The insatiable hunger for crime feeds the overflowing pockets of producers on a daily basis. You may find yourself asking, where did this start? Television? Novels? Many would be startled to believe crime has been sought out before law enforcement became professionalized. So where did it begin? In this article, you will learn the history of crime in news, and how it has influenced our lives today.
The craving for crime came long before we had the means to record it. The earliest records began in the 18th century. Crime pamphlets were distributed in Britain, which was not heavily policed at the time. The news was one of the only ways that people could be held accountable for their actions. Newspapers charged victims a fee to post messages in hopes to revive stolen items or find particular people. This started a curve of accurate information being relayed to consumers. (Crone)
Law enforcement eventually started to shape up and become more professional. Defined by the 1792 Middlesex Justices Act, which formed seven established police ‘departments’ with at least three judges and up to six paid police officers. People no longer needed to publish their personal information through newspapers, although the interest in crime persisted. Newspapers combated this by making articles that relayed the newest police reports. Leading to the launch of the first-ever newspaper solely relating to crime, the Hue and Cry and Police Gazette (1797-2003).
With a surplus of consumers, producers were able to make news expensive. People in the working class would often pool together money to buy newspapers. Only to further confirm the need and unhinged interest for crime news. John Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette (1835-1836), one of the most popular crime news sources, received 40,000 readers (Crone). In historical context, where social media was not a thought, to be able to sell something to that mass amount of people was quite remarkable. The popularity of crime was so intense that to keep up, producers were pushing out information regardless of whether it was real or fake. A quote from a Gale source on crime reporting describes this well:
“As the popularity of various political movements fluctuated, these proprietors began to include sensational accounts of crime and disasters, real or imaginary, to keep their journals afloat.”
Rosalind Crone
These had huge effects on the population’s perception of crime. Everything became so inflated that people started to believe the world was much more dangerous than it is. When in fact, the percentage of crime was in decline over these periods. As a society, most of us like to imagine that fake news is a recent epidemic. Fake news has only been coined as a new term, but the origins of disinformation go back hundreds of years. In this case, the motive is monetary, but in other cases disinformation can derive from a plethora of agendas.
Perceptions of crime only became further changed. Using cheaper prints and materials, journalists found a workaround to the newspaper prices to mass-produce for the lower-middle class (Crone). Eventually, newspapers became nationalized which created a flow of similar information across the board. During this time “New Journalism” was a budding movement. Newspapers began to conglomerate themselves, in some cases, articles became identical. However, some publishers such as George Purkess used a “lurid front page, which illustrated recent crimes in significant detail, and…risqué advertisements”, that allowed them to stand out (Crone).
Crime news history also takes a turn beginning in the 1970s and 80s, where mass murder and crime became further sensationalized. News sources were the main outlet for information and the information being put out was highly censored.
People to this day picture serial killers as middle-aged white men, and that statistic is much lower than common belief. People of color were not reported on because of racism, which seems counterintuitive, but it is because the victims were not people producers cared to raise awareness for.
“we’re often inundated with images of white serial killers and white victims, only 51 percent of serial killers from 1970 to 2000 were white. “The primary reason we don’t hear about African American serial killers more, especially from the Seventies to the Nineties, is that the issue of who their victims were,” he says. “Although not always, murders, in general, tend to occur within the racial group of the murder.” As such, black serial killers often targeted non-white victims, who didn’t get the same coverage in the news media due to the inherent racism of the time.”
Brianna Ehrlich
Female serial killers were also widely underrepresented as they are in controlling positions. Female killers often got other people to do their bidding for them. Only further misconstruing the population’s view on crime.
This era of relentless serial killing reports was called the “golden age of serial murder” a term coined by Harold Schechter (Ehrlich). This is where we see some household serial killer names arise like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and Jefferey Dahmer. Eventually, this era started to fizzle out from awareness that the news brought to the dangers of hitchhiking, and advancements in security systems. As these victim areas started to lessen, serial killers searched for a new way to lure victims, the internet.
Advancement in technology has permanently altered serial killers in many ways. It has made it a lot easier to get caught, but it has also widened victim pools, allowed specific details of killing fantasies, and gave dark web community chats to killers. A new form of popular news became murder documentaries, and it has persisted to this day. Crime documentaries of all kinds continue the false ideations regarding factual statistics. Focusing on notable murder cases played by attractive actors, romanticizing, and harming views on terrible events. They also widely disproportion the amount of murder there is to the less viewable crimes (crimes that are not as fun to watch) such as robbery or domestic violence.
News has been developing for hundreds of years, yet we are still being fed misinformation on crime. What does this say about the society we are in now? Why isn’t this a topic of conversation?
We are so intrigued with what we hear about crime that we fail to look at its faults. We, as a society, should do better.
Sources:
Crime and the Media in America By: Stephan Mann
Crime Reporting By: Rosalind Crone
Origins of the Metropolitan Police
Why Were There So Many Serial Killers Between 1970 and 2000 — and Where Did They Go? By: Brenna Ehrlich
Journalism 2.0 