The Construction of Crime News (2004)

Since the publication of Law and Order News, very little work has been done to chart changes in the professional imperatives or news values that determine the newsworthiness of crime. In part, this is because many of those key criteria identified by S. Chibnall apply. The first people to attempt to systematically identify and categorize the news values that commonly determine and structure reported events were J. Galtung and M. Ruge. Their concern was with news reporting generally, rather than crime news per se, but their view that incidents and events were more likely to be reported if they were, for example, unexpected, close to home, of a significant threshold in terms of dramatic impact, and negative in essence, clearly made them relevant to crime reporting. Given that the notion of modern life being characterized by risk has become such a widespread and taken-for-granted assumption, it is surprising to find that the media devote little attention to crime avoidance.