On the morning of January 26, Sir Ian reported back to his police authority on the state of crime in the Metropolis one year after his appointment
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- ‘Trial by Media’: Policing, the 24-7 News Mediasphere and the ‘Politics of Outrage’
| City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Greer, C. & McLaughlin, E. (2011). "Trial by media": Policing, the 24-7 news mediasphere and the "politics of outrage". Theoretical Criminology, 15(1), pp. 23-46. doi: 10.1177/1362480610387461 This is the unspecified version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version.
http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1986/ Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1362480610387461 Copyright and reuse: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/
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Mediasphere and the ‘Politics of Outrage’ Greer, C. and McLaughlin, E. (2011) ‘Trial by Media: Policing, the 24-7 News Mediasphere, and the Politics of Outrage’, Theoretical Criminology, 15, 1: 23-46.
This article analyses the changing nature of news media-police chief relations. Building on previous theoretical work (Greer and McLaughlin, 2010), we use the concepts of ‘inferential structure’ (Lang and Lang, 1955) and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker, 1967) to examine former Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Commissioner Sir Ian Blair’s ‘trial by media’. We focus on the collective and overwhelmingly hostile journalistic reaction to Blair’s declaration in 2005 that, (a) the news media are guilty of ‘institutional racism’ in their coverage of murders, and (b) the murders of two ten- year-olds in Soham, 2001, received undue levels of media attention. A sustained period of symbolic media annihilation in the British mainstream press established a dominant ‘inferential structure’ that defined Blair as the ‘Gaffe-Prone Commissioner’: his position in the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ was shredded, and his Commissionership de-legitimised. The unprecedented resignation of an MPS Commissioner is situated within the wider context of ‘attack journalism’ and the rising news media ‘politics of outrage’.
news mediasphere; Soham; trial by media; politics of outrage Introduction This article examines the ‘trial by media’ that preceded Sir Ian Blair’s dramatic decision to resign as London Metropolitan Police Commissioner on 2 nd October 2008. 1 While we are interested in the ‘fateful moments’ (Giddens, 1991) that 1 Versions of this article were presented at the British Society of Criminology Seminar Series, LSE, the All Souls Criminology Seminar Series, Oxford, and University of Southampton Sociology Seminar 2 characterised Blair’s news media relations throughout his period in office, our empirical analysis focuses on the journalistic reaction to his declaration in 2005 that, (a) the news media are guilty of ‘institutional racism’ in their coverage of murders, and (b) the murders of ten-year-old Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in Soham, 2001, received disproportionately high levels of news media attention. 2 These
interconnected claims infuriated an already antagonistic news media. An overwhelmingly hostile and increasingly collective journalistic reaction was instrumental in establishing the dominant ‘inferential structure’ (Lang and Lang, 1955) that would define Blair as ‘gaffe-prone’, shredding his position in the ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker, 1967) and constituting a turning point in his Commissionership. It is not our contention that Sir Ian Blair was driven from office exclusively by a hostile news media. Rather we argue that it was the intense fusion of metropolitan news media politics, party politics and police politics that ultimately made his Commissionership untenable.
The article is structured as follows. First, we review dominant conceptualisations of the ‘special relationship’ between the news media and the police, with a particular focus on chief police officers. We utilise two key theoretical concepts – ‘inferential structures’ (Lang and Lang, 1955) and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker, 1967) which we feel are underused in current research. We suggest that, considered together, these concepts constitute a solid theoretical framework within which contemporary news media-police chief relations can be explored and understood. However, they must first be reworked within the context of a 24/7 news media environment. Second, then, we map out some of the key characteristics of this environment, focusing in particular on transformations in the interconnected spheres of media, politics and policing that are simultaneously de-stabilising and reconstituting news media-police chief relations. Building on theoretical work developed elsewhere
Series. The authors would like to thank the seminar participants, and the anonymous reviewers of this article, for their helpful comments. 2 The ‘Soham murders’ are one of the UK’s highest profile murder cases. Two ten-year-old girls Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were murdered in August 2002 by Ian Huntley, a local school caretaker. His girlfriend, Maxine Carr was convicted of providing the police with a false alibi for Huntley. The initial hunt for the missing schoolgirls was a global news story. A subsequent official inquiry was highly critical of the police for their failings in this case. Yüklə 1,04 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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