11 minute read
The Media and America’s Fascination with Crime
By Mark J. Phillips and Aryn Z. Phillips
Americans are addicted to violent crime. Not to committing it, particularly—notwithstanding a history of nineteenth-century gunslingers, twentieth-century gangsters, and the wide prevalence of handguns, which outnumber citizens. Rather, Americans love to talk about crime, to read about it, relive it, and revel in it.
In some respects, Americans, like citizens of all ages and nations, are simply drawn to bloodshed by their nature. When Vespasian constructed the Coliseum in Imperial Rome nearly two thousand years ago, an arena intended purposely for the staging of blood sports, he built a structure designed for as many as 50,000 spectators. The Coliseum hosted gladiatorial contests of warrior pairs, even entire groups of warriors. Residents of Rome came to witness the slaughter of armed combatants, unarmed prisoners, wild animals of every stripe and feature, even elaborately staged executions of prisoners killed in various gruesome but mythologically authentic ways, such as being mauled by beasts or burned to death. On occasion, the exits were stopped up, and the Coliseum was flooded for naval battles.
Over time, gladiatorial exhibitions have given way to medieval jousts, to public burnings at the stake, to stocks and pillories, and to the guillotine. Between 1792 and 1794, thousands of Frenchmen went to their public deaths at the Place de la Revolution in Paris, now the Place de la Concorde, victims of a revolution gone mad. Dangerous as Paris was in those years, the Place overflowed with spectators. Vendors sold programs listing the daily victims; women sat knitting, and children variously cried and cheered.
While it is increasingly evident that the modern fascination for violent crime in American culture is slaked by the media, that influence itself is not modern. Sensationalized stories of crime in print date back at least to the eighteenth century with England’s Newgate Calendar. Subtitled the Malefactors’ Bloody Register, it was a monthly collection of executions at London’s Newgate Prison, complete with lurid and highly inaccurate descriptions of the criminals and their murderous acts, illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings of stabbings, shootings, and poisonings. By 1774, the Calendar was published in bound volumes and commonly found in English homes for at least the next century.
The Calendar crossed the Atlantic as the American Bloody Register, which collected and published accounts of America’s misdeeds until the 1860s, when such tales were picked up and published in novel form by brothers Erastus and Erwin Beadle. These were sold for ten cents and became known, of course, as “dime novels,” instantly popular and avidly consumed by young, working-class readers, reflecting a boom in literacy following the Civil War. Scandalous and excessive, the Beadles’ dime novels and similar outpourings by numerous competitors became a mainstay of American literature and culture for the second half of the nineteenth century. By 1900, advances in printing and cheap pulp paper, coupled with increased demand for these stories, caused the novels to evolve into serialized magazines, beginning in 1896 with Frank Munsey’s Argosy, followed by Street & Smith’s Popular Magazine in 1903. As the pulps transitioned to fiction, reporting of true crime was picked up by the nation’s newspapers.
In 1880 there were 850 newspapers published in America with a total daily newspaper circulation of 3,100,00. By 1900, the number of newspapers had increased to 1,967 and circulation to 15,100,000. And by 1910, the number of newspapers had increased to 2,200 and circulation to 22,400,000. Over a span of only thirty years, circulation had increased seven-fold.
Much of that explosive growth in newspaper readership can be traced to the sensational “yellow journalism” of ambitious publishers such as William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. In 1887, Hearst, the Harvard-educated son of wealthy mining magnate and U.S. senator George Hearst, took over his father’s San Francisco Examiner. Hiring the most-talented writers of the age, and showing little regard for truth or balance in reporting, he built an empire of newspapers across the country that informed, shaped, influenced, and entertained the public.
Pulitzer, by contrast, was an impoverished Hungarian immigrant, who through hard work and a flair for reporting turned the failing New York World of the 1880s into the spokesperson for the working-class readers in the East. The World was filled with advertising, illustrations, and entertaining news, and was soon in a circulation war with Hearst’s New York Journal.
And newspaper circulation required grist for the mill. Sales depended upon lurid headlines and articles that caught the reader’s eye and caused him or her to reach into a pocket or purse for change. As any watcher of nightly news knows, local violent crime and attendant trials lead the newscast, followed only distantly by sports, traffic, weather, and the political events of a wide world forever teetering on the edge of famine, war, and mutually assured destruction. But real trials bring these dramas to greater life, and Americans revel in them when they contain additional intrigue or a twist: love, money, celebrity, sex, race, betrayal, or scandal. Each trial becomes theatre, with the courtroom as stage, the participants as actors, and enraptured Americans as audience.
At the 1906 trial of Harry Thaw for the murder of New York architect and socialite Stanford White, news reporters swamped the courtroom and crowds of spectators daily impeded access to the courthouse. The twentieth century was only six years old, and no one could have predicted the coming media frenzy that would surround the trial of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the Tate/LaBianca killings, or the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. And yet the trial of Harry K. Thaw for White’s murder was promptly and confidently pronounced in newspapers to be the trial of the century.
By the end of the 1913 trial in Atlanta of Jewish factory manager Leo Frank for the murder of thirteen-year-old factory worker Mary Phagan, the judge, attorneys and witnesses knew he was likely not guilty. But by then the local newspapers, the Constitution, Hearst’s Georgian, and particularly the populist Jeffersonian, had whipped the populace into a frenzy of antisemitism. By the time the jury began deliberations on the afternoon of August 25th, a crowd of 5,000 prowled the streets outside. Calls to lynch Frank could be heard through the open windows. In the air of hostility against the defendant, Judge Leonard Roan and the attorneys agreed that Frank and his lead attorneys should not be present when the verdict was read, as their safety could not be assured. The jurors took just four hours to come back with a verdict of guilty. The press condemnation of Frank continued unrelenting, and when his sentence was commuted by Governor Slaton two years later, a posse of prominent Atlanta citizens broke Frank out of Milledgeville prison and lynched him in nearby Marietta, one of the few white men ever lynched in America.
Reporters will swamp the proceedings at a high profile trial. At the 1925 trial of John Scopes for teaching evolution in a Tennessee school, proceedings had to be moved outdoors because the sheer number of those attending threatened the actual physical stability of the courthouse. Thereafter, five thousand observers watched from makeshift bleachers, and partisan banners hung in full view of the jurors. Conviction unsurprisingly followed in an environment of a Bible revival meeting. At the 1934 trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh’s baby, the reporters numbered 350, and the world came to witness what H.L. Mencken called “the greatest story since the Resurrection.” And in the 1954 trial of Sam Sheppard for the murder of his wife, Marilyn, reporters inundated the trial, occupying every inch of the courtroom, sitting mere feet from the jury, listening in on the private conversations of lawyers, and handling the evidence. And in 1992, when news reports hit the Los Angeles streets of the acquittal of four police officers on state charges for the beating of Rodney King, so did protestors. In the subsequent riots fifty-three people died, and more than three thousand buildings were torched, assuring the officers’ conviction in their subsequent federal trial. The result of unrestrained media coverage is a justice system trajectory pushed from its necessary arc of fairness.
In 1995, O.J. Simpson was tried for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, and the trial was carried live from gavel to gavel. The live broadcast of criminal trials was then, and remains today, controversial. Judges, lawyers, and witnesses cannot resist performing for a television audience, and the interests of the criminal defendant suffer. The number of objections by attorneys multiply exponentially as they perform for the cameras—in the Simpson trial an astonishing 16,000 times—and juries grow weary as trials lengthen. Measured against these disadvantages are the rights of citizens to witness a free and open courtroom dispensing justice in the manner the law requires.
On October 2, 1995, the twelve members of the O.J. Simpson jury retired to consider the evidence, but in only four hours they notified Judge Lance Ito that they had reached a verdict. The entire country came to a halt to hear the verdict the next morning. Ninety-one percent of all televisions in operation in America were turned to the coverage, only the first U.S. moon landing and the funeral of John F. Kennedy attracting a larger share of the audience. The LAPD went to full alert, arrayed against a repeat of the Rodney King riots. President Clinton was briefed on national security measures, then left the Oval Office to watch with staffers, one of an estimated 140,000,000 Americans tuned in. Larry King, host of CNN’s Larry King Live, told his viewers “If we had God booked, and O.J. was available, we’d move God.”
Of course the Founding Fathers understood the necessity of a free press, and the First Amendment assures Americans among other rights the presence of independent inquiry into the operation of the government and its component parts. Without a curious press free of influence, courts cannot be relied upon to operate in a fair and even-handed manner. Thus, the public press is essential in keeping the judicial branch open and honest. Our forefathers had experience with dependent courts of an autocratic government and knew that democracy would not thrive in the vacuum of a society without a public press.
But an unrestrained press driven to sell newspapers and radio and television ads will inevitably intrude on courts not equipped to insulate themselves from excess. Unrestrained, the press will threaten and cajole investigators, influence the courtroom behavior and tactics of lawyers and judges, and frighten jurors. Unrestrained, the press will so inflame a community that the environment becomes toxic, inhospitable to a fair judicial process.
ENDNOTES
1 Keith Hopkins, The Colosseum: Emblem of Rome, http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/romans/colosseum_01.shtml (for coliseum capacity)(accessed April 6, 2016); Water Battles at the Colosseum, http://www.tribunesandtriumphs.org/colosseum/water-battles-at-the-colosseum.htm (for naval battles)(accessed April 6, 2016); Wild Animals at the Colosseum, http://www.tribunesandtriumphs.org/colosseum/wild-animals-at-the-colosseum.htm (for animals)(accessed April 6, 2016).
2 Marisa Linton, “The Terror in the French Revolution” (PDF). Kingston University. (for the number of victims); http://www.theguillotine.info/articles/reignofterror.php, (for vendors selling programs and spectators bringing children) (accessed April 6, 2016).
3 Facts About the Newgate Calendar, http://www.bl.uk/learning/histcitizen/21cc/crime/media1/calendar1/facts1/facts.html (for the Newgate Calendar)(accessed April 6, 2016); Catherine Curzon, The Newgate Calendar, or, Malefactor’s Bloody Register, http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.com/2014/09/the-newgate-calendar-or-malefactors.html (for Malefactors’ Bloody Register)(accessed April 6, 2016).
4 Paper for the People, Dime Novels and Early Mass Market Publishing, https://exhibits.library.villanova.edu/dime-novels/the-basics (for Beadle, dime novels)(accessed April 6, 2016); Dime Novel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dime_novel(accessed April 6, 2016); David E. Sumner, The Magazine Century: American Magazines Since 1900, p. 23. Peter Lang Publishing, Inc. (for Argosy magazine)(accessed April 6, 2016).
5 Newspaper Circulation Figures 1880 – 1910, Coursehero.com, https://www.coursehero.com/file/p5rnbr/Newspaper-Circulation-Figures-1880-1910-1880-850-pubs-circ-31-mill1900-1967/(accessed April 6, 2016).
6 Douglas O. Linder, State v. John Scopes (“The Monkey Trial”), http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/evolut.htm (accessed April 6, 2016).
7 Jim Crogan, The LA 53, http://www.lafire.com/famous_fires/1992-0429_LA-Riots/LAWEEKLY-2002-0426/2002-0426_laweekly_The LA 53_Crogan.htm (for number of deaths)(accessed April 6, 2016); Robert Reinhold, “Riots in Los Angeles: The Overview; Cleanup Begins in Los Angeles; Troops Enforce Surreal Calm” New York Times, May 3, 1992 (for buildings burned).
