Media, Process, and the Social Construction of Crime by Gregg Barak

Author:Gregg Barak [Barak, Gregg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780815318552
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 503047
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1995-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Table 6.2

Coverage by The Daily Clintonian (n=30)

These stages of the criminal justice process were used in an attempt to determine the potential impact of the coverage at the pretrial, trial and post-trial stages. The pretrial and trial stages are important in assessing how the defendant is portrayed in the newspaper coverage and the post-trial stage is important in ascertaining the possible impact on the attribution of guilt question.

The types of coverage are important for two distinct reasons. First, those articles attributed to the reporters and newspaper editors tend to reflect the views of the agencies (e.g., law enforcement and prosecution) and individuals (e.g., police and witnesses) involved in the case. The editorials tend to reflect the views of either the newspaper or editors. The letters to the editors reflect the views of the readers and they help to ascertain the impact of the coverage on these individuals. However, whether the letters reflect the general view of the population at large is beyond the scope of this study.

In order to facilitate the reading of this study, and to give credit where it is due, the names of the contributing reporters will be used when possible. The Daily Clintonian’s coverage of this murder case (twenty-seven articles) was accomplished by one reporter, Gene Baker, II. The Tribune-Star’s primary coverage was the work of one reporter, Patricia Pastore. She wrote seventy-two of the eighty-three articles that appeared in her newspaper. Of the remaining eleven articles, three were written by one reporter, two by another reporter, two other reporters wrote one article each, and the four remaining articles were not credited to a specific reporter.

Content analysis research is necessarily concerned with what is written or said about a particular person or topic. For this study it was necessary to select a number of “prejudicial factors” that could be interpreted as being biased against the accused. The works of Friendly and Goldfarb (1967) and Wilkie (1981) were most helpful in determining what prejudicial factors to look for. The following is a list of six prejudicial factors selected for this study:

Characterization of the crime.

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