Asian Criminology (2007) 2:201–203

DOI 10.1007/s11417-007-9037-9

BOOK REVIEW

Media and Crime: A Critical Introduction

(Key Approaches to Criminology)
Yvonne Jewkes. Sage, London, UK. 2004,
ISBN 0-7619-4765-5, 256 pages, £20.99 (Paperback)

John Nguyet Erni

Published online: 21 November 2007

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007

‘Her last photo’ is the small caption next to a snapshot of Madelene McCann shown
wearing an angelic smile on her face while sitting on the beach. The headline in People’s
Magazine screams: ‘From Victims to Suspects’ (24 September, 2007). The smallness of
‘little Maddie’s’ photograph is by far the most striking feature of a full eight-page spread of
a crime story. The bulk of People’s Magazine article on the recent shocking turn of events,
which posits Maddie’s mother as the 3-year-old’s murder suspect, derives its appeal by
positioning the readers as the ‘moral majority’ from whom scrutiny of Kate McCann
(Maddie’s mother), her evasions, inconsistency in testimony and purported ‘fake grief’, can
now be cast. In other words, a strangely voyeuristic sense of ‘community’ emerges from
this new angle in the news about a crime against a child. In Media and Crime: A Critical
Introduction, Yvonne Jewkes devotes an entire chapter to the media constructions of
children in crime news, and writes, ‘Although late modernity is frequently said to be
characterized by fragmentation, surveillance, regulation, dangerousness and risk - all of
which are said to mitigate against, if not make redundant the notion of community -
individual life histories are structured, shaped and made sense of within frames of reference
provided by the mass media...In fact, it may be precisely those “negative” characteristics of
late modernity that fuel people’s need for unity and...a sense of cohesion’ (pp. 103–104).
The passage above from Jewkes’s book illustrates well her approach to the study of the
connection between crime and the media: an approach that blends a broad sociological view
on the ‘mediated society’, a criminological standpoint on how crime has radically
transformed society into an anomic, dangerous place requiring discipline, and a cultural
studies perspective that theorizes late modernity as a formation that reproduces the
contested notion of ‘community’. Jewkes’s book is thus a triangulated study, which
contributes to a usefully interdisciplinary attempt to think through the relationship between
media and crime. While it is written as a textbook, the rich and varied theoretical substance
of, and case studies in, the book is suitable for research review purposes.

J. N. Erni (*)
Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China
e-mail: jerni@ln.edu.hk

DO9037; No of Pages
202 Asian Criminology (2007) 2:201–203

The book is organized into seven chapters. A broad - and often overly compact - review
of the major theories about the rise and transformation of a ‘mediated society’ from media
studies, sociology, criminology and cultural studies forms Chapter 1, while Chapter 2
focuses on handling a question: why is crime so eminently ‘newsworthy’? Here, the author
offers a list of 12 features or news values that often thrust crime news into the center of
people’s media diet. The features are threshold, predictability, simplification, individualism,
risk, sex, celebrity or high-status persons, proximity, violence, spectacle or graphic imagery,
children, conservative ideology and political diversion. This list makes clear that the
audience of crime news and programmes possesses a broad literacy for reading various
discourse forms. With these two Chapters, Jewkes sets the stage for what I consider to be
the major contribution of this book: a rigorous reexamination of Stanley Cohen’s classical
moral panic theory in Chapter 3. Here, Jewkes pays homage to Cohen’s deep influence in
British sociology and criminology (and elsewhere) but does not shy away from criticizing it
for its obsolescence in the 21st century analysis of crime news, for the latter has been an
outgrowth of both consumerist and anti-terrorist ideologies that privilege novelty,
negativity, and a renewed urge to forge a society of surveillance underpinned by military
mentality. Readers will be struck by the resurrective modification of the moral panic theory
by Jewkes, at an age of intensified demonizing of ‘the deviant’ that serves up both law-
and-order and entertainment values. Needless to say, the revival of the moral panic thesis
also means that 21st century crime reporting must rehash 19th century binary oppositions
that continue to polarize the modern ‘folk devils’ and the ‘innocent victim’ (Leps 1992).
Yet sometimes crime news recreates certain favorite types of individuals as both devil
and victim, as in the case of Kate McCann cited above. Youth, children and women are the
subjects of Chapters 4 and 5. In Foucauldian parlance, these groups become ‘subjects’ of
crime through the media’s disciplinary gaze on deviance. Thus, from these two Chapters,
there emerges an analysis of an array of discursive subjects in crime news: the monstrous
child, the paedophilic pervert, the bad mother, the sexually loose wife, the lesbian avenger,
and so on. I read those Chapters as the representation of the author’s useful attempt to
insinuate feminist and anti-homophobic analyses into the dominant paradigms of
criminology.
In Chapter 6, Jewkes (finally) turns to a genre analysis of the media representation of
crime. Such an analysis is sorely missing throughout the book, which remains incapable of
distinguishing the various representational forms and audience impacts of different media
genres, such as television, internet, film, entertainment news, etc. In this Chapter, the focus
is on a British television programme, Crimewatch UK. Jewkes attempts to gauge the media
effects of the programme on the public, through looking at real life examples. She also
discusses how the selection of crime on the programme is determined by the 12 news
values covered in Chapter 2. Ultimately, a programme which seeks to raise the citizen’s
alertness of crime, Jewkes argues, ends up magnifying fear and panic.
Conspiracy or not, there appears to be a link between the media’s magnification of fear
and panic surrounding crime and the disciplinary policies of the government in boosting
their surveillance of society. Precisely, the transition from Chapter 6 to Chapter 7 (which
focuses on the advancement of a technological apparatus - a ‘surveillant assemblage’
(p. 175) - for creating a surveillance culture) stirs the reader’s imagination about just such a
conspiracy. Chapter 7 crosses over from an emphasis on the media to lodge a serious
critique of criminology, for its complicity in the production of a surveillance culture, and
even an indirect promotion of a voyeuristic populace. In this way, Jewkes recalls John
Pratt’s (2006) recent work to theorize ‘penal populism’ in which the media has helped to
create a populist base for crime policies. In a book that tries to appeal to both practitioners
Asian Criminology (2007) 2:201–203 203

in media studies and criminology, the placement of a critique of the latter toward the very
end of the book may suggest an intrinsic lack of balance between the author’s core
academic background in media studies and her somewhat thinner knowledge in
criminology.
Media and Crime: A Critical Introduction is a useful introductory text, which contains
useful features for class discussion (e.g., study questions, summary, keyword definitions).
Yet it is a thoroughly British textbook; all of the theories, examples and crime statistics are
drawn from the UK. Besides presenting Asian readers with possibly an obstacle in cultural
and media referencing, the book has entirely ignored the transnational reportage of crime.
For students and other readers in Asia, for which it is particularly important to understand
the mediatization of crime from an international perspective, many concerns are left out by
this UK-centered text, concerns such as the internationalization of crime spectacles, the
development of a cross-national surveillance sphere facilitated by satellites and the internet,
and the comparison of child-phobic and misogynistic tendencies across different national
media systems, and so on. Yet this deficit should not be taken as an intrinsic weakness of
Jewkes’s book, for such a deficit is in fact indicative of a more profound Eurocentrism in
the fields of media studies and criminology at large. Every author writes out of a context he/
she knows best, but few take it further along to question the epistemological paradigm that
underwrites our horizon for writing. To that kind of deficit, I would recommend the
following companion book to Jewkes’s: Jeff Ferrell and others’ (2004) Cultural
Criminology Unleashed.

References

Ferrell, J., Hayward, K., Morrison, W., & Presdee, M. (Eds.) (2004). Cultural criminology unleashed.
London: Glasshouse Press.
Leps, M.-C. (1992). Apprehending the criminal: The production of deviance in nineteenth-century discourse.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Pratt, J. (2006). Penal populism. London: Routledge.
‘From victims to suspects’, People’s Magazine, 24 September 2007.