Negotiating the Discursive Construction of Evil, Innocence, and Justice: A Typology of True Crime Media

• In Event: 30868 - Digital Communities, Cultural Narratives, and Social Trust

Abstract

The entertainment true crime genre has fascinated American audiences for decades, as the 1940s and 1950s saw the success of True Detective magazine, Truman Capote ushered in the modern true crime era with In Cold Blood (1965) and, Sarah Koenig’s wildly influential Serial (2014) defined the medium of the podcast. Over time, the genre has been continuously revived and reinvented through various media forms, remaining overwhelmingly (though not universally) focused on sensationalized murder narratives. Simultaneously, though, the genre has evolved to reflect shifts in broader socio-historical contexts, changes in the media environment, and powerful discursive regimes reflecting social understandings of criminal justice. This is reflected in the use of varied generic discursive framing strategies, through which broader conceptualizations of crime/criminality, victimization, and institutions of justice are presented and negotiated. Examining these mediated frames through the lenses of media sociology and critical criminology, this project aims to illuminate the discursive significance of true crime media, focusing on the cultural role these frames play in public understandings, negotiations, and constructions of criminality, victimization, and justice.
Drawing on grounded textual analysis, this paper categorizes true crime media into three overarching generic/narrative types, associated with variable framing strategies: criminal-centric stories (largely adopting the monster-celebrity frame), victim-centric stories (largely adopting the ideal victim frame), and process-driven stories (including the investigator-memoir frame, the heroic criminal justice system (CJS) frame, and the skeptical/critical criminal justice system (CJS) frame). This paper then explores the discursive significance of these generic media, positioning various exemplars within their broader discursive environment. In further theorizing these media and their cultural framing strategies, this project ultimately interrogates the ways in which this popular entertainment genre provides unique opportunities for audiences to negotiate social understandings of criminality, victimization, and justice.

Author

• Sarah Johnson-Palomaki, Montana State University