Toronto’s Little Shop Of Horrors: A Cultural Criminology Examination On Serial Killer Bruce McArthur And The News Media

<div>Contributing to the dynamic and interdisciplinary field of cultural criminology, this project works to emphasize the destructive, modern forces of consumerism and violence within Toronto’s crime-news industry. The paper fuses the canonical and emerging methodologies of content analysis, discourse analysis, and liquid ethnography, to evaluate the framing and editing techniques used to relay the story of Bruce McArthur’s predations in The Village (over the 2018 news year). A sample of 365 articles, retrieved from five print media sources, are methodically examined to understand both the local and national agenda-setting strategies of contemporary journalism. Actively contributing to the transformation of human suffering and violence into mass-market pleasure, a carnival of crime model (Presdee, 2000) serves as a primary lens for evaluating the hyper-sensationalized reporting styles of modern news makers. Weaving theoretical contributions from the fields of sociology and media studies, the embeddedness of heteronormative, racialized, and ethnocentric tropes common to the news and crime-infotainment industries is also critically evaluated towards raising greater political and social accountability. Crime-centric podcasts are further identified as a leading technological medium for fueling public obsessions with murder and transgressions. Formed by enthusiastic hobbyists and motivated journalists, the producers of podcasting content hastily straddle the realms of entertainment and information sharing. As such, this research calls for immediate awareness and tending to the neoliberal symptoms of boredom and fear existing in our modern world, building on Stanley Cohen’s (1972) moral panic theory.</div><div><br></div><div>Keywords: cultural criminology, serial killer, news media, crime infotainment, McArthur<br></div>

Toronto’s Little Shop Of Horrors: A Cultural Criminology Examination On Serial Killer Bruce McArthur And The News Media

<div>Contributing to the dynamic and interdisciplinary field of cultural criminology, this project works to emphasize the destructive, modern forces of consumerism and violence within Toronto’s crime-news industry. The paper fuses the canonical and emerging methodologies of content analysis, discourse analysis, and liquid ethnography, to evaluate the framing and editing techniques used to relay the story of Bruce McArthur’s predations in The Village (over the 2018 news year). A sample of 365 articles, retrieved from five print media sources, are methodically examined to understand both the local and national agenda-setting strategies of contemporary journalism. Actively contributing to the transformation of human suffering and violence into mass-market pleasure, a carnival of crime model (Presdee, 2000) serves as a primary lens for evaluating the hyper-sensationalized reporting styles of modern news makers. Weaving theoretical contributions from the fields of sociology and media studies, the embeddedness of heteronormative, racialized, and ethnocentric tropes common to the news and crime-infotainment industries is also critically evaluated towards raising greater political and social accountability. Crime-centric podcasts are further identified as a leading technological medium for fueling public obsessions with murder and transgressions. Formed by enthusiastic hobbyists and motivated journalists, the producers of podcasting content hastily straddle the realms of entertainment and information sharing. As such, this research calls for immediate awareness and tending to the neoliberal symptoms of boredom and fear existing in our modern world, building on Stanley Cohen’s (1972) moral panic theory.</div><div><br></div><div>Keywords: cultural criminology, serial killer, news media, crime infotainment, McArthur<br></div>

What Picture Would They Use?

This chapter studies the impact of digital culture on a long-standing crime news staple, the mug shot. First, it historicizes the way mug shots have traditionally served the interests of news organizations and the criminal justice system. Then, based on two highly publicized cases, the chapter situates mug shots in a model of decontextualization and recontextualization that accounts for traditional and social media. Former Texas governor Rick Perry’s mug shot was recontextualized by traditional journalists and social media users, and grounded research suggests that he was able to exert embodied gatekeeping to control the narrative about his case. Former Stanford University swimmer Brock Turner was subjected to the anger of many Twitter users, who used his digital mug shot to create counternarratives to criminalize him visually. The two cases illustrate the affordance of images to narrative, the role of power in message construction, and the impact of digitization on a model for recontextualization.

Location Based Fake News Detection using Machine Learning

Now a days lots of crime news incremented. In this system we can easy find which type of crime happened in particular city by using pin code. The easy access and exponential growth of the information available on social media network has made it detect to news or information fake or not. The easy dissemination of shared information has added to exponential growth of its falsification. On social media spreading lots of fake news. Thus it has become research challenge to automatically check detected news or information fake or real. Machine learning plays important role to classify the information in different categories. This paper reviews finding different types of crime news in particular city and detected news fake or real. One more feature is predict the future of crimes.

The Little Golden Calf [Zolotoy telyonok] and crime reports of the late 1920s

The article discusses possible inspiration behind I. Ilf and E. Petrov's novel The Little Golden Calf [Zolotoy telyonok] (1931): newspaper crime reports appearing in the late 1920s. The author points out parallels between the book's characters (Ostap Bender, Shura Balaganov, and Aleksandr Ivanovich Koreyko) and the real heroes of crime news. The article describes the adventures of an Aleksandr Serbin, who crossed the USSR from Odessa to Vladivostok alternately posing as a Brazilian industrial worker and a son of the Brazilian consul in China. All the while, Serbin seems to have been closely imitating the novel's plotline of the Lieutenant Schmidt's children. He enjoys free accommodation in hotels and receives payments from various local Soviet authorities. Interestingly, Serbin chronicles his adventures in letters to his girlfriend, thus immediately evoking another literary character — Khlestakov in Gogol's The Government Inspector [Revizor]. The article also draws analogies between crimes that took place in the Crimea in 1928 and the wealth accumulation schemes adopted by yet another of the book's characters, Koreyko.

Television journalism, crime news and sourcing practices: findings from Argentina

This paper presents the results of a research project on the new modes of production of television crime news. The enquiry involved monitoring television newscasts of the five major channels in Buenos Aires City and interviews with news workers. We analyze the news content, the ways of narrating and enunciating crime news on television, the role played by the police in the structure of the news, the emergence of new sources of information and the production routines of crime news. Our findings suggest that most of the newscasts on television give prominence to crime news within their agendas and that its production and presentation has changed as the result of the spread of digital technologies as sources of information.

Stolen innocence? Observance of the EU Directive on presumption of innocence by Spanish crime reporting

This paper examines the compliance of Spanish crime reporting with the principles of the 2016 EU Directive on presumption of innocence, which aims at preventing the publication of information that might bias the public and the jurors against the suspect. A content analysis applied to a sample of 200 crime news stories published by eleven of the most popular print and online news platforms in 2018 reveals that the Spanish press coverage of crime is centered around the pre-trial and sentence stages, with little attention to the oral trial. The full name and the face portrait of the suspect appear in roughly one-third of the stories, but this overwhelmingly happens in news stories reporting on the court’s decision, so that the presumption of innocence is generally protected. Interestingly, the legacy media are more likely to report on the victim’s full name and the crime details that online digital media. One-fourth of the stories include accusations of guilt, as prosecutor attorneys and other officials are more frequently cited than defense lawyers. Although the Spanish press is largely compliant with the recommendations of the EU Directive, the lack of attention to the oral phase, where the arguments of both parts are deployed and contrasted, leads to a bias in the coverage against the suspect.