Has crime news served to redefine 'law and order,' through its paying increasing attention to white-collar and corporate crime?
The #4 most under-reported story on last year's list was about how white-collar and corporate crime is rarely covered in the mainstream news media. However, this year we hypothesized that such coverage is actually increasing due to the activities of public interest groups like Democracy Watch, which are working to bring to light the extent of crimes like tax evasion, bribery, fraudulent advertising, illegal mergers, and monopoly pricing.
This study begins with the premise that, although the news media serve a 'law and order' agenda largely ignorant of white-collar criminality, it is possible that this situation is changing over time. The hypothesis tested is that, over the past two decades, the news media have increasingly served to promote a redefinition of 'law and order' consistent with the broader social movement against white-collar crime, by intensifying the focus on, and changing the nature of, coverage of such crimes.
To assess how media coverage of white-collar crime has changed in light of the growing social movement against such crimes, a content analysis of the Vancouver Sun was conducted for three periods: 1977-79, 1985-87, 1992-94. Using a random sampling procedure, nine weeks worth of data were compiled from each of the periods. For a story to be included in the analysis, it had to meet one of the following selection criteria.
Occupational crime - Offences committed by individuals for themselves in the course of their occupation, and the offences of employees against their employers.
Corporate crime - Illegal acts committed by corporations which exploit relatrs and citizens in order to advance their organizational goals.
This was compared with the frequency and prominence of sexual offence coverage for the same periods of study. Coverage of sexual offences was used as a benchmark for comparison because of the violent nature of such crimes, and the assumption that these stories would receive more coverage.
The findings are significant, and serve to reject the hypothesis. The frequency of white-collar crime coverage in the Vancouver Sun actually decreased over the three periods under examination. Whereas in the 1977-79 period there were 41 white-collar crime stories, this figure dropped to 33 such news items in the 1985-87 period, and to 23 items in the 1992-94 period.
These findings can be contrasted with the frequency with which sexual offences were reported during the same period. In the 1977-79 period there were only nine such news items; this figure jumped by 367% to 33 items in the 1985-87 period, and rose a further 52% in the 1992-94 period to 50 items. Altogether coverage of sexual offences increased by 556% from 1979 to 1994.
Conclusions
The study concludes by tentatively rejecting the hypothesis that over the course of the past two decades, the news media have increasingly covered white collar crime. These preliminary data instead point to a decrease concerning the frequency and prominence of coverage of such crimes in the Vancouver Sun, despite the existence of a growing social movement against white-collar crime.
Researcher: Clayton Jones