Media reporting on miscarriages of justice in England and Wales fundamentally changed after the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission resulting in a decline in coverage, a reduction in investigative journalism and a radically altered usage of the term “miscarriage of justice”.

Abstract

This study explores how the media’s approach to miscarriages of justice changed after the creation of the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) in 1997. As a piece of research, it seeks to analyse the relationship between journalism and the appeal system. Miscarriages of justice in the UK are intrinsically linked in the minds of the public with investigative journalism. This is because of the successful campaigns run by journalists in the 1980s and 1990s that uncovered shocking examples of injustice. The appeal system before 1997 was structured in such a way that the voice of the press was amplified and its influence augmented. The exposure of miscarriages such as the Bridgewater Four, Birmingham Six and Guildford Four fundamentally challenged the legitimacy of the criminal justice system. The response of the government was to create an independent organization to investigate possible miscarriages of justice. This broke the structural relationship between politics, the press and the law because the CCRC had a statutory obligation to be neutral and was therefore beyond influence (including press campaigns). The research is informed by systems theory and uses a varied methodical approach to analyse the changing media discourse on miscarriages of justice. Content analysis of newspaper reporting of the courts showed that the disengagement by the media was resulting in thousands of cases going unreported. Interviews with key figures such as Lord Runciman and Professor Michael Zander were used to understand the relationship between the media and the institutional response to the crisis in the appeal system. Content analysis was carried out on national newspapers between 1992 – 2007 to illustrate how the level of reporting on miscarriages of justice fell sharply after the creation of the CCRC. These findings were then examined using critical discourse analysis (CDA) in order to identify the shifting discourse that lay behind the decline in coverage. The findings highlighted how the meaning of the term “miscarriage of justice” had fundamentally changed since 1997. Miscarriages are now more readily associated – at least in the right wing press – with the unpunished guilty rather than the punished innocent. The thesis indicates that the decline in coverage has two main impacts: firstly, individual cases no longer enjoy the support and investigative power of journalists and secondly, because journalists are no longer engaged in the appeal system the pace of reform has slowed dramatically.

Date of Award	18 Jul 2018
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Winchester
Supervisor	Alan Grattan (Supervisor) & Jill Dealey (Supervisor)