How are public attitudes toward criminalized populations shaped by journalists' rhetorical choices? What accounts for the mass media's preoccupation with violent street crime when the more lethal crimes of corporations receive little attention? What can sociolinguists contribute to debates about legal transgressions and the pursuit of justice? In this book, Andrea Mayr & David Machin answer these questions by highlighting the ways in which the media “vie for our attention with stories about crime designed to shock, outrage, titillate and entertain, reducing what is a complex social and political problem to simplified accounts and easy to understand sound bites for news bulletins on radio and television” (2). Mayr & David employ critical discourse analysis to unpack the linguistic and iconographic patterns that inflect mediated representations of criminalized activities, arguing that in concert these patterns legitimize a view of crime as a product of individual psychopathology rather than of socioeconomic inequality. In so doing, the authors offer numerous insights about the “market-driven nature of newsmaking” (16) in which ordinary events are repackaged into extraordinary allegories that affirm popular prejudices and attract paying audiences.
The book consists of seven analytic chapters between a succinct introduction and conclusion. Each chapter focuses on a set of news items published by media outlets based in the United Kingdom (major newspapers like The Guardian, national tabloids like The Sun, and various branches of the BBC) and aims to uncover representational techniques that systematically vilify recreational drug users, religious minorities, sex workers, unemployed youth, and other marginal groups. Ch. 2 discusses the lexical fields in which stories on illicit drug users are embedded. Ch. 3 explores how analyses of grammatical transitivity can reveal subtle assignments and concealments of agentive responsibility. Ch. 4 investigates the construction of semantic linkages between images of delinquent youth and anxieties about social decay. Ch. 5 considers the sensationalization of deviant women, whose crimes are identified with either excessive passivity or mythical evil: women who fail to satisfy archetypical benchmarks of femininity or maternal virtue “seem to confirm people's worst fears about society falling apart” (115), and criminalized women are thus convenient scapegoats for the anomie of late modernity. Ch. 6 focuses on depictions of police officers, who are consistently portrayed as paragons of professionalism and whose viewpoints are considered so essential to crime reportage that their omission may disqualify a story from the genre. Ch. 7 demonstrates that while prisons are routinely critiqued as places of outrageous luxury, the truth falls far short of this mythology. Ch. 8 reveals how corporations' legal transgressions are overwhelmingly portrayed not as crimes, but as tragedies, scandals, errors, or accidents “waiting to happen” (209)—responsibility for which is simultaneously assigned everywhere and nowhere.
Although the book leaves certain themes unexplored—the criminalization of race could be further interrogated, for example—it is refreshingly free of jargon, written in an accessible style that students everywhere will appreciate, and makes a valuable contribution to current anthropological, sociological, and linguistic work on the social construction of crime.
