime news would suddenly be overtaken by the unprecedented events of the summer of 2011: events that would set up fundamental questions about the integrity and morality of the British press, reflecting on both its crime reportage and the actual criminality of its editors and journalists. This persuaded us to expand certain aspects of our book to consider the implications for the future of crime intelligence in the media in the light of these disclosures. Much has been, and will continue to be, written about the Leveson Inquiry, its Report and the ways in which the press, overall, might be regu- lated. But this is not a book about Leveson. What we realised is that we were writing a book which illuminated how the scenario of 2011 had evolved. It was widely known that phone-hacking figured as one of the investigative tools being used by journalists in the decade before 2011. Generally, the public was largely unconcerned at the sensationalising of often mundane incidents through reporting the involvement of celebrity figures in them. Consumers continued to buy, not boycott, titles accused of invading their privacy by a range of celebrity figures, tacitly tolerating the strategies that led to such enjoyably ‘juicy’ news about individuals already in the public eye.1 Equally, the political community (once the security-laden issue of hacking into royal phones had been dealt with) was largely uninterested in the embarrassment and distress of people like Hugh Grant or Max Clifford at having their privacy invaded by illegal means. 1 We do not, here, deal with the issues of privacy – clearly of importance to debates over responsible journalism, partly because this had already been comprehensively dealt with, in ways that do invoke a historical dimension. See J. Rozenberg (2005) P rivacy and the Press (Oxford University Press).
The list of books you might like
