Crime News Research Articles

Classification of domestic violence Persian textual content in social media based on topic modeling and ensemble learning

ObjectiveDue to the importance of monitoring social networks to categorize domestic violence content and extract practical knowledge for conducting preventive interventions, as well as analyzing the extensive Persian textual content related to domestic violence generated in social networks following the COVID-19 pandemic, primarily, this research aims to create the best domestic violence Persian textual content classification model using topic modeling content at first and then combining algorithms using ensemble learning to achieve the best model performance. MethodBy collecting Persian textual data using hashtags related to domestic violence equally and randomly from Telegram, Twitter, and Instagram networks between April 2020 and April 2023, the content were considered for topic modeling using the LDA algorithm. By extracting the probabilities of each topic for each document in our dataset, we considered the topic that had the highest probability to be a label for that document. Following feature extraction from labeled datasets, the Stacking and Voting ensemble learning methods were applied. ResultThe analysis of 337,287 textual data revealed five topics: family crime news, war violence, women's rights, and violent reactions. Also, compared to the voting method, the stacking method performed better with 96.4577 precision, 96.4499 accuracy, 96.4499 recall, and 96.4475 F-score. ConclusionAccording to the study findings, practical knowledge of the extracted topics can assist mental health centers in making preventive decisions. Moreover, the built model has the most efficient performance among the built models for the multi-class classification of DV texts in the Persian language for social media monitoring.

Exploring the effects of location information on perceptions of news credibility and sharing intention

In recent years, the integration of location-based services into social media platforms has seen a significant surge, coinciding with the growing challenges posed by the proliferation of fake news online. However, the influence of location data on readers’ perceptions of online news credibility, particularly in relation to the reporters’ whereabouts, remains unclear. To investigate this relationship, we conducted a 3 (Topics: crime, science, health) × 2 (Location anchor: event-anchored or participant-anchored) × 4 (Proximity to location anchor - no, same, close-by or faraway location) mixed-method online study (N = 288) on Prolific. Our data collection involved presenting participants with news articles and assessing their credibility assessments and sharing intentions based on the proximity of those disseminating the news to both the subject matter of the news and the audience consuming it. Our findings reveal that the proximity of the reporter’s location to the readers’ location had a noticeable adverse impact on perceptions of news credibility and the likelihood of sharing it. Furthermore, we also identified a weak positive correlation between sharing intentions and trust in social media platforms. In addition, we observed that crime news were generally perceived as less credible compared to health and science news. Our research contributes significantly to a nuanced understanding of how location-based cues impact user behaviour when interacting with online news articles. Furthermore, it provides design insights for social media platforms aiming to enhance user trust and promote pro-social behaviours.

Forensic journalism: A sistematic literature review

This article provides a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) on forensic journalism. This is a field which combines the areas of journalism and forensic investigation and plays an essential role in crime report and journalistic investigation, in connection with the legal system and advocacy of justice. The SLR considered a corpus of 90 scientific articles, from four databases: Web of Science, B-On, Communication Abstracts and Scopus. The authors demonstrate a particular interest in discussing the framing of crime news, as well as their effects on audiences. The idea that runs through is that of the relevance of quality journalism. An investment in journalism education and in the specialisation of journalists comes out as a possible path towards enhancing the quality of the news. Even though this is a well established area, “forensic journalism”, the concept itself, is yet to be widely adopted by researchers.

“The victim lived an intense life”: media (mis)representations of femicide crimes in the Republic of Cyprus

ABSTRACT International media research has recently emphasized the coverage of “partner homicides” in news media outlets with specific focus on the traits/characteristics and the forms of femicides. This led us to consider the ways in which news media outlets construct, portray, affect audiences and certain groups of individuals through the representations of such crimes. Through thematic content analysis of crime news, the purpose of this study is to determine how femicide victims are portrayed by major news media outlets in the Republic of Cyprus. The research consisted of an analysis of 366 femicide-related articles referring to 37 femicides that took place from 2006 to 2020. The data were analyzed to determine effects on newsworthiness, public perception, and patterns of victim blaming. The phenomenon of victim blaming emerged from the analysis as a recurring frame, both in a direct and indirect manner. Such blaming strategies include the usage of language with negative connotations in descriptions of the victim, such as highlighting their “promiscuous” pasts, and the attribution of “male honor”-related motives to the perpetrators, using sympathetic language to describe the perpetrator, highlighting the victim’s mental or physical problems, and so forth.

Reports on sexual violence published in an online Chinese newspaper: A new frame research.

The leading role of the media is very important in the new media era to build the reporting system and framework of sexual violence crimes, guide people's awareness and public opinion, and improve society's vigilance on sexual crimes. This study took People's Daily Online, a representative online media in China, as a research object to analyse the reporting of sexual crimes over the past 15 years. We conducted relevant searches for specific keywords set in the Python crawler and used IBM SPSS Statistics 19 software to analyse the frequency of relevant content. The results of the research show that, firstly, there have been significant changes in the number of news stories about sexual crimes. Second, the majority of sexual crime news stories are from mainland China. Third, the focus of the news stories and people is relatively concentrated on the perpetrators. Fourth, the People's Daily Online's coverage of sexual crimes focuses on blaming the perpetrators. Fifth, sexual crimes show that the framework is more episodic. This paper examines changes in the coverage of sexual crimes in China and captures how the media cover socially relevant issues, providing important insights for future social health, psychological awareness and diversion, and media policy.

Six Decades of Media Routinizing Exaggerations Concerns and Fears

ABSTRACT Comparing police crime-rates to newspaper reports for a period of over six decades this reasearch first examined crime reporting in the media. Second, it confirmed what we know: location of crime news in the paper (front page, center), reports length, tone, choice of words, gender, race or class issues. Third, it suggests a new challenging insight. Rather than have periodic, discrete crimereports, waves or moral panics, the data indicate that the media maintains inflated, consistent and continuous levels of crime reporting, thereby keeping a relative high level of concern and fear thus normalizing and routinizing these concerns and fears.

Good Guys Became Bad Guys? Changing Representations of Asians and Other Races in Crime News During COVID-19

During COVID-19, Asian Americans were perceived as a threat to the American society, which could have led to heightened media scrutiny and a shift in media portrayals. This study examines this question with a quantitative analysis of crime stories sampled from five newspapers (2019–2021). Our results suggested that large-scale social events such as COVID-19 might have transformed media representations of Asians and other racial groups, with noteworthy variability: (a) When considering all types of crimes, during the pandemic, news about lawbreaking activities by Asian perpetrators almost doubled that of before-COVID period. No significant change was uncovered in the coverage of Asian victims. (b) However, on two types of crimes—“crimes against persons” and “violent crimes”—that have more newsworthiness and social import, stories about Asian victims during the COVID-19 were higher than those of the before-COVID period. (c) When comparing media representations with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data, the percentage of Asian perpetrators and victims in newspapers did not differ from that of the FBI in 2019 and 2020; however, Asians were overrepresented as victims in 2021.

Disclosure of perpetrator origin in crime news: Changing practices in journalism after populist accusations?

If news reports on crime disclose the ethnic or national origin of suspects or perpetrators, severe consequences for audience stereotypes and public policy may arise. Thus, many professional codices advise journalists to limit origin disclosure to rare exceptions. Right-wing populists have, however, accused news media of obfuscating the ‘true dimension’ of immigrant crime. Conducting a content analysis of N = 10,943 crime reports released between 2013 and 2021 by 10 German newspapers, we investigated how journalists reacted to such attempted political influence. Findings show a massively increased frequency of news reports that included explicit or implicit cues to suspects’ or perpetrators’ origin, with a peak in 2018 and a subsequent decline in 2021. We interpret the results as a time-dependent effect of populist anti-media agitation that emerged after a large immigration wave to Germany in 2015 and 2016 but lost much of its impact a few years later, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Implications for journalism theory and ethics are discussed.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy: The Effect of Crime News Coverage on Crime Perception and Trust

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy: The Effect of Crime News Coverage on Crime Perception and Trust

Berita Kriminalitas di Kalimantan Dalam Koran Bintang Borneo Analisis Bulan Februari 1929

News about criminal acts published in newspapers or the Bintang Borneo Newspaper which focuses on the year 1929 from february to find out the content of the news and how many times the criminal acts occurred. This research uses a descriptive qualitative method with the approach used in analyzing namely using a historical analysis approach. Historycal analysis is an analysis that aims to reconstruct events that occurred in the past objectively and systematically. The primary source for this research uses archives from newspapers or newspapers, while secondary sources are obtained from books, jurnals, and websites that contain explanations about crime. After analysis, crime news in the Bintang Borneo newspaper occurred four times in a period of one months (february). The forms of criminal acts range from theft, robbery, fights, assault, to murder

Analyzing the Implementation of Press Council of Pakistan Codes: A Sociological Perspective

Mass media wield significant influence over human social, economic, and cultural realms. The formulation of media laws and ethics aims to regulate the press, with ethical codes playing a crucial role in decision-making. This study focuses on two ethical codes of the Press Council of Pakistan (PCP): unethical reporting and the projection of crime news. Employing quantitative content analysis, the research examines whether Pakistani newspapers adhere to the PCP code of ethics and the extent of unethical reporting. Two prominent Urdu dailies, Jang and Duniya, are analyzed, revealing that Duniya News publishes more news items in line with PCP ethics, while Daily Jang exhibits a higher intensity of unethical reporting, particularly in crime news. This study contributes to understanding ethical considerations in Pakistani media with its practical implementation of societal norms.

Enhancing Criminology Education with Crime News Analysis

Crime news analysis is an effective teaching tool in teaching Criminology. This study illustrates the use of crime news analysis in Criminology, and examines its effectiveness using a quasi-experimental survey. The results show that crime news analysis significantly enhances students’ interest in the subject matter, improves their learning experiences, and fosters stronger attachment to the Criminal Justice program. Incorporating crime news analysis into the curriculum facilitates understanding the causes of crime, connecting theory to practice, improving analytical and critical thinking skills, and promoting active engagement with real-world issues. The study also reveals that crime news analysis’s impact is more pronounced among criminal justice majors, freshmen, sophomores, and female students. Additionally, its effectiveness is slightly higher in face-to-face classes compared to online ones. These findings provide valuable insights into optimizing the educational merits of crime news analysis in various contexts and demographics.

Designing the Visual Gateways into Crime News: A Comparison of Youtube Thumbnails from Journalists and Non-Journalists

ABSTRACT Thumbnails and link previews play an outsized role in determining which online content is shared, seen, and engaged with. But conventions for these vary depending on the platform and the content creator. Journalists and non-journalists alike use and sometimes design these thumbnails with often striking differences. On some news aggregators, like Apple News or Google News, the bulk of the thumbnails are photographs related in some way to the linked content. Yet, on other platforms, such as YouTube, the thumbnails are often bespoke designs that allow for more storytelling freedom and potentially more ethical risk compared to camera-based images. This study, informed by visual news values, uses the context of the 2022 stabbing homicide of four University of Idaho students to systematically examine all YouTube thumbnails related to the murder suspect in the first four days after he was publicly identified. In doing so, this study is able to contribute to our understanding of the visual presentation of a crime-related topic with limited source material and is also able to shed much-needed light on how journalistic practices and conventions compare to those of non-journalists in the selection and design of image thumbnails on YouTube.

Sentiment Analysis of Foreigner Crime News Reports in Korea

Sentiment Analysis of Foreigner Crime News Reports in Korea

Accident, scandal, disaster: the media framing of corporate crime

Corporate crime is often misrepresented in crime media as individual wrongdoing with minor consequences. Despite considerable research on corporate crime in news, there has been no examination of quality media sources, upon which this paper focuses. This paper presents an exploratory study of the first week of framing corporate crime in UK-based online quality press outlets: The Guardian, The Independent, and The Telegraph. It does so by examining three major corporate crimes of the last decade: the Grenfell Tower fire, the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate (LIBOR) manipulation, and Volkswagen emissions manipulation. Methodologically, the paper is based upon an adapted version of Robert Entman’s media theory of framing by using the framing elements of perpetrator, cause of crime, victimization and punishment to explore what and how frames are being used in each outlet. It is found that even the most critical mass media outlets resort to accidental narrative frames that fail to address criminal (in-)justice. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings for an understanding of the variance in quality press outlets’ frames of corporate crime that warrants further research.

Crime News in a Loyalist Press Environment

Several laws regulate and influence reporting on crime in the United Arab Emirates, a country in which journalism functions within a Loyalist Press environment. These include elements in the 1980 press law and the recently updated penal code and cybercrimes laws. This legislation can secure the confidentiality of police investigations, protect privacy, and prevent the spread of false information, but it can also hinder timely reporting and the dissemination of important facts. Viewed through the Social Responsibility theory of the press, its effects include preventing fulfillment of the media requirement of full access to current information. Additionally, factors such as an official emphasis on “happiness” may influence news coverage.

Analysis of the Insertion Process in Crime News Theo Van Leeuwen's Critical Discourse Analysis Study

This study aims to analyze the use of Leeuwen's inclusion theory in crime news with the theme of murder in the Online Tribun News.Com news. Data collection was carried out in three stages (1) reading and understanding the discourse on the theme of murder in the news Online Tribun News.Com with the aim of obtaining a clear understanding of the contents of the discourse to be studied, (2) marking parts of the discourse related to the theory of inclusion. Leeuwen, and (3) record sentences in discourse related to Leeuwen's inclusive theory by using a data recording format. Data analysis was carried out descriptively. Based on the results of the study it can be concluded, Leeuwen's inclusioan theory found in ten criminal news headlines with the theme of murder in the Online Tribun News.Com news is five of the seven existing theories, namely objectivity-abstraction, nomination-categorization, nomination-identification, assimilation individualization and associations-dissociations. So, it can be concluded that writing criminal news with the theme of killing journalists does not marginalize victims. In making news headlines, journalists still hide actors. Concealment of actors by journalists is done by using passive sentences in news headlines.

“Kids or demons?”: Personal referring expressions applied to juvenile offenders in English and Chinese crime news

This study reports on a contrastive study of media representations of juvenile delinquency. Based on 87 news reports, we draw on Ariel (1991) and Xu (2000)'s accessibility hierarchy to compare the forms and functions of personal referring expressions applied to juvenile offenders in English and Chinese crime news. In addition, we extend our analysis by incorporating the discussions of the evaluative meaning of nominal descriptions under the social actor representation framework of Van Leeuwen (2008). It is found that both English and Chinese data exhibit a preference for nominal description foregrounding offenders' age in the first mentions. However, in the subsequent mentions, the key differences identified are that English news has more frequent use of definite descriptions, distal demonstratives, pronouns and functional terms, whereas Chinese news has a greater incidence of surnames, proximal demonstratives, zeros and identification terms. The discussion attempts to provide possible explanations for our findings from three aspects: linguistic features, socio-cultural conventions and social justice systems in different countries. Building upon these discussions, this study may shed empirical light on the issue of referring to juvenile offenders in mass media between two disparate languages, raising media's awareness of the mediatized language of crime.

Trends in U.S. Mass Shootings: Facts, Fears and Fatalities

Although representing a rather small percentage of gun deaths in the United States, mass shootings receive a disproportionate share of crime news coverage, with the fears of countless Americans at a level well above the actual risk. This article attempts to clarify some of the wide-ranging confusion regarding what exactly is a mass shooting, how often they occur, and whether they have been on the rise over the past several years. After discussion of some methodological issues associated with measuring prevalence, trends exhibited in several reliable data sources on mass shooting are presented. The article concludes with a brief discussion of contagion and whether it is reasonable to expect that the recent spike in mass shootings will persist.

A study of " Bei-sentence" in crime news headlines in the new media context

New media play an important role in news communication, and in order to attract readers' attention, they often use quilt sentences in crime news headlines frequently, and such usage has triggered extensive discussions. In the context of linguistics, a combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis is used to study the structural features, semantic features and predicate components of the Bei-sentence in crime news headlines, which can explore the use of the Bei-sentence and related linguistic features in crime news headlines in the new media context. In addition, the linguistic features and functions of the Bei-sentence have a significant impact on the meaning expression and readers' emotion of the headlines. The improper use of new media language may cause secondary harm to victims and also undermine the justice of social news. The new research perspective of combining social phenomena with linguistic theories helps to deeply understand the characteristics of crime news headlines in the new media context and helps to improve readers' media literacy.