Description
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?
News, Crime and Culture explores the links between culture, criminality and social control, focusing on the ways in which news reports reinforce particular respons- es to race, poverty, class and gender. Maggie Wykes considers the extent to which crime reporting in the Western media obscures endemic, fundamental and profound issues of poverty, racism and patriarchy, and operates instead to emphasise deviancy, fecklessness and psychosis. This is examined through discussions of homelessness, youth culture, football hooliganism, inner-city crime, prostitution, pornography, homosexual- ity, child abuse, and domestic violence. Using case studies and a range of methodological analyses, Wykes turns the business of crime reporting inside out, reveal- ing the hidden agendas that not only report but shape our view of the world in often insidious ways.
Maggie Wykes lectures in the Department of Law at the University of Sheffield. She has written widely on aspects of media reporting, with a particular emphasis on gender and deviance. ISBN:9780745313269 
