Coverage of crime news in newspapers of Tamilnadu

Abstract

The study explores the issues in crime reporting, crimes that get most reported in newspapers; investigation of the sources of crime stories available to the papers; ascertaining the specific part in the layout where crime stories are located; identification of the genre of published crime stories and assessment of the editorial policy of the selected newspapers on crime. Through crime reports, people get awareness about the crime occurrence in the city and about processes regarding the criminal justice system. Basically a crime report in media includes the headline, sub headlines, message (in column), photo (color or black and white) with illustration. In this study, of four newspapers (the Hindu and Indian express from English, the Dinakaran and Dailythanthi in Tamil Tirunelveli edition) were selected for, content analysis. Newspapers were randomly selected from last six months of study. The paper attempts to do the analysis regarding placement of the crime reports whether placed prominently or not, space allotted to the report, frequency of crimes, rank of papers in crime report etc. Second part of the paper attempts to analyze the stories related to the types of new crimes published in the newspapers. The findings show that violent crimes such as murder and assaults received more coverage in comparison to other categories of crimes like drugs, and property.