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, looking at the ways in which news reports reinforce particular responses to race, poverty, class and gender. In examining what is defined as crime, and how it is reported, the author 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 emphasize deviancy, fecklessness and psychosis --- in discussions of homelessness, youth culture, sports hooliganism, inner city crime, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, paedophilia, and domestic violence. Using case studies and a range of methodological analyses, Wykes turns the business of crime reporting inside out, revealing the hidden agendas that not only report but also shape our view of the world in often insidious ways.
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