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Drawing on interviews with journalists, senior police and press officers, this is the first ethnographic study of crime news reporting in the UK for over 25 years. It explores changes over the last 40 years, including the aftermath of the Leveson Report and the breakdown of relations between the Met and the mainstream media. The book argues that new investigative journalism non-profits have been slowly repairing the field of crime journalism and reporting with – and not on – stigmatised communities. Nevertheless, the police continue to control the flow of policing news to the press and the public. Despite the radical transformation of the Fourth Estate, in the case of the police it has never been so restricted in its ability to speak truth to power.

What can we learn from the legal cases of Stephen Lawrence and Louise Woodward? How do the legal system and the media contribute to a collective understanding of class, nation, race and gender? In this book, Siobhan Holohan explores media representations of law and order in the context of notions of multi-culturalism and victim-centred politics. Two high profile cases - the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the US trial of the British au-pair, Louise Woodward - are examined. Holohan argues that the stories built up around Woodward and Lawrence - the organization of public discourse around a sacrificial figure - have contributed to exclusionary patterns of social order. The book offers a perceptive account of what makes some criminal legal cases prone to scrutiny and spectacle and provides a vivid illustration of the presence of power relations in legal decisions. In conclusion, the author draws on the model of the Macpherson report to propose a more inclusive form of social and legal judgement that takes into account social inequalities.

Whenever a miscarriage of justice hits the headlines, it is tempting to dismiss it as an anomaly – a minor hiccup in an otherwise healthy judicial system. Yet the cases of injustice that feature in this book reveal that they are not just minor hiccups, but symptoms of a chronic illness plaguing the British legal system. Massive underfunding, catastrophic failures in policing and shoddy legal representation have all contributed to a deepening crisis – one that the watchdog set up for the very purpose of investigating miscarriages of justice has done precious little to remedy. Indeed, little has changed since the'bad old days'of the Guildford Four and Birmingham Six. Award winning journalist Jon Robins lifts the lid on Britain's legal scandals and exposes the disturbing complacency that has led to many innocent people being deemed guilty, either in the eyes of the law or in the court of public opinion.

As featured on the BBC Radio 2 Jeremy Vine Show. David Wilson is one of the 1st's best-known and most innovative criminologists. An ‘insider'view of the construction of a news agenda for crime and punishment. This superb read from Professor David Wilson looks at how the “news” agenda for crime and punishment is constructed. It also contains analysis of media stereotypes, narratives and depictions together with insights connecting these to real life. Media portrayals set the agenda for public discourse and popular debate. Academics in their ‘ivory towers', professionals and other crime experts ignore this at the risk of seeing their more informed understandings side lined. The book builds on the author's experiences of covering high profile cases and populist issues for TV, radio, newspapers and other media. It also contains telling inside accounts of police-media relations at murder scenes in Gloucester, Soham, Whitehaven, Rothbury and Ipswich. A must in grasping the equally ‘hot topic'of Public Criminology With a Foreword by the award-winning investigative journalist Donal MacIntyre.

Crime is always newsworthy. But is crime reporting as value-free and objective as we would like to think? Is crime reporting concerned exclusively with issues of good and evil, justice and the law? Or is it part of a broader and much more specific ideology, underpinned by an essentially conservative agenda? The link between news reports of crime or disorder and public perception becomes increasingly clear, as public reaction to the murder of Sarah Payne and the fuel crisis has shown. News, Crime and Culture explores these links, assessing the relation between culture, criminality and social control, and in particular the ways in which news reports reinforce particular responses to race, poverty, class and gender. Maggie Wykes uncovers these links through a variety of high-profile events featured in the news, spanning the last twenty years of the twentieth century. She examines such issues as child abuse, football hooliganism, homelessness, youth culture, inner-city crime, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and domestic violence. Using case studies and a range of methodological analyses, Wykes turns the business of crime reporting inside out, revealing the hidden agendas that not only report but shape our view of the world in often insidious ways.