Critical news analysisA B C D E F G H IJKL M N O P R S T U VXYZWthey may be committed by the central criminals.
Contextual crimes may also be unrelated to
the McGuffi n, the primary crime, ‘but portray
aspects of the wider society’.
Chief among McGuffins, say Allen, Living-
stone and Reiner, is homicide, 48 per cent of
their sample fi lms having a homicide McGuffi n- contrasting substantially with crime fi gures
in the real world, where 90 per cent of recorded
off ences are property crimes. Th e authors note
an increase in contextual crimes during the
1960s: ‘Th is is signifi cant because it is contextual
crime perhaps even more than the McGuffin
which creates a sense of society as a whole being
threatened by crime.’
Th is trend is linked to the ‘increasing predomi-
nance of police heroes rather than amateur
“sleuths”’; ‘towards an increasingly graphic
representation of violence in the portrayal of
crime’; the degree to which crime traumatizes the
victim; and the perception that crime has social
origins. In their analysis, the authors emphasize
the complexity of the representation of crime in
contexts of the ‘collapse of moral certainties’ in
society, the dominance of Hollywood, the retreat
from strict forms of censorship and the demo-
graphic nature of audience – largely made up of
young people.
Crimes of self-publicity See terrorism as
communication.
Crisis defi nition How do we know when a crisis
is a crisis? One answer is – when the media
tell us it is a crisis. Th eir capacity for agenda-
setting, of selecting the front-page headlines
or the lead stories, can not only crystallize the
notion of crisis in the public mind but also in
some cases help precipitate one, at least in the
sense that people in authority – such as govern-
ments – can be forced into a crisis response to a
crisis stimulus.
Critical news analysis Generic term for a wide-
ranging and complex approach to the analysis
of the presentation of news in the mass media.
Perhaps the most infl uential starting point in the
UK for this critical analysis is the book by Stanley
Cohen and Jock Young, eds, Th e Manufacture of
News: Social Problems, Deviance and the Mass
Media (Constable, 1973). Th ey, along with other
commentators of the time – such as Professor
Stuart Hall and colleagues at the University
of Birmingham, and research teams such as
the glasgow university media group –
contributed to a developing awareness that the
news is socially constructed and that it is both
a social and an ideological construct. In other
words, news isn’t neutral. Critical news analysis
Coups and earthquakes syndrome Te r m
coined by American journalist Mort Rosen-
blum to describe the Western attitude to news
emanating from developing nations in, for
example, Africa and South America. For events
in such countries to be deemed of news value
they must come under the category of ‘coups and
earthquakes’ – the overthrow of governments
by force or natural disasters. Rosenblum wrote
Coups and Earthquakes (Harper & Row) in 1979,
but current practice seems not to have improved.
Referring to the ‘coups and earthquakes’
syndrome, Mark D. Alleyne in News Revolution:
Political and Economic Decisions about Global
Information (Macmillan, 1997) writes, ‘It some-
times seems that there is a malicious attempt
to stereotype these countries, and this attitude
might be propelled by various factors, including
racism, political idealogy and ethnocentrism.’
Alleyne believes that ‘in this way, international
news can be seen as a weapon of those with
power in the international system, a tool to
maintain the status quo, at least in regard to
the inferior status of some peoples and nation-
states’.
The key problem lies with prevailing news
values, for the defi nition of news ‘controls the
way in which journalists decide what is impor-
tant’. At the same time ‘journalists often use
vague, shorthand terms to describe complex
issues and regions’. See compassion fatigue.
Creole See communication: intercultural
communication.
Crime: types of crime on screen A number
of types of on-screen crime are identified by
Jessica Allen, Sonia Livingstone and Robert
Reiner in an article entitled ‘True lies: changing
images of crime in British postwar cinema’ in
the European Journal of Communication, March
- Th e authors surveyed 1,461 crime-related
films released between 1945 and 1991, and
popular with the public, reporting that ‘contrary
to general beliefs about increased crime content
of the media ... our data shows a constant rate
of representation, at least in the cinema over 50
years’.
Th e authors discuss primary, consequential,
collateral and contextual crimes. To the first
- that which animates the narrative – they
ascribe the term mcguffin, borrowed from fi lm
director Alfred Hitchcock, ‘to refer to the object
whose pursuit provides the driving force of the
narrative’. Consequential crimes are those which
are committed in the course of, or in order to
cover up, the McGuffi n, while collateral crimes
are not directly related to the McGuffi n though