Crime content and media economics

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Concerns about sensational crime news content received increasing prominence in the 1990s, with the media blamed for its alleged key role in selling crime content to readers and viewers. This dissertation tests whether journalists act on the commonly held assumption that newspaper crime content increases circulation in four different periods of intensified competition in Toronto and Vancouver from 1950--2000. These events, which span an old-fashioned newspaper war in mid twentieth-century Toronto to the last newspaper war of the century with the launch of the National Post in 1998, mark major competitive periods in Canadian media history. My findings indicate that the link between sensational crime content and selling newspapers is tenuous at best. That is, the nature and amount of newspaper crime content during these periods had more to do with the masculinist cast to crime news making norms and practices than the economic structure of the media environment of the period. Finally, my study suggests that the effects of media competition on crime content are more complex than previously acknowledged in the criminological and media studies literatures, such that competition does not invariably lead to more crime news or even to more spectacular crime coverage.

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