Homicide and media: ‘realities’ and ‘representations’
Homicide and media: ‘realities’ and ‘representations’
This chapter considers existing criminological insights into homicide and identifies the key themes and perspectives that emerge at the intersection of homicide and mainstream media. We might think of perpetrators like Derek Medina, Randy Janzen and Amanda Taylor as aberrations who are fundamentally different from the rest of us, or make sense of their social media posts in relation to the crimes they committed as simply another manifestation of their transgression. However, all three individuals have lived out their lives in the same world as us. Before they were killers — and indeed afterwards — they were ‘prosumers’ of mediated representations of homicide, as we all are. The chapter first addresses questions of definition, scale and nature before examining how the field of criminology has made sense of homicide in media in terms of what emerges as important and what is missing from such analyses.
Keywords: homicide, media, Derek Medina, Randy Janzen, Amanda Taylor, social media, criminology
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