Criminal trials in black and white: Exploring meaning making about defendants and criminal trials in newspaper court reporting narratives in New South Wales

Abstract

This study investigates the construction of newspaper court reports as an act of ‘meaning making’. Through a qualitative analysis, it seeks to develop a better understanding of how the criminal trial and defendants are represented and how meanings are embedded and advanced through newspaper court reports. Distinct from the question of what is reported about criminal proceedings, my aim is to generate insights into how the myriad contestations that occur within and surrounding criminal trials are negotiated in the construction of a newspaper court report and to theorise the possible implications of the meanings produced through those processes of construction. I conceptualise newspaper court reports as narratives and use a combination of functionalist narratology and cultural criminology to expose the barely visible and highly sophisticated ways in which narrative techniques respond to the plurality of stories that comprise a criminal trial. Focusing on seven case studies representing the defendants in five criminal trials heard in New South Wales between 1893 and 2016, I demonstrate how narrative techniques perpetuate the use of gendered expectations and idealised identities to amplify the deviance of defendants in increasingly complex ways. My analysis does not seek to draw determinative conclusions about what is communicated through newspaper court reports, but rather to understand how processes of narrative construction and meaning making operate together to create, recreate, strengthen or weaken some meanings and not others. This study makes an original contribution to knowledge that expands upon the existing literature regarding mediated representations of defendants and situates the analysis of their construction against the competing imperatives of fair trial rights and news values. The findings generate insights into the relationship between how newspaper court reporting narratives are constructed, and how meanings about cultural products such as crime and justice are negotiated and reinforced.