Representing Order: Crime, Law, and Justice in the News Media

David E. Smith is a political science professor at the University of
Saskatchewan and author of Jimmy Gardiner: Relentless Liberal.

When Time names CNN’s Ted Turner newsmaker of the year, then it is
clear that the authors of this study are on to something. In earlier
volumes, they looked at how journalists and their sources produce
meaning from the flow of news events. Here they study the meaning
journalists give events. They do this through content analysis of six
news outlets in the Toronto region, including a quality and popular
newspaper, a television station, and a radio station.

By freezing news reports, and then analyzing how two law-related
stories (a murder and a reform to employment law) are treated, as well
as analyzing the content of news reports in general, the authors produce
some remarkable findings. For example, “just under one-half of all
news coverage in newspapers and popular television, well over one-half
of all news coverage in quality television, and approximately two-thirds
of news coverage on radio” focuses on aspects of crime, law, and
justice.

How the authors explain this finding is no less absorbing than how they
make their discovery. Mass media are agents of social control that
reinforce, or reproduce, “morality, procedural form, and social
hierarchy.” In the process, readers begin to understand what is only
subliminally evident to consumers of the news—its theatricality.