"Another case of Ruthless Robbery…" Violence, Crime and the Local Press in a provincial City of Greece

This paper’s basic hypothesis is that the press, through the presentation of criminal incidents, transmits an evaluative knowledge determining this way, desirable objectives and propagating for canonistic types of behaviour. The daily knowledge as a constitutive element of the daily reality is a condition of interaction between the members of a society. In that sense, the local press that transmits this daily knowledge constitutes a dominant structuring factor of this reality.
The research which is based on content analysis of newspaper articles of the whole local press of Mytilene (the capital of the prefecture of Lesbos in Greece) published between January – March 2004 and additional interviews from journalists aims to illustrate the following:
a. The concept of criminality is being constructed both qualitatively and quantitatively through local press and not vice versa.
b. The local press evaluates negatively illegal behaviours, positively the austerisation of social control, while in most cases it cancels any relevance with the social frame of criminality.
c. The local press with the dramatic narrations that uses it causes fear of victimisation.
d. The journalists transmit evaluative knowledge in an attempt to cover the lack of knowledge of real criminological data.