New Perspectives and New Informants: 1914–1939

Abstract

The interest of professional journalists in pre-trial investigations was fundamental to the construction of a new set of relationships within the broad area of providing crime intelligence. Increasingly crime reportage was to be characterised by conflicting standards of behaviour and ideas of responsibility towards the community in shaping and presenting its subject matter for consumption. The involvement of lawyers in crime reportage during the nineteenth century had been encouraged by the belief that this ensured that coverage of a case would not breach safe limits. A first generation of professional journalists reporting from the courts worked with legal professionals and largely observed those same conventions. But those restraints and practices did not survive the war and the final withdrawal of legal professionals from active involvement in crime reportage. As a result, the interwar years were characterised by tensions between journalists and their police informants, and their view of what constituted acceptable reportage, and the legal profession. Senior figures in the legal profession increasingly criticised the ways in which some members of the various police forces shared details of their investigations with journalists that would previously only have come into the public domain during the formal trial process.