According to this book's authors, the Leveson Inquiry, launched following the News of the World hacking scandal of 2011, quickly drifted from its initial focus on the distorting effects of investigative journalism on the delivery of justice to a wider emphasis on the everyday practices of investigative journalism, particularly those threatening privacy. Yet a study of the past two centuries of crime news, they tell us, “illuminates just how predictable, from that long-term perspective, the revelations of 2011 were” (5). Judith Rowbotham, Kim Stevenson, and Samantha Pegg tell a story of a gradual decline, in stages, from a late Victorian “golden age” of legal discourse in the press to an early twenty-first century in which crime news is vacuous, focused on human-interest or celebrity angles, and rarely offers a favorable picture of British criminal justice.

Crime news in the first half of the nineteenth century was often formulaic, comprising what the authors, quoting Malcolm Gaskell, call “symbolic content” rather than “precision of reporting” (15). It aimed to convey moral messages in an entertaining manner, revealing the bad choices that had led the criminal to his execution. In the mid-nineteenth century, the sharp decline of capital punishment and the expansion of the daily press coincided with legal professionals' need to build popular respect for the law; as a result, newspapers and lawyers entered into a symbiotic relationship in which the latter provided detailed descriptions of trials, the legal events that contained the most potential for drama. The preponderance of daily newspaper content was political news, above all parliamentary reports, and crime news offered “respectable” sensationalism to help fill the pages. Moreover, these lawyer-writers identified professionally with the law rather than journalism, and so the convention of anonymity in the press facilitated their willingness to provide legal analysis. For today's citizen, the authors tell us, this Victorian model “reminds us that it is possible to provide entertaining reportage which is also legally informative and accurate” (6).

From about 1885, the innovations of the “new journalism” created a newspaper market in which crime news lost its near monopoly on non-political news. As a result, while the role of lawyers did not disappear, these legal professionals increasingly had to take into account new readers' fundamental lack of interest in legal detail. By the turn of the century, therefore, overall crime reporting decreased in quantity; legal detail gave way to summary. As for content, newspapers grew more likely to focus on “pre-trial excitements” (113), particularly if these could be conveyed sensationalistically. At the same time, newspapers became more assertive in publicizing the facts of criminal investigation. In doing this, journalists became increasingly reliant on police sources, although at times they conducted detective work on their own. For their part, the legal establishment expressed concern over the potential effects that the new approach to crime news could have on the possibilities for fair trial.

Following World War II and the removal of wartime and early post-war paper rationing, the authors argue, crime news returned to Victorian levels of quantity though not quality. Readers' interests remained a constraint; in order to merit space, even murder news, let alone new of more minor crimes, needed an appropriate hook, such as a law-and-order framing, a sexual component, or a link to a celebrity. This difficulty was multiplied by the expansion of broadcast news after World War II; newspapers could no longer offer the first report, and therefore had to find ways to make their coverage distinctive. Efforts to make crime news interesting to readers were aided by the final erosion, in the 1950s, of the “consensus” among politicians, legal professionals, and newspapers that “‘unsavoury’ detail that was extraneous to any crime narrative would be excluded” (162–63).

Even so, the authors contend, the decline of crime news was not yet complete. That would come only after 1960, as crime news became politicized, often leading to allegations of police criminality or incompetence. By the end of the twentieth century, the authors note, it had become rare to find positive depictions of the criminal justice system, leading professionals to worry about its perceived legitimacy. In the decades after 1960, moreover, newspapers' insistence on the public interest in revealing particular details ahead of trial constantly threatened to subvert justice; charges of contempt of court against newspapers increased. The emergence of Twitter and other social media in the early twenty-first century only exacerbated the difficulty of educating the public about the workings of the law, as these outlets facilitated the circulation of decontextualized information from trials. Indeed, by the early twenty-first century, crime news received nineteenth-century levels of legal rigor only in the specialist law pages of the broadsheets; from the perspective of legal professionals, even in the broadsheets the main news pages consisted of abbreviated and often misleading accounts written by inexpert journalists for reasons having less to do with the needs of a functioning legal system than with newspaper sales.

This book offers an original and convincing account of the ways in which newspaper crime news changed over a nearly two-century period. Its great strength is in offering compelling generalizations about a large body of press content while placing more familiar cases within new contexts. In its interpretation of broader journalism history, the book essentially follows the jeremiad approach familiar from such popular accounts as Matthew Engel's Tickle the Public (1996): one decade's declining standards lay the groundwork for those of the next, in a steady downward spiral. The authors do, though, allow room for nuance, and they are well tuned to the nuances of different newspapers' readerships. On the other hand, the authors take too much at face value claims of early twentieth-century Institute of Journalists spokespeople that journalism had achieved professional status, a move that the authors follow up by arguing that this status had deteriorated by mid-century. The reality is that the Institute of Journalist's claims were broadly unconvincing even in the 1890s, and the 1907 founding of the National Union of Journalists was largely a repudiation of the idea of journalism as a profession. Minor quibbles aside, this is an impressive contribution to our understanding of the interplay between the criminal justice system and the wider culture in which it operates.