Investigating the crisis of the present

Abstract

As we begin Crime, Media, Culture’s fourth volume, the need for serious and sustained scholarly engagement with the intersections of crime, media and culture has never been greater. Around the world, genocidal criminality competes with global warming and a Spice Girls reunion for media attention. The United States gears up for a presidential election sure to be decided by distorted images of terrorism, gender, and crime. The Guardian declares that, with some 138 journalists now killed, Iraq has become a war ‘no longer . . . accessible to public scrutiny or to democratic engagement’, and so evidences ‘the end of the media as a major actor in war’ (Bunting, 2007: 17). In the heartland of the United States, a distraught young man murders eight people at a mega-shopping mall and then kills himself, all in the hope that ‘now I’ll be famous’. Meanwhile, a little girl goes missing – and the media are mobilized. Madeleine McCann’s disappearance in Portugal has generated a torrent of international media coverage – coverage that may in fact be ushering in a dangerous extension in the hyper-mediatization of crime and control. Images of Madeleine are ubiquitous, and can be spotted not only in the media, but in airports and other public venues around the world. Two points arising from this story are worth briefl y dwelling on here. First, in November 2007, charities released fi gures indicating that more than 600 children have been missing in the UK for as long as Madeleine McCann, and are still unaccounted for (Woolf, 2007). Among them, dozens have disappeared from local authority care, and many more have been identifi ed by police and immigration offi cers as traffi cking victims: 40 are considered to be at particularly ‘high risk’ of harm. Many of these children have no parents to launch an appeal and few have achieved any kind of media visibility. None has attracted the levels of attention devoted to the McCann case. Secondly, the intensity and relentlessness of the media focus on the McCanns becomes all the more interesting when we consider the dearth of verifi able facts in the case. Indeed, all we ‘know’ at the time of writing is that a little girl has gone missing. No body has been found, no clear information regarding Madeleine’s whereabouts has been uncovered, and no one has been offi cially charged with an offence. Yet Madeleine’s parents – Kate and Gerry McCann – have been subjected to nothing short