Text-Content
„Outside of The Times and the Morning Star, a common pattern of feature treatment emerged. Essential background elements – universally those of victim, mugger and area – were selected, individually explored, and set against each other. It is the specific journalistic feature form which provides the mechanism of balance; the final weighing is not arrived at by a process of argument or analysis but is built into the feature form as it is initially constructed. Thus one strategy used by more than one newspaper was to juxtapose (either within the same feature article or in the same paper in a ‘feature spread’) a number of ways of interpreting the connection between crime and environment, biography and background. This way of balancing off a number of different readings is a sort of feature by montage effect and was most obvious in the case of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail. In the Express the ‘balance’ was set out on the double-page – on the left Handsworth and the mugger, on the right the suffering victim, the liberal judge unusually incensed, and a highly flattering portrait of the local police (pre-empting more critical versions of police policy towards immigrant groups such as those appearing in the Star and the Guardian). Although the whole feature had a severely deterministic headline –‘Caught for Life in a Violent Trap’ – we have seen how the Handsworth/mugger side of the equation had been so undermined by particular images of the race–crime connection that the overall effect was to cut away the grounds of the argument it otherwise contained. Balance here was represented typographically but the ideological weight was tilted to one side.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 105) #Montage;„Outside of The Times and the Morning Star, a common pattern of feature treatment emerged. Essential background elements – universally those of victim, mugger and area – were selected, individually explored, and set against each other. It is the specific journalistic feature form which provides the mechanism of balance; the final weighing is not arrived at by a process of argument or analysis but is built into the feature form as it is initially constructed. Thus one strategy used by more than one newspaper was to juxtapose (either within the same feature article or in the same paper in a ‘feature spread’) a number of ways of interpreting the connection between crime and environment, biography and background. This way of balancing off a number of different readings is a sort of feature by montage effect and was most obvious in the case of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail. In the Express the ‘balance’ was set out on the double-page – on the left Handsworth and the mugger, on the right the suffering victim, the liberal judge unusually incensed, and a highly flattering portrait of the local police (pre-empting more critical versions of police policy towards immigrant groups such as those appearing in the Star and the Guardian). Although the whole feature had a severely deterministic headline –‘Caught for Life in a Violent Trap’ – we have seen how the Handsworth/mugger side of the equation had been so undermined by particular images of the race–crime connection that the overall effect was to cut away the grounds of the argument it otherwise contained. Balance here was represented typographically but the ideological weight was tilted to one side.“ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 105) #Montage