There is something terribly wrong with CCTV, China

Since footballer sexual assault became top news in 2004, six years after the first case was reported, much has been written in the news media about individual cases, footballers and women who have sex with them. Deb Waterhouse-Watson reveals how media representations of recent sexual assault cases involving Australian footballers amount to "trials by media", trials that result in acquittal. The stories told about footballers and women in the news media evoke stereotypes such as the "gold digger", "woman scorned" and the "predatory woman", which cast doubt on the alleged victims’ claims and suggest that they are lying. Waterhouse-Watson calls this a "narrative immunity" for footballers against allegations of sexual assault. This book details how popular conceptions of masculinity and femininity inform the way footballers’ bodies, team bonding, women, sex and alcohol are portrayed in the media, and connects stories relating to the cases with sports reporting generally. Uncovering similar patterns of narrative, grammar and discourse across these distinct yet related fields, Waterhouse-Watson shows how these discourses are naturalised, with reports on the cases intertwining with broader discourses of football reporting to provide immunity. Despite the prevalence of stories that discredit the alleged victims, Waterhouse-Watson also examines attempts to counter these pervasive rape myths, articulating successful strategies and elucidating the limitations built into journalistic practices, and language itself.

This collection focuses on media representations of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito, defendants in the Meredith Kercher murder case. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, encompassing criminology, socio-legal analysis, critical discourse studies, cultural studies and celebrity studies, the book analyses how this case was narrated in the media and why Knox emerged as the main protagonist. The case was one of the first transmedia crime stories, shaped and influenced by its circulation between a variety of media platforms. The chapters show how the new media landscape impacts on the way in which different stakeholders, from suspects and victims’ families to journalists and the general public, are engaging with criminal justice. While traditional news media played a significant role in the construction of innocence and guilt, social media offered users a worldwide forum to talk back in a way that both amplified and challenged the dominant media narrative biased in favour of a presumption of guilt. This book begins with a new and original foreword written by Yvonne Jewkes, University of Brighton, UK.

The Neil Entwistle murder case caused a media frenzy on both sides of the Atlantic. With his wife and baby daughter found dead in their bedroom, Neil was the immediate suspect, and his subsequent conviction seemed inevitable to all who heard and read the sordid coverage. However, things are not always what they seem. With remarkable objectivity, Cliff Entwistle reveals the inconsistencies in the investigation, the lies told and the key forensic evidence withheld from the medical examiner, and with touchingly personal candour, he shares the pain he felt at the great loss and betrayal his family suffered. You will be disturbed by the harrowing details he exposes of the justice systems of both the UK and the US, yet you cannot fail to be encouraged as he testifies to the strength and resilience of family bonds in the face of unimaginable heartache and adversity.

A groundbreaking exposé about the alarming use of rap lyrics as criminal evidence to convict and incarcerate young men of color Should Johnny Cash have been charged with murder after he sang, "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die"? Few would seriously subscribe to this notion of justice. Yet in 2001, a rapper named Mac whose music had gained national recognition was convicted of manslaughter after the prosecutor quoted liberally from his album Shell Shocked. Mac was sentenced to thirty years in prison, where he remains. And his case is just one of many nationwide. Over the last three decades, as rap became increasingly popular, prosecutors saw an opportunity: they could present the sometimes violent, crime-laden lyrics of amateur rappers as confessions to crimes, threats of violence, evidence of gang affiliation, or revelations of criminal motive—and judges and juries would go along with it. Detectives have reopened cold cases on account of rap lyrics and videos alone, and prosecutors have secured convictions by presenting such lyrics and videos of rappers as autobiography. Now, an alarming number of aspiring rappers are imprisoned. No other form of creative expression is treated this way in the courts. Rap on Trial places this disturbing practice in the context of hip hop history and exposes what's at stake. It's a gripping, timely exploration at the crossroads of contemporary hip hop and mass incarceration.

A seminal work and examination of the psychopathology of journalism. Using a strange and unprecedented lawsuit by a convicted murder againt the journalist who wrote a book about his crime, Malcolm delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject. Featuring the real-life lawsuit of Jeffrey MacDonald, a convicted murderer, against Joe McGinniss, the author of Fatal Vision. In Malcolm's view, neither journalist nor subject can avoid the moral impasse that is built into the journalistic situation. When the text first appeared, as a two-part article in The New Yorker, its thesis seemed so radical and its irony so pitiless that journalists across the country reacted as if stung. Her book is a work of journalism as well as an essay on journalism: it at once exemplifies and dissects its subject. In her interviews with the leading and subsidiary characters in the MacDonald-McGinniss case -- the principals, their lawyers, the members of the jury, and the various persons who testified as expert witnesses at the trial -- Malcolm is always aware of herself as a player in a game that, as she points out, she cannot lose. The journalist-subject encounter has always troubled journalists, but never before has it been looked at so unflinchingly and so ruefully. Hovering over the narrative -- and always on the edge of the reader's consciousness -- is the MacDonald murder case itself, which imparts to the book an atmosphere of anxiety and uncanniness. The Journalist and the Murderer derives from and reflects many of the dominant intellectual concerns of our time, and it will have a particular appeal for those who cherish the odd, the off-center, and the unsolved.

Redefining Trial by Media: Towards a critical-forensic linguistic interface applies a range of linguistic models to recast trial by media not as a sensationalist and infrequent phenomenon, but as a systematic and routine process. Using critical discourse analysis and cognitive linguistic models, this book builds a Spectrum of Trial by Media which views juries in criminal trials as moulded by ideological media-made constructions of crime. The role of these media constructions is enhanced by the isolation levied on jurors by the linguistic composition of trial language, and reinforced by the language strategies of legal professionals in court. Critically deconstructing media portrayals of crime and forensically examining the language of criminal proceedings, this book offers a redefinition of trial by media which casts the role of the press as much more prevalent in the courtroom trial than is presently appreciated.