Thesis-2014-Payne.pdf (3.21 MB)
Download fileAfter the panic: an investigation of the relationship between the reporting and remembering of child related crime
thesis
posted on 2015-02-23, 12:31 authored by Georgina PayneThis thesis considers why some crimes persist beyond the moment of
newsworthiness and how they are able to transcend this period of intense reporting to
become a feature of popular memory. The central argument is that the popular memory
of a crime is built up over time through a synthesis of public discourses, which are
predominantly developed in news reporting, people s everyday experience and the
normative social frameworks of everyday life. A temporally sensitive analysis of two
case studies, the murder of James Bulger and the murder of Sarah Payne, tests this
hypothesis by exploring the connections and disconnections between the ongoing
reporting of these crimes and the remembering of them. The study finds that the personal
past and public discourse intertwine in remembered accounts of these crimes and
considers that this is evidence of the ways audiences utilise crime news as an imaginative
resource for understanding crime and criminality more broadly. It can thus be said that
audiences use the news to frame, but not define their understandings of the world around
us.
Funding
Loughborough University
History
School
- Social Sciences
Department
- Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Publisher
© Georgina PaynePublisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Publication date
2014Notes
A Doctoral Thesis. Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of Doctor of Philosophy of Loughborough University.Language
- en