Routledge Crime and Media: A Reader (Routledge Student Readers)

This engaging and timely collection gathers together for the first time key and classic readings in the ever-expanding area of crime and media. Comprizing a carefully distilled selection of the most important contributions to the field, Crime and Media: A Reader tackles a wide range of issues including: understanding media; researching media; crime, newsworthiness and news; crime, entertainment and creativity; effects, influence and moral panic; and cybercrime, surveillance and risk. Specially devized introductory and linking sections contextualize each reading and evaluate its contribution to the field, both individually and in relation to competing approaches and debates. This book provides a single source around which criminology, media and cultural studies modules can be structured, an invaluable revision and consultation guide for students, and an extremely useful resource for scholars writing and researching across a wide range of relevant fields. Accessible yet challenging, and packed with additional pedagogical devices, Crime and Media: A Reader will be an invaluable resource for students and academics studying crime, media, culture, surveillance and control. Review 'One should hesitate to use the word ‘comprehensive’ about any text, but so thought-provoking, intellectually sophisticated and avowedly inter-disciplinary is Chris Greer’s Crime and Media: A Reader that it can probably justifiably lay claim to the appellation. Dazzling in the breadth and depth of coverage, the book succeeds in bringing together key ‘classics’ in the field of crime and media with more obscure, idiosyncratic or simply difficult-to-get-hold of readings that are none the less essential to an understanding of the complex and nuanced relationship between crime and media. That said, the original and incisive commentaries written by the editor are worth the cover price alone. Challenging, provocative and perceptive, Greer’s passion for his subject undoubtedly will enthuse students and breathe new life into sometimes stale debates. This is one of those rare books which makes anyone else’s aspirations to produce a similar text in the future entirely superfluous. Quite simply, a tour de force.'.......... Yvonne Jewkes, Professor of Criminology, University of Leicester, UK''This timely collection of classic and more recent analyses of crime and the mass media does more than simply cover a field; it is a conceptual tour de force. Greer’s synthesis defines a new understanding about the relevance of new developments in cultural studies and media logic for a comprehensive critique of how the mass media packaging of crime as news and entertainment shapes practice, perceptions, and policies about crime and social control.''.......David L. Altheide, Regents' Professor at the School of Justice and Social Inquiry, Arizona State University, USA''The academic expression of the Sixties’ imagination was to erode conventional disciplinary boundaries and to work in the new spaces where kindred interests could now meet. This was exactly the story of the meeting between, on one side, criminology, crime, deviance and social control and on the other, media studies. The result has been a flourishing of work on the many links between crime and the media. Chris Greer’s selection of forty two readings from this vast literature – from theories of simulacra to the dialectics of Dixon - strikes just the right balance between theory and research, standard and novel, normal and edgy. His selection (plus running commentary on the readings) is comprehensive enough to be a handbook for the whole field of study and coherent enough to reveal a theoretical integrity of its own. An essential guide for students and memory-aid for their teachers''........Stan Cohen, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, LSE, UK''As technology and media continue to evolve and dramatically impact all aspects of social life, it is unfortunate that crime and media research has