Prior to 1994 I had little interest in the activities of the police. As a mass media
consumer I was aware of the prominence of crime in the daily news agenda and I
watched, read and listened to potted summaries of rape, mayhem and murder.
Frequent too, were stories of police malpractice, incompetence and corruption. Police
stories were also a significant part of television drama with programs like the long
running British series The Bill, and a range of Australian productions: The Feds,
Halifax f.p, Rafferty's Rules, Blue Heelers, State Coroner, and Water Rats.
The police also featured at the cinema with crime genre movies Natural Born Killers
(Oliver Stone, USA), Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, New Zealand) and Pulp
Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, USA) becoming box office hits.
My interest in the portrayal of police change dramatically when on the 7th of October
1994, I was appointed Officer-in-Charge of the Media and Publications Branch of the
Australian Federal Police (AFP). I was responsible for all aspects of the
communication function including: media liaison, crisis management, media
management, publications and internal communication.
My branch dealt with media inquiries from local, national and international media
across the gamut of issues facing the AFP. These ranged fiom industrial issues about
budgets and overtime, allegations of corruption and incompetence, and operational
matters as diverse as burglaries, alleged Nazi war criminals, peace-keeping operations
and drug 'busts'.
Needless to say my police stakeholders did not always see things the same way as my
media colleagues. I was seeing at a practical day-to-day level the complex taxonomy
of police/media relations outlined by Putnis (1996). Putnis noted the ubiquity of the
police and the media as social institutions and observed that their daily operations
involved a complex, dynamic, relationship constructed out of many thousands of
interactions, across all levels of the organisations, in many different settings.
My experiences in dealing with the media became the genesis of this study.
My aim is to expand our understanding of the police/media relationship by exploring
characteristic forms of print news-media reports about policing, the impact these
reports have on police, and on law and order policy.
The possibility of bias towards police in this study is acknowledged given I was a
member of a police service fiom 1994 until 2002 and the research relies heavily on
'participant observer' techniques (Kay 1997; Potter1 996; Schofield 1993). Every
effort has been made to maintain a critical perspective on the subject matters raised
and it should be noted my association with police ended prior to the writing-up phase
of the research. In addition to comments fiom my supervisory panel, ongoing
discussions with media colleagues were another strategy adopted to ensure balance in
the writing-up of this study.
This is a unique study in that it offers an insider's perspective of police/media
relations and at a time that represented a watershed for police. The early 90s was a
period of straightened finances for public sector agencies and police, like other
agencies, were under pressure fiom governments to demonstrate the efficient use of
public monies (AFP 1995; Grieve 2000). Reform programs swept through policing
with many, like the AFP, being organised along business lines (Palmer 1995; Etter
1995; Rohl 1999; WAPOL 1999). The 90s were also a watershed for criminal
organisations with the emergence of transnational criminal syndicates, such as drug
traffickers, that had the potential to impact on crime at a local level without even
entering the country, let alone the jurisdiction, in which the crime took place (Bliss
and Harfield 1998; Palmer 1995; McFarlane 1999). In order to combat these
syndicates, police began to work in a more cooperative fashion and formed loose
coalitions, often across countries, in a manner similar to the criminal syndicates they
were trying to combat (Palmer 1995). The 90s also saw the continuation of
committees of inquiry and royal commissions into police malpractice (Landa and
Dillon 1995) and the inevitable bad press for police (Wood 1996; Munday 1995).
The media and police have a symbiotic relationship and it is a critical one as most
members of society have little direct contact with the criminal justice system.
Information about crime, and the efforts of police to combat it, is obtained second
hand through fictional accounts from such vehicles as television dramas, and from the
news media. As aptly described by Hall et al. (1975), nearly thirty years ago, the
media is the link between crime and the public. The police are therefore heavily
reliant on the media to provide a balanced account of the panoply of issues
surrounding the criminal justice system (Cowdery 2001). At its most fundamental,
police require the support of the communities they serve in order to be effective, and
the news media can have a major impact on perceptions about police performance
(Reiner 1997; Surette 1992). As organisational entities, police need to compete with
other bureaucracies for public hnding, and the media is an essential tool in generating
positive publicity about successful operations and policies. The media is, therefore,
critical to the maintenance of positive relationships with the two most important
stakeholders in the policing function: the community and the government.
McGregor (1993) provides a useful summary of the literature relating to print media
coverage of policing issues: there are substantial discrepancies between official
accounts of criminal activity and press reports of crime; the media tends to
homogenise crime by concentrating on a limited range of crimes (mainly violent
crime) and drawing facts from a limited range of sources (police/court reports); the
media over-report serious crimes, especially murder and crimes with a sexual
element; and, the press concentrates crime reportage on events rather than issues, so
crime incidents and specific crimes form the bulk of crime news as opposed to
analyses of the causes of crime or remedies, trends or issues. McQuail (1994, p.256)
reminds us that assessing media performance on the basis of media content, measured
against the extent to which content relates to reality, is open to question. He argues
that there is no general answer to questions of meaning construction, but media
research has pointed to several elements in a more general framework of social and
personal meanings including clues as to what is more or less important, salient or
relevant in many different contexts (1994, p. 379).
An important research question concerns the impact of news media practices,
particularly given the significant costs to the community flowing from the
commission of crime, its investigation by police, and the processing of offenders
through the criminal justice system. The Australian Institute of Criminology estimates
the cost of crime in Australia is approximately $19 billion, while the cost of dealing
with crime is another $13 billion (Mayhew 2003). The news media, articulated
through radio talk-back hosts, are seen as having undue influence on how public funds
on crime control are spent (ABC, The Media Report, 1 August 2002; Chan 1995;
Cowdery 2001; Dixon 2002; Weatherbum 2002). These commentators have pointed
to the serious public policy issues arising from the contribution made by the media
towards what Weatherburn describes as an irrational public debate about law and
order (2002, p. 12) and Hogg and Brown have coined 'the uncivil politics of law and
order' (1998, p. 4). As Hogg and Brown (1998, p. 4) observe:
crime is depicted as a problem of ever-increasing gravity set to overwhelm society unless
urgent, typically punitive measures are taken to control and suppress it.
The influence of the media on public policy has long been recognised. As Paletz and
Entmann (l981, p. 6) observe:
they influence the decisions and actions of politicians; they are open to manipulation by the
powerful which insulates the powerful fiom accountability to the public; they reallocate power
amongst the already powerful; they decreased to a marked extent the ability of ordinary
citizens to judge events; they foment discontent among the public; and they preserve the
legitimacy of the political, economic and social system.
Ethnomethodological approaches (Ericson and Haggerty 1997) underpin the research
in this study. The ethnomethodological approach was used because of its wider scope,
employing as it does, observation, interviewing, and document-analysis techniques
(Ericson et al. 1987, p. 77) and its ability to provide meaning and context to the
phenomena under observation (Hall 1978; Willis l981). Ethnomethodological
approaches are complemented by news framing analyses (Barkin and Gurevitch 1987;
Blood, Putnis and Pirkis 2002; Capella and Jamieson 1996; Coleman 1995; Entman
1993; Kitzinger 2000; Keely 1999; Darling-Wolf 1997; London 1993; Pan and
Kosicki 2001; Miller and Riechert 2001; Pirkis and Blood 2001; Reese, Gandy and
Grant 2003; Scheufele 1999) to explore the news media frames employed in the genre
of print crime reporting.
What emerges from the study is evidence of a one-sided, highly negative, discourse
about policing implemented through a range of media frames centred on conflict and
broader xenophobic and egalitarian narratives. Despite the advantages police have as
information gatekeepers, their attempts to manage the media environment have met
with little success (Hughes 2004; Williams 2002) and the need for police to restrict
access to police communications is being challenged (Crime and Misconduct
Commission 2004, Inquiry into the effects of a Queensland Police Service decision to
adopt digital technology for radio communications). There are exceptions, of course:
the news media are not all bad. Routine reporting of crimes, where details of
offenders are publicised, greatly assists the work of police as reflected in the case of
43-year-old Mr Colin George Dunstan which is discussed in Chapter Eight. Dunstan
sent a series of explosive devices through the mail system in Canberra and police
provided the media with photographs of the devices, Mr Dunstan (who was the main
suspect), and his vehicle. The media coverage restricted Mr Dunstan's movements
and led to his early arrest. Similarly, publication of the details of missing persons,
warnings about lethal batches of drugs and crimes such as drink-spiking, enable
police to reach a mass audience efficiently and quickly. And at a more abstract level,
as noted by McQuail (1994, p. 34), modem communication vehicles can make a
positive contribution to cohesion and community.
The emergence of the 'yapping pack' form of journalism (Tiffen 1999, p. 207) has
resulted in elements of the media exercising a worrying degree of influence over what
should be a broader and better informed debate about criminal justice issues. An
illustration of this process occurred toward the end of this study with the widely
reported spectacle of the Premier of New South Wales presenting his replacement
police minister before radio presenter Mr Alan Jones for his endorsement; the
subsequent involvement of that minister in operational police matters (Williams
2002); and the departure of the state's police commissioner as a result of sustained
media attack (ABC, The Media Report, 1 August 2002; Weatherburn 2002). These
incidents say much about the influence of the news media in relation to police matters
and makes this study a timely one.
What follows is a literature review examining contemporary trends in policing and the
media; a detailed analysis of two major case studies involving complex police
operations; an analysis of a number of examples of print media reports about policing,
to identify typical, or characteristic, media frames; the findings from nearly 50
interviews with senior people involved in the policelmedia interface; and an
examination of changes in the milieu in which media reports about policing occur.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/218731 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Jiggins, Stephen, n/a |
| Publisher | University of Canberra. Professional Communication |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | ), Copyright Stephen Jiggins |
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