By Tess Bartlett - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

Changes in New Zealand mediaThe difficulties emerging in the 1990s were further highlighted by dramatic changesin the news media. Deregulation and technological change in the 1980s meant therewas a new commercial imperative. This had lasting consequences for thepresentation of news items on television. Like other Anglophone societies, there wasgrowing pressure to organise the television schedule into small saleable fragments,which meant news and current affairs items were condensed (Atkinson, 1994; Cook,2001). News items overall became shorter. Longer interviews were more likelylinked to ‘human­interest’ stories, and fast­paced, often fragmented, news items weremore likely to be ‘hard news’ such as crime and criminal justice stories (Atkinson,1994). A New Zealand study, conducted by Atkinson (1994), revealed that the lengthof news items for violent crime was one of the shortest on average in 1990 runningfor 58 seconds, while stories on politics averaged 118 seconds (Atkinson, 2002).This illustrates the lack of in­depth research needed for crime and prison stories assensational headlines sufficed.Crime visibility further increased with the introduction of New Zealand’s first paytelevision service in May 1990 (Sky Television Ltd, owned by Rupert Murdoch)(Sky Television, 2007). While terrestrial television offered only two state providedchannels in the early 1980s, suddenly, free to air networks had to compete with othertelevision broadcasters offering a much wider variety of channels. This,paradoxically, meant the choice in programme content diminished as crime newstook on a tabloid style format (McGregor, 1992). The consequences of this suddencompetition was that channels no longer provided members of the public with abalanced selection of content; instead, there was a further increase in exciting crimebasedprogrammes in the hope of gaining the widest possible audience. The increasein violent crime in the late 1980s from 833 per 100,000 of population in 1987 to 991in 1992 and 1,393 in 1995 further provided the mass media with reliable news storiesto gain public attention 15 . For example, Atkinson (2002) found that on New Zealandtelevision’s One Network News 13.8 percent of items in 1993 were crime and prison15The increase in recorded crime up until the 1990s can be attributed to changes in recordingpractices by the police, as well as fluctuations in economic cycles (for instance a study in England andWales found that economic lows and highs are associated with dishonesty and violent offencesrespectively), sociological factors such as unemployment, and demographic factors such as theincrease in the youth population (Triggs, 1997).35