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doi:10.1093/bjc/azl079 BRIT. J. CRIMINOL.

(2006) 46, 1037–1057


Advance Access publication 13 October 2006

THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL


WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

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M IC HA EL L E VI *

Crimes of deception are treated by the mass media as extensions of ‘infotainment’, such as individual
and corporate celebrities in trouble; ‘normal’ people turning to fraud because of drugs, gambling or
sex; readily visualizable and often short fraud events (like ‘identity fraud’ or ‘card skimming’)
connected to ‘organized crime’ or ‘terrorism’; or long-term concealment of fraud that shows the
‘Establishment’ to be incompetent or business people/politicians to be hypocrites. These populist
themes, prosecutions and regulatory actions, active non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and
lobbyists, media technology and libel risks influence what business activities get labelled as ‘fraud’
or ‘corruption’. However, the growing specialist business and technology press and electronic media
report worldwide less sensational cases involving reputational damage, business prospects and
technological vulnerability, and these affect business people (if not the general public) in ways that
may be neglected by traditional media and crime studies.

Introduction and Theoretical Background


Reiner (2007) suggests that media and crime analysts examine three interrelated issues
that have been the primary foci of research: the content, consequences and causes of media
representations of crime. He argues that these are phases of an intertwined process
that can only be separated artificially: texts, audiences and authors are interdependent,
and their separation is only a presentational device. This will be the starting point of
this essay, which aims to redress some of the gaps in the analysis of crimes of deception
by and against business which have received very modest attention in the burgeoning
literature on crime and the media. This will be a broad-ranging review of some key
issues rather than the focused exploration of a hypothesis, though one conventional
leitmotif—whether the media are biased against reporting white-collar crimes because
they are owned by business people (Sutherland 1983, originally 1939)—will be examined
and found wanting. Rather, an attempt will be made to piece together and to account
for the complex strands of what goes into the reporting of financial crime stories.
In essence, the argument here is that white-collar and other financial crimes of
deception are treated by the mass media as extensions of ‘infotainment’. They typically
focus on issues like individual and corporate celebrities in trouble; a drugs, gambling
or sex craze taking otherwise successful people off the rails; readily visualizable and
often quite short fraud events (like credit-card skimming), preferably connected to
‘organized crime’ or ‘terrorism’; or long-term concealment of fraud that shows up the
business and/or regulatory/criminal justice ‘Establishment’ to be incompetent or the
offenders to be hypocrites. The growing specialist business and technology press and
electronic media may be interested in those aspects too, but they are also interested in
reputational damage, business prospects and technological vulnerability, so cases that

* Professor of Criminology, Cardiff School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Wales, UK; Levi@Cardiff.ac.uk

1037
© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD).
All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
LEVI

lack sensationalism may still be reported upon in settings that are salient both to poten-
tial victims (for fraud prevention) and to respectable potential offenders as well as to
offenders themselves, who may wish to mitigate their social and commercial damage
from exposure. The mass media may be relevant both to victims (to avoid being

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blamed for carelessness or worse) and to defendants of all social groups facing trial
before ordinary jurors; but mass media are less salient for elite individuals and busi-
nesses with ongoing commercial prospects, who may be more worried about the cover-
age in the business press (Levi 2002). However, given the rise in global electronic news
coverage, these media markets are far from being hermetically sealed.
The underlying empirical basis for this analysis is interviews with leading British and
American print and television journalists who have been involved in producing major
white-collar crime stories (not all of them used); analysis of fraud stories in major
British, American and Australian newspapers (both broadsheet and tabloid, in the case of
the United Kingdom); television news and, especially, consumer and documentary pro-
grammes on radio and television; and inferences from newsprint, radio and television
events over the past 20 years in which this author has been a participant as ‘expert com-
mentator’, including those not used by the media. There is no space here for any detailed
content analysis or elaborated case studies (for which, see Levi forthcoming) and readers
will have to look elsewhere for more general literature on media and crime (see, e.g.
Ericson 1991; Jewkes 2004; Greer 2005; Mason 2003; Reiner 2007). However, some key
themes in media treatment of financial fraud are developed and their limitations set out.
Why is white-collar crime coverage in the media important? First, because the media
shape crime discourses and may well influence public perceptions of harmfulness and
of what ‘the law and order problem’ consists of, with consequent effects on:
• enforcement resources (including policing powers);
• the decision making of juries and other tribunals;
• the occupational opportunities and profits of those sanctioned and even for those
who, like most employees of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International
(BCCI), Banco Ambrosiano, Enron and Parmalat,1 were never charged with or disci-
plined for anything but who may be stigmatized by association (like coming from a
‘criminal area’).
Second, because knowledge of the effects of the media may encourage us to re-think
justice policy, such as in relation to pre-trial controls over publicity or jury selection.
(There is, however, a difficulty here: knowing and dealing with the prejudices of some
jurors may lead to the selecting out of the most prejudiced, but replacing jurors by
judges whose prejudices we would not be allowed to examine if they existed is an
uncertain benefit, whatever our views on then Prime Minister Berlusconi’s allegations
that Italian judges are systematically biased against him.) However, pre-trial publicity
controls can have the effect of stifling public awareness of fraud risks, make it easier for
prosecutors and regulators to drop action against well connected people and firms,
and reduce the reputational damage that is part of the deterrence of white-collar
crimes, especially since, in lengthy cases, the time (a) from events to their detection as
confirmed fraud, and (b) even from police investigation to conviction may last several
years.

1
Parmalat supplied dairy products and employed people in many developed and developing countries.

1038
THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

And finally, media crime research is important because it can illuminate the politics
of representation of some social groups and try to account for this. Here, we should
note that though uncoupling from the problematic term ‘white-collar crime’, the cate-
gory of ‘crimes of deception’ as a whole conceals many victim–offender prestige differ-

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entials, and both the social backgrounds of offenders and the economic interests
harmed by frauds and other ‘economic crimes’ vary widely. Weisburd et al. (1991)
noted that most fraud offenders before the US Federal courts were closer to blue than
to white collar in status. Thus, it makes a difference whether media are reporting on
blue-collar ‘criminal types’ defrauding their criminal friends or bankers; on East Euro-
pean ‘oligarchs’ running banks and laundering money and/or defrauding depositors;
or on elite bankers defrauding either their peers or ordinary depositors, some of whom
are poor. In short, a narrow focus on either offender or victim status alone is an inade-
quate framework within which to examine allegations of social bias. Furthermore, it is
very far from certain what the base rate is against which such bias should be judged: a
statistically valid representation of cases brought to court, unweighted by economic
and social impact (in which case, the media would be very dull)? Or of commercial mis-
conduct, whether reported to the authorities or not (though victimization surveys have
failed to examine this satisfactorily to date, and the social background of many offend-
ers may not be known)? Despite some progress in particular sectors, we do not yet have
a satisfactory empirical basis for bias analysis.
Even if there were bias, as seems likely, it might reflect media preference for juxtapo-
sitions of ‘the unusual’ as ‘infotainment’ rather than protect elites from public resent-
ment. An example of this preference is the treatment of Nick ‘Rogue Trader’ Leeson’s
£830 million fraud that led to the collapse of Barings Bank. Lower-middle-class Leeson
himself—described after sentence as ‘The last oik of the British Empire’ (The Independ-
ent, 4 December 1995)—and his telegenic ‘girl next door’ wife (later divorced) formed
a huge contrast with the nobility who dominated the directors and clients of Barings.
His trademark reversed baseball cap at the time of his arrest became an iconic picture
in all media.
Reiner’s (2007) review makes it clear that crime issues (including those relating to
victims) loom large in media coverage, and they serve a variety of dramaturgical pur-
poses. Jewkes (2004; see also Levi 2001) has noted that the dramaturgy is extended in
media treatment of cybercrimes: if anything, the fact that 17-year-old school kids can
hack into the Pentagon or potentially disrupt air traffic control is part of the alarm
about loss of adult control that cyber crimes evoke. More generally, people—whether
citizens or journalists acting as their proxies—plausibly react to stories about organised
criminals stealing our identities to commit credit-card fraud quite differently from the
way they would react to:
• stock analysts who advise their clients to buy securities that a different part of their
bank is being paid to promote (even when their emails show that they personally
judge that the securities are overvalued); or
• fabulously well paid company directors who (usually after taking professional advice
asserting that this is not illegal) backdate the beginning of their employment so that
their share options gain in value more than they otherwise would (or properly
should), or who charge expensive refurbishments of their homes and extravagant
entertainments as company expenses.

1039
LEVI

It is conventional wisdom among those few criminologists and media sociologists who
have paid any attention to fraud (and corporate crimes generally) that they are
neglected by the print and electronic media. To illustrate, neither fraud nor white-
collar crime was indexed by Ericson et al. (1987; 1989; 1991), despite their extensive

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and thoughtful elaboration of the influence of the private sector on the news, perhaps
because there were very few major élite financial crime scandals in Canada during the
period of their research, which ended before the wave of prominent white-collar prose-
cutions in North America, Australia and Britain started in earnest with insider trading
cases in the United States in 1986. Like other crimes, coverage of white-collar crimes
and their control can vary over time, and it is important to incorporate this periodization
aspect in explanations.
Alleged media neglect of financial crimes (especially those crimes committed by
business) is usually attributed to the power of corporations to manage the news agenda
in their favour, whether deliberately (by economic/political pressure), more or less
unconsciously by value hegemony (McNair 1993) or as part of the routines of ‘news-
worthiness’ (Chibnall 1977; Box 1983). A wider account still gives business the power to
avoid the criminalization of ‘their’ activities by influencing law itself—see Tombs and
Whyte (2001) for the application of this to corporate crimes such as health and safety
issues and McBarnet, in this issue, for discussion of law as a permissive mechanism for
‘neutralization’. The consensus is summed up by McNair (1993: 48): ‘Journalists are
not necessarily biased towards the powerful—but their bureaucratic organization and
cultural assumptions make them conduits of that power.’

The players in financial crime news


The key players in media coverage of financial crimes are multifarious. In addition to
the bewildering array of electronic and print media—local and global, rich in
resources and poor—they include not just victims, offenders and the institutions of for-
mal governance (police, prosecutors, regulators and trials), but also third parties with
an interest in particular outcomes. The latter are constituted by business pressure
groups and trade associations; local and global corporate and cyber-security and foren-
sic accounting firms; and anti-corruption, pro-consumer and tax justice NGOs. Indus-
try lobbyists try to increase ‘awareness’ of harm, such as to try to dissuade consumers
from buying counterfeit products or to take greater safety measures (‘Don’t write down
your PIN’), and to get the police and sentencers to act against payment card fraud or
‘intellectual property piracy’. One technique is to associate the activity with ‘organized
crime’ or ‘financing terrorism’ as if, merely by being organized by a syndicate rather
than one or a small group of professional criminals or anarchic ‘pranksters’, that made
the impact much worse. Where technology can be added to gangsterdom or terrorism,
this makes ideal media copy, though there is sometimes a fight back in the specialist
computer press, who tend to be vigorously anti-authoritarian in deconstructing prose-
cution allegations and suspect the enforcement agencies of repressive paranoia. Some
sectors of civil society—such as national chapters of Transparency International and
other NGOs such as The CornerHouse (www.thecornerhouse.org.uk) and Unicorn
(www.againstcorruption.org), or pressure groups such as the US Center for Public
Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org/default.aspx) or journalistic networks such as Report-
ers without Frontiers (www.rsf.org)—actively use the media to get their anti-corruption
1040
THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

messages across and advocate tougher legislation and more action against transna-
tional and domestic bribers; the Consumers’ Association and its equivalents abroad
campaign against consumer product frauds and, more recently, frauds by financial
services firms; the Tax Justice Network and some charities campaign against tax avoid-

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ance by the super-rich and by multinationals; while some enforcement staff leak infor-
mation in order to make it more difficult for prosecutorial gatekeepers and judges to
suppress prosecutions or to acquit high-status people. United Kingdom regulatory
agencies such as Trading Standards officials and the Office of Fair Trading and their
non-UK equivalents may be under pressure to show their effectiveness, or want greater
powers to deal with ‘offenders’, perhaps administratively. In the United States, though
not in the United Kingdom, Democrat politicians such as New York Attorney General
Eliot Spitzer and Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau may see action against business
misconduct as an important part of their social mandate.2 So, publicity for some finan-
cial crimes or alleged crimes, or for the need to criminalize harms, becomes the site for
broader legislative and enforcement power and resource struggles, and personal careers.
As noted above, there are a wider range of prestigious organizations and people
involved in pressure over financial crimes than in the area of ‘normal’ crimes (Schlesinger
and Tumber 1994) and who, in the model of Hall et al. (1978) and Critcher (2003), can
act as ‘primary definers’ of the nature of criminality for the audience. We will review
here how the media deal with these components, accepting that in practice, they are
usually woven together in a composite gestalt. They are supplemented by one aspect
that is almost unique to financial crimes: a limited subset of criminal and regulatory
defendants—those prosecuted (in the case of the UK) by the Revenue & Customs Pros-
ecutions Authority and by the Serious Fraud Office (SFO)—have high social status and
the money to pay for media campaigns and sophisticated defences. They, therefore,
are better placed than most to resist their roles as shamed prison fodder.

Victims of Crimes of Deception


Reiner et al. (2003) noted the trend for victims to become the pivotal focus of news sto-
ries in the last three decades, paralleling the increasing centrality of victims in criminal
justice and criminology. This can take the form of empathy with victims and with their
fear of crime. The range of people at risk of victimization and techniques of deception
have changed significantly in that period (Shover et al. 2003; Friedrichs 2007; Levi
2007; Levi and Pithouse forthcoming), and the data are unavailable anyway to test this
on fraud victims. One of the factors democratizing and legitimizing crime control is
the view that it exists to protect the vulnerable. Yet, many victims of prosecuted frauds
(by volume and value) are wealthy individuals and corporations and, whatever the val-
ues of ‘the media’ (a generalization best avoided), their plight makes poor populist
copy unless it is extreme: a reduction in competitive prowess or in the number of
annual foreign holidays lacks sufficient edge for serious ‘newsworthiness’, though the
broadsheets may comment.

2
Spitzer’s website (www.oag.state.ny.us/bio.html) promotes his role in recovering billions of dollars from the financial services
sector for their illegal practices. ‘Again and again, Attorney General Spitzer has acted to stop fraud in the marketplace, to level the
playing field for honest businesses and to help restore confidence in the markets. As a result of these and other actions, he has won
national acclaim. He was named “Crusader of the Year” by Time magazine; the “Sheriff of Wall Street” by 60 Minutes; and “The
Enforcer” by People magazine. Reader’s Digest magazine called him America’s “Best Public Servant”.’

1041
LEVI

The controversial issue of ‘victim deserts’ and ‘victim precipitation’ is most commonly
encountered in explanations of violence, but ‘blaming the victim’ is also present in many
frauds, in the self-definitions of victims as well as in media and social group commentary
(Levi and Pithouse 1992). Deserving victims are those who did not think that they were

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not doing anything risky and/or those who took every effort to protect themselves but
were cleverly deceived. Thus, as in the representation of corporate pension fund frauds
such as Maxwell’s Mirror Group from the early 1990s onwards, or investment schemes
such as Barlow Clowes, which targeted retiring teachers and other older people with
promises that their money was ‘safe as the Bank of England’, the media embrace the ‘wid-
ows and orphans’ and assist their campaigns for redress on the basis of their legitimate
expectations (see also Robb in this issue). After a major political struggle supported by
the media, Barlow Clowes investors were compensated because of the government’s
maladministration of licensing and regulation (Le Quesne 1988; Levi and Pithouse 1992;
Lever 1992).3 Compensation claims have been the subject of major media and Parliamen-
tary campaigns for justice that had little to do with the usual ‘law and order news’ fare of
tougher policing, prosecutions or sentencing; and both pensioners and other savers who
have lost money or failed to gain money promised have received strong media and politi-
cal support for their complaints of ‘mis-selling’ (a term that is more business-friendly than
‘fraud’ but is also more likely to lead to business willingness to compensate).
In some frauds, there are multiple victims of the same scheme (running even into
hundreds of thousands, in some pyramid-selling scams). In others, such as credit-card
fraud, the card issuer acts almost like an insurer, compensating the direct victims of
crime for their financial (though not emotional) loss. In the particular case of frauds
directly or indirectly against banks, for example, there may be commentary on their
recklessness, especially in cyberfrauds or where there is ‘identity fraud’—a protean
term that may include every occasion on which someone pretends to be someone they
are not. A Google search indicates that there were 2,330 news articles worldwide men-
tioning identity fraud in the last two weeks of August 2006 alone, and a more detailed
review of identity theft and fraud articles in 2005–06 shows that both in the United
Kingdom and the United States, hacks into information held by third-party card-
processing firms attracted opprobrium for the data administrators and were treated as
major populist items in the tabloid and broadsheet press and some electronic media.
Where laptops containing personal data on thousands of US military veterans are stolen,
or CardSystems’ computer processes led to the leak of information on 40 million
credit-card customers, these arouse popular fears and are cross-media in their coverage.
The rise of specialist computer magazines has fuelled this attention (see, e.g.
www.wired.com/news/politics/privacy/0,71622–0.html?tw=wn_index_2). Analytically,
there is a major gap between objective information insecurity and the criminal exploi-
tation of that data: ChoicePoint, one of the largest data brokers in the world, in early
2005 admitted that it had released to fraudsters sensitive data on roughly 163,000 peo-
ple who signed up as customers starting in 2001. At least 800 cases of identity theft
resulted: 0.5 per cent of the ‘at risk’ population. The company paid $15 million in a
settlement with the Federal Trade Commission in 2006.

3
Campaigns for Justice are not restricted to fraud. Over 1,000 Allied Steel & Wire employees’ contributory pension funds largely
disappeared when their firm went into receivership in 2002, and failed (in July 2006) in their attempts to get the European Court
of Justice to rule that the UK government had a legal duty to protect or compensate them.

1042
THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

British television journalist, Paul Kenyon, demonstrated how easy identity theft was
when creating a photographic driving licence for himself in the name of registered
blind then Home Secretary David Blunkett (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
programmes/kenyon_confronts/2625395.stm). Though identity theft and identity

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fraud are used very loosely, there has been a longer drip of articles in mainstream
broadsheet and tabloid newspapers suggesting that people are right to be worried
about the ability of others (criminals or governments) to reconstruct them from appar-
ently trivial items, such as ‘Q. What could a boarding pass tell an identity fraudster
about you? A. Way too much’ (The Guardian, 3 May 2006, available online at
www.guardian.co.uk/airlines/story/0,,1766267,00.html). It is not surprising, therefore,
that the Home Office has had an identity-theft working party or (with strong help from
the private sector) has developed a specialist website (www.identity-theft.org.uk/) as
part of its crime (and fear) reduction strategy (see also www.cifas.org.uk/identity_
fraud.asp). So, too, has the US Federal Trade Commission (www.consumer.gov/idtheft/).
In addition to these, there have been media campaigns in the United Kingdom and
United States by financial intelligence firms such as Experian and product firms such
as Fellowes to enhance awareness of risk and purchase their shredders to reduce the
risk of ‘bin raiding’ by thieves (www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/210603/raising-con-
cern-about-identity-fraud- in-great-britain.html?keywords=mori). All of these campaigns
generate significant publicity (and, as the data show, greater shredder sales), and there
are weekly stories—many of them critical of banks4—about impersonation and identity
theft, mostly in the consumer affairs or money sections of newspapers and on con-
sumer radio and television programmes. On the other hand, for risks facing businesses,
there are many conferences but relatively few media items outside the specialist and
business press, such as Accountancy Age, The Banker, Computer Weekly, the Financial Times
and Wall Street Journal, who have business people and professionals as their target audience.

Offenders, defendants and the media


In order to create proper ‘folk devils’, one has to have truly innocent victims. One diffi-
culty for applying this construct to ‘City fraud’ is that the ‘suits’ giving evidence for the
prosecution as victims or witnesses may be hard to distinguish from those as defendants
in the dock.5 The routine cases of deception with institutional victims very seldom
receive any publicity in the tabloid media: rather like violence, all media prefer to
emphasize the polar extremes, of cases with traumatized victims and, preferably, in
combination with offenders whom they can paint as extravagant and uncaring, though
‘fall from grace’ lifestyle stories about pillars of the community will do almost as well.
Somewhere in between are stories involving (both as victims and offenders) major cor-
porate institutions with high public name recognition factors, from Guinness
(renamed Diageo afterwards partly because of the stigma associated with the case—see
Levi 1991) and Prudential to more obscure and less global brands. The most common
famous institutions to appear in the media as victims are large banks and card issuers;

4
Not untypical is a full page article headlined ‘We Take Identity Theft Seriously, But Our Banks Are Dragging their Feet’ (The
Observer, ‘Cash’ section, 3 September 2006).
5
Or not in the dock, since the specialist courts with computer screens for electronic documentation and satellite technology for
remote interrogations in the big London cases have done away with the dock; so, the accused sit with their lawyers rather than
being in a special place of stigma.

1043
LEVI

partly because of the use of discretion not to prosecute—especially where corporate


criminal conviction would lead to a loss of banking or securities licence—offenders
tend to be less universally recognized names. However, in part due to the campaigning
of NGOs, French company Elf (now part of Total), German companies Mercedes and

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Volkswagen, UK defence company BAE and US defence company Boeing have all been
‘scandalized’ and some prosecuted in the past decade for their alleged role as offenders
in mostly overseas bribery cases. Not just the left-leaning The Guardian but also pro-business
newspapers such as the Financial Times and The Economist have given substantial space to
reports on corruption, such as from The CornerHouse and Transparency International
castigating UK government and prosecution inactivity.
The media sometimes label financial crimes as ‘organized crime’, but almost exclusively
when committed by Mafia-type associations or by people with connections to the ‘under-
world’, in which case they have used terms such as ‘organised crime moving in on com-
merce’ since the 1950s (Levi 1981). Examples include VAT carousel frauds, widely covered
in broadsheet and tabloid media and on television in August 2006, prompted by UK Treas-
ury alarm at the possible £30 billion losses in 2006, which in turn energized HMRC to
mount some high-profile cross-border cases and raids accompanied by some reporters.
We should also understand white-collar crime publicity in terms of the cult of celebrity in
late modernity; thus, after some enforcement action, the media tend to focus on white-
collar individual or corporate defendants that their readers and viewers will have heard
of, such as middle-class ‘home-maker’ icon Martha Stewart, jailed in 2004 and released
in 2006 to public fascination and economic rebirth, or Lord Jeffrey Archer; Ernest
Saunders, the chief executive of Guinness, convicted in 1989 of theft; performers such
as comedian Ken Dodd, acquitted of tax evasion; and leading politicians such as
Jonathan Aitken, who was jailed for perjury in 1999 following a failed libel action.6
Sports stars are a particular focus; they include jockey Lester Piggott, jailed for tax eva-
sion; England soccer coach Terry Venables, not prosecuted but banned from acting as
a company director; and boxing promoters Frank Warren (likewise banned) and
American Don King, as well as UK soccer managers accused in 2006 of taking ‘bungs’
over transfers. Match-fixing is a particular theme that has attracted publicity, tapping
into public cynicism, as discussed by Karstedt and Farrall in this issue (yet with contin-
ued heavy spending on betting). This led to volumes of newsprint in the main and
sports sections over UK Champion Jockey Kieran Fallon, charged and banned from
racing in the United Kingdom and United States in 2006 in connection with alleged
race-fixing, and scandals in the German and, especially, Italian leagues; and the crimi-
nal and libel trials involving famous footballers such as Bruce Grobelaar. The purchase
of British Premier League soccer teams by Russian and other East European and Israeli
multimillionaires has also focused interest on their previous questionable business
activities, in both main and sports sections. The cultural obsession with entrepreneurs
has generated a host of biographies as well as news and magazine stories about people
alleged to be ‘on the fringe’ in business morality or honesty about their backgrounds:
Australia and America have their share of Alan Bond-type ‘larger than life’ characters
but in Britain, these include Mohammed Al Fayed (the owner of Harrods), Lord
6
At the press conference in 1995 at which he announced his resignation to fight a libel action against The Guardian, he hypocrit-
ically declaimed ‘If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple
sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it. I am ready for the fight. The fight against falsehood and those who
peddle it. My fight begins today’; see www.guardian.co.uk/aitken.

1044
THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

Archer, Lord Conrad Black (the former owner of the Daily Telegraph), Sir Richard
Branson (Virgin) and Robert Maxwell. However, these have had to be carefully written,
given libel risks discussed later. Although my interviews indicate some fraud news sto-
ries that have been ‘spiked’ so as not to generate hostile exchanges between newspaper

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proprietors or with other powerful people, the media are not shy of attacking their own
when they fall from grace, or, in the case of both Robert Maxwell and Lord Black, fall
from hubris. Analogies with Citizen Kane were commonplace and a favourite quote was
that Conrad Black’s trouble was that he tried to ‘live like a billionaire when he was only
a millionaire’ (The Guardian, 2 September 2004). For both business and celebrity
reasons, the prosecutions and civil lawsuits for hundreds of millions of dollars received
substantial ongoing publicity in Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom and United States,
where he formerly owned newspapers.
Some brief examples will illustrate these points. A solid ‘fall from grace’ story is ‘Collared:
The Fallen Angel of Fraud’, about a lawyer who was a pillar of the community but
borrowed money on clients’ homes in a vain attempt to make profitable a failing com-
mercial development in Australia (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 1996). A more
complex story (only partly because he was a less socially virtuous person) was ‘Fraudster
Tycoon Tumbles’ (The Guardian, 24 December 1997), about property developer Jurgen
Schneider, portrayed by the German judge as ‘an insecure person driven by a compul-
sion to impress his father with his success’, and accompanied by a photograph of the
man plainly seriously distressed by his fate (though not accompanied by any photo-
graph of the many business victims made bankrupt by his debts and deceptions). The
judge’s comments were widely publicized in Germany and led The Guardian to subtitle
its piece ‘Shaming of the Bankers’, quoting (in translation) the judge thus:
The case is a sort of picture of Germany’s society, and of German banks especially, where the rule
holds that appearances take prominence over reality. If someone wants a small bank loan, he’s strictly
controlled, but if someone wants millions and pretends to own billions, then the bankers will carry the
money to him . . . . If financing questions had been properly examined, some utter nonsense would
have become apparent.

Added populist spice was provided by the outrage of many smaller creditors, who lost
money because they assumed that any firm backed by Deutsche Bank was credit-worthy,
juxtaposing their righteous anger with an earlier statement by the former Chairman of
the bank that its losses of DM1.5 billion in this case were ‘peanuts’. So, in the Schneider
case, the bank was deemed to be a blameworthy victim but the other victims were
blameless.

Defendants’ media strategies


One of the differences between white-collar and other accused is that the elite among
them—not, of course, the plethora of swindlers of moderate social standing such as
credit-card, insurance and tax fraudsters—are used to serving as primary definers and
used to exerting control within the legitimate commercial world. How do defendants
adapt, often with advice from their lawyers and PR firms? They have to consider two
issues, which may not always be harmonious: (i) avoiding imprisonment or serious reg-
ulatory action, and (ii) reducing harm to their future business career. Thus, it depends
what stage of the process they are operating in and whether they intend to plead not
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LEVI

guilty. In the United States, efforts may be made by elites to get the authorities to proc-
ess cases administratively or civilly, or, at worst, via a ‘deferred prosecution’ (under
which they agree to major internal reforms in return for not being prosecuted); the latter
was done by KPMG in 2006 in its settlement of the tax-shelter case. Usually, if news gets

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out (sometimes because of stock-exchange rules about disclosure, sometimes because
the regulators or prosecutors want to show that they are active), they will try to stress to
the media the ambiguity in the criminal law and their personal non-culpability (see
McBarnet and Braithwaite and Braithwaite in this issue).
In a sensational British case, they may try to use the risk of prejudice against them to
pressurize the Attorney General into warning the media about Contempt of Court.
This was tried by the Maxwell brothers in the aftermath of their deceased father
Robert’s massive frauds against company pensioners and banks. On 14 January 1992,
the Select Committee on Social Security (which had responsibility for pensions) set up
a series of high-profile hearings covered extensively by the media live, as well as in
remarkable and unprecedented detail in all the major news programmes—breakfast,
lunchtime and evening. This level of anathematization is normal in the United States,
but very rare in the United Kingdom. The refusal of the Maxwell brothers to answer the
questions of the committee on the grounds that—on legal advice—they anticipated
charges and did not wish to incriminate themselves was covered in a hostile manner on
all news broadcasts each time that they appeared (and when, initially, they refused to
appear). The Sun reported ‘Lock ’em up! MPs in rage as Maxwell brothers refuse to
answer’. Even The Guardian headlined ‘Ungolden Silence’, making derogatory com-
ments about the failure of the committee to ask who was paying the fees of the Max-
wells’ counsel. Social hostility to lawyers was tapped by frequent references to their
bringing ‘along expensive QCs’: the BBC news, for example, referred to the Maxwells’
being ‘silent and shielded by lawyers’ (3 March 1992). Eventually, after numerous
defence protests, in February 1994, the Attorney General stepped in to prohibit the
showing of ‘Maxwell—The Musical’ in the West End, though far fewer people would
have seen it even in the London jury catchment area compared with daily newspapers.
There were around 5,000 articles in UK national newspapers on the Maxwells between
November 1991 and the end of 1994, before the trial, at which they were both acquitted.
Defendants may try to place in the media alternative views of ‘what happened’, which
is often more ambiguous than for other crimes. They may even try to transform them-
selves from villains to the victims of abusive regulators or prosecutors. Entrepreneur
Asil Nadir, who illegally fled bail in the United Kingdom to the no-extradition Turkish
Republic of North Cyprus to avoid an ‘unfair trial’ over the massive losses at Polly Peck,
persuaded otherwise aggressively anti-fraudster radio and television British journalist
Roger Cook that Nadir and all who worked for him were themselves victims of a mali-
cious plot by the SFO and Metropolitan Police (13 May 19977), and has maintained this
view from exile ever since (up to the time of writing). The Guardian newspaper had an
ambiguous position on Nadir, sometimes critical of his conduct, sometimes accepting
that he might have been a victim of an Establishment Conspiracy (though it was never
clear why he should have been thus targeted). Others were mainly critical of him,
accepting the official line.

7
See also the account of this investigation at http://nakedspygirl.blogspot.com.

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THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

A particularly intriguing example of a defence media strategy was the (eventually


unsuccessful) campaign of the ‘Natwest 3’ in 2005–06 to avoid extradition to the
United States in connection with activities undertaken with Enron: the nomenclature
was deliberately chosen by them and their advisers to invite comparison with the mis-

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carriages of justice of the Birmingham Six and the Cardiff Three. This became the
focus of an astonishing media attack upon the abuse of ‘fast-track’ Europe–United
States extradition arrangements in the aftermath of ‘9/11’ to deal with white-collar
criminals, culminating in a well publicized Confederation of British Industry-supported
‘protest march’ of pin-striped suited company directors to Parliament to complain
about the over-reach of American criminal law. Television news, tabloids and, particu-
larly, all broadsheets including The Guardian carried broadly sympathetic interviews
with the bankers, often photographed open-shirted with their families in the
background; The Daily Telegraph mounted a full campaign on this issue, and alongside
business people and other newspapers, put heavy pressure on the UK government, to
the extent that the Prime Minister and Attorney General expressed support for the
defendants’ plea to be allowed bail despite their involuntary appearance before the US
courts. Bail (but not the right to return to the United Kingdom) was granted and they
largely fell off the media map, though the (anti-US legal imperialism) issue continued
to be referred to whenever British business people were arrested at US airports en
route for other jurisdictions, or others were extradited. There were some deeply scepti-
cal voices, such as in the ‘City Slickers’ column of the fortnightly British satirical
magazine Private Eye, which, over two decades, has consistently critiqued both the PR of
fraud defendants and regulators/prosecutors deemed to be too slow to act.

Sentencing frauds and the media


In trials involving major executives and/or corporations, several newspapers have
reporters involved long-term in attending trials. This was the case with Enron, World-
Com and other major cases, which, following US Sentencing Guidelines, were given
condign punishment (Levi 2006), as it was in the 1980s and early 1990s British trials
like Guinness and Blue Arrow and American trials like that of Ivan Boesky and Mike Mil-
lken. In others, there are unlikely to be any reporters present (especially since the
death of the ‘court reporter’ role on local newspapers, due to financial cutbacks), so
they are dependent on press statements or ‘inside tips’ from police or other interested
parties. Judges sometimes use the sentencing process as a pulpit for the denunciatory
principle of punishment, with the aim of satisfying the general public (as well as deter-
ring other business people) via expected media reportage. One such case was Guinness,
the first of the major Serious Fraud Office (SFO) trials, in which the judge sentenced
CEO Ernest Saunders to jail for five years for theft of funds as a ‘success fee’ for the
takeover of Distillers, stating that ‘I have no doubt that but for the existence of the
scheme the outrageously high payments to . . . would not have been made—those
rewards that exceeded even the dreams of avarice’. None of the British tabloids carried any
other story on the front page, and all had at least five pages of news and ‘analysis’. The
broadsheet ‘serious’ press were predictably more restrained, but Guinness was given
enormous prominence everywhere (see Levi 1991 for a detailed review of media coverage).
Likewise, when it came to sentence, only the Daily Mirror, which had an ‘exclusive’ on
a different topic, relegated it to the inside pages, and the record fine of £5 million on
1047
LEVI

the multimillionaire owner of Heron Corporation who had unlawfully assisted the
Guinness takeover of Distillers, Gerald Ronson, gave the primary cue. The Daily Star
won the headline war, with ‘Guinness Crook of Records’ on the front page and ‘Shares
Fiddle Boss Will Make £27,000 Each Day He’s In Clink’ inside; The Sun came a close

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second, with ‘£5m: That’s fine for Ronson’; the Daily Mirror picked up the theme of dis-
grace also, with ‘The Price of Greed: Tycoon Collapses as Shamed Mr. Big Gets 5 Years
in Jail’. There was no relationship between type of storyline and the general ideological
line of the newspaper: this was just a major news story on radio, television and in all the
newspapers reflecting the cultural shock of (relative) elites being convicted in the
United Kingdom. An Irish BBC journalist telephoned me and asked if I considered
that the five-year sentence meant that there was ‘one law for the rich and another for
the poor’. When I replied that this was not necessarily so, she rang off, obviously not
wanting this ‘line’ in her story. Interviewed on BBC Television’s ‘Newsnight’, family
member and director Jonathan Guinness8 was asked how he felt about ‘the ruin of a
man who made you very rich’. He replied ‘richer . . . . Well, embarrassed, obviously . . .
but I would not have come to any other verdict’. He praised what Ernest Saunders had
done for his company, and expressed sympathy for his situation. He added the classical
allusions of the properly educated that ‘like many people who fly high, he got too close
to the sun. He got precisely what you get in a Greek tragedy, which is hubris’. For
Saunders, then, hubris was followed by Nemesis, though Saunders continued to hog the
hostile headlines because of his recovery from the supposed dementia which
persuaded the Court of Appeal to release him early from prison, making him a symbol
of devious business elites outwitting the criminal justice system even after conviction.

Reintegration?
Although British culture appears more resistant than American culture to the ‘born
again’ role, some UK defendants appear to survive disgrace, though whether former
elites are accepted again in the heart of the Establishment is a more uncertain issue.
Leeson’s jail sentence was publicized in all the newspapers—including the bottom-
tabloid Daily Star—along with ill-informed xenophobic comments in the tabloids about
the conditions in Changi Prison in Singapore (which, in other contexts, many of the
tabloid newspapers would positively commend for British criminals!). However, after
his release, alongside many former fraudsters and politically involved convicted con-
servatives, especially in the United States, there was little criticism as he pursued well
paid public-speaking engagements (a proportion of which went by agreement to the
Barings liquidators) and even obtained a commercial manager role in minor Irish soc-
cer club Galway United. Jailed insurance fraudster Lord ‘Charlie’ Brocket became a tel-
evision star due to his charming performance in the television programme ‘I’m a
Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’. Lord Archer became more a figure of fun because of
the puncturing of his pretensions, but Jonathan Aitken’s more subtle conversion to
become a preacher, his books (Aitken 2000; 2004; 2006) such as Pride and Perjury, and
marriage to the widow of actor Rex Harrison were treated with reasonable sympathy;

8
Jonathan Guinness, who became, by heredity, the peer Lord Moyne, later acted as Chairman of a huge Swedish company called
Trustor, and was disqualified as a company director and bankrupted for £40 million himself, as well as being acquitted of fraud in a
Swedish trial that was heavily reported in the Swedish electronic and print media.

1048
THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

neither of them, however, was permitted by the leader to return to the Conservative
Party fold. Gerald Ronson (jailed over Guinness) had never attracted much personally
negative publicity and though the media (especially the Daily Telegraph) dramatized
with some horror his shaking hands with the Queen Mother at a Royal Opera House

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fund-raising function while on parole, he was treated as a ‘stand-up guy’ and his com-
mercial rehabilitation was viewed neutrally (see, e.g. The Independent, 18 October 2000).
In 2003, his wife Gael was made a Dame for charitable services to Jewish Care and the
Royal Opera House, without adverse media comment.

Changing Technology, Defamation and Financial Crime News


Changes in news production factors are significant to understanding media treatment
of frauds and corruption. Tumber (1993) examined the selling of scandal in the
United Kingdom and Thompson (2000), advancing what he termed ‘a social theory of
scandal’, argued that scandals were ‘struggles over symbolic power in which reputation
and trust are at stake’ (p. 262). He further argued that changes in media motivation
and technology transformed the visibility and altered the relations between public and
private life. Subsequent to Thompson’s work, the rise of blogs and internet sites that
are difficult to control by national defamation laws have opened up public figures and
businesses to wider criticism, whether true or false (and even intentional disinforma-
tion). Newspaper websites have raised bigger questions of vulnerability to forum-shop-
ping by those accused of misconduct, with the United Kingdom’s plaintiff-friendly
system making it the jurisdiction of choice for suppression and damages. Thus, mate-
rial appearing in a plaintiff-unfriendly jurisdiction newspaper such as the New York
Times may be read online in the United Kingdom and be deemed to be sold here,
enabling libel actions in the United Kingdom. A fascinating insight into some of the
problems of media commentary in the United Kingdom, contrasted with the United
States, is provided by the case of Loutchansky v. Times Newspapers Ltd and others (QBD, 27
April 2001) [2001] All E.R. (D) 207 (Apr); Loutchansky v. Times Newspapers (Nos 2–5)
[2001] E.W.C.A. Civ. 1805 CA. In that case, despite his conviction in Latvia and previ-
ous media reports of investigations plus a statement by the former CIA Director about
his corporate links with Russian criminal activity, the judge found that The Times had
libelled an Uzbekhi businessman in 1999 over reported links with Russian organized
crime. In Loutchansky v. Times Newspapers Ltd and others (No 2), 5 December 2001, the
Court of Appeal partially rejected the judge’s conclusions, but, in this and other cases
(such as that involving the former Conservative Party Treasurer, Lord Ashcroft, and his
corporate dealings in Belize), the perils of even suggesting that a prominent public figure
is suspected of organized crime or fraud activities are plain. Extreme care is exercised
internally, with stories signed off by the legal department, before running stories suggest-
ing that any major public figure is involved in fraud or any other crimes. In this sense,
criminologists’ attempts to re-label harm by business as crimes are unlikely to be reflected
in media coverage which uses that label, since to do so would be economic suicide.
On the one hand, my UK interviews with media people indicate that due to media
ownership’s having become more purely business-oriented and conglomerate, domi-
nated by ‘bean-counters’ (a negative term for accountants), there are today even fewer
funds than during the late 1960s available for pre-scandal financial investigation by
electronic and print journalists (such as in The Sunday Times), though, if a scandal
1049
LEVI

happens, ‘herd journalism’ means that heavy expenditure is possible, as papers com-
pete to gain exclusives or fresh angles. On the other hand, the rise of cheap micro-
technologies has enabled covert recording by ‘undercover reporters’ for print, radio
and television, though this technique is more often and more easily used on retail and

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credit-card fraudsters than on rings of corporate price-fixing cartels, which anyway
would take a lot longer to make—likewise with elaborate and expensive sting
operations9 mounted on celebrities and ‘organized criminals’ by newspapers like the
News of the World. The ‘in your face’ reporting of corporate immorality is intermittently
fashionable, especially in consumer programmes—in part due to its espousal by
Michael Moore in the United States and then the United Kingdom, with ‘TV Nation’,
‘The Awful Truth’ and ‘Michael Moore Live’ (aired on Channel 4). However, this
‘door-stepping’ technique is not novel, being crafted first in the United Kingdom by
Roger Cook on radio (‘Checkpoint’) from 1971 and on television (‘The Cook Report’)
from 1985. Many television producers have a horror of making programmes that are
just ‘talking heads’ which, they fear, no one will watch, and the difficulties of making
frauds ‘filmic’ are viewed as a deterrent, despite chances of location shots on Caribbean
‘fraud haven’ beaches.
Once published somewhere, global electronic news gathering enables instantaneous
worldwide publicity, directly or via the major agencies such as Associated Press and
Reuters. Hence, Google news searches following ‘events’ show media in a huge variety
of countries reporting the verdicts in Enron and in other multinational cases such as
Parmalat. This is an important component of reputational risk—the downside element
to global branding by multinationals which means that they may damage their expen-
sive branding (and balance sheet ‘goodwill’) if they are exposed as misbehaving in any
part of their operations worldwide. Rationally, subject to corporate and individual ‘risk
appetite’ and circumstances, one would expect it to deter misconduct and crimes that
are expected to have some chance of being discovered and publicized in the media, to
some extent independent of prosecution, conviction and imprisonment. Here, foreign
NGOs and investigators may—sometimes prompted by disenchanted public officials—
throw up major stories for the media elsewhere to seize upon. Thus, when regulators/
whistleblowers reveal that Royal Dutch Shell has falsified its oil reserves, leading its
share price to be artificially high, the markets are affected by a more general loss of
trust in the management. This is so even though there are no criminal prosecutions to
date and the United States announced in 2006 that there would be neither prosecu-
tions nor regulatory action: market rumour could have happened without a large
media effect, but partly because of the ‘facts of the case’, the financial press took this as
a major feature of Royal Dutch Shell’s split governance structures, which were changed
in response. In a sense, although this was not publicized as a systemic problem of the
industry, the size of Shell meant that it was taken more like a rotten barrel than a rotten
apple.
Criminal or regulatory sanctions in such cases, however, can come from several juris-
dictions, sustaining media interest. Although its corporate conviction was reversed by
the US Supreme Court in 2006 on technical grounds, the well publicized role of

9
Newspaper undercover operations that—because of the total absence of informed consent by those involved—certainly would
not pass the British Society of Criminology’s ethical research guidelines, and recently have been treated as inadmissible in evidence
because the courts believed that they may have provoked the crimes.

1050
THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

accountants Andersen in shredding Enron documents (see McBarnet in this issue) led
to a fatal loss of credibility and financial value in the firm’s audit opinions, and to its
collapse: since there were Andersen partnerships in most countries, this received glo-
bal publicity despite substantial routine advertising by Andersen and their long-

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standing normal role as primary definers on accountancy issues.10
Mathiesen (1997) argues that mass media technologies provide the means for the
many to see the few—the synopticon as contrasted with the normal panopticon. How-
ever, this reciprocal process of surveillance between elites and masses is highly unbal-
anced. The greater damage that can be done to the powerful by exposure and scandal
does not fundamentally change structures of power and advantage but rather, he
argues, legitimates capitalism more effectively by creating the illusion of control. The
evidence suggests that although the many have more insights into the fraudulent few
than they used to do, the Panopticon is, on balance, the dominant view.

Power, media and reporting of crimes of deception


Few seriously argue nowadays that one can ‘read off’ crime news as a reflection of eco-
nomic interests (see Barlow et al. 1995 for a more general discussion). The relationship
of fraud and corruption with ‘High Politics’ can be seen most clearly in developing
countries (e.g. Kenya, in 2006) but it appears also in some European (particularly
France—Roussel 2002—and Italy) and American scandals (Savings & Loans, Whitewater-
gate, Enron); however, most frauds prosecuted and reported upon lack this direct con-
nection. Social-security fraud and illegal immigrants may be treated by the tabloid
media as belonging together in the anti-Pantheon of Folk Devils. However, except for
the collapse of the Dot.Coms and Enron, which were used to leverage regulation by
those concerned about corporate transparency and accountability (in the Sarbanes-
Oxley Act 2002), frauds are seldom treated as symbolic of crises in capitalism. Nor are
‘abuse’ of tax regulations and corporate domicile (Braithwaite and Braithwaite, and
McBarnet, this issue). Pragmatic factors would stop their being reported as crimes
because libel actions would follow, but they appear seldom in mainstream news also (a)
because they are hard to grasp and (b) perhaps because global media firms (but not
the BBC!) themselves take advantage of such lawful if ‘on the margins’ methods to
increase profits, making it career-limiting and pointless for journalists to spend time on
stories that their editors will reject.
As with police corruption, are individual and corporate ‘fraudsters’ treated as iso-
lated ‘rotten apples’ or alternatively are used to symbolize wider problems in the state
of the nation, in the culture of business, or indeed capitalism generally? This appears
to vary over time. When there are a bunch of collapses/scandals happening at roughly
the same time, this leads business sections in broadsheets to ask whether this symbolizes
something wrong in the environment. Thus it was in the United States with the slew of
Dot.com collapses and Enron. At other times, such as the UK 1987–92, prosecutions in
Guinness and Blue Arrow raised critical questions about the neo-liberal values of the City
of London, but the fashion for prosecuting elite firms soon declined and, with it, the

10
Most of the Andersen staff were taken on by other firms, and it is difficult to conceive of further prosecutions eliminating other
Big Four firms, hence, perhaps, the deferred prosecution agreement that allowed KPMG to avoid prosecution for its tax shelter
promotions.

1051
LEVI

event ‘hooks’ upon which to hang such lamentations (Fooks 2003). However, we
should not assume that it is appropriate for the media to treat such crimes as if they
were endemic or ‘rotten barrel’ rather than ‘rotten apple’; unless prompted by ideo-
logical considerations, such a conclusion should surely depend on ‘plausible evidence’

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about the prevalence and incidence of fraud in particular sectors of the economy and
claims on the public purse, bearing in mind the limitations of what media investigators,
police and regulators take the trouble to know about those sectors. Even if we had
better offending and victimization surveys than currently exist, this would throw more
limited light than we would need to know upon such matters (Levi and Pithouse
forthcoming; Bussman and Werle, and Karstedt and Farrall in this issue).
Media and crime studies agree that the demand for ‘objective’ news reporting and
the continual time pressures of news production combine to generate an over-reliance
on official sources which, in turn, serve to orient the media around the ‘definitions of
reality’ that those ‘accredited sources’ provide as ‘primary definers’ (Critcher 2003;
Schlesinger and Tumber 1994). Since some high-status defendants are (or were) such
accredited sources, they—like former Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, and
senior British Labour and other Party figures embroiled in the ‘cash for honours’ 2006
scandal—are well placed to offer their reasoned and ‘reasonable’ side of the story,
except where it is difficult to see what a sensible defence would look like.
However, whether or not connected to the general ‘de-subordination’ in late-
modern society and cynicism about professionals, financial crime reporting regularly
contains comments attacking government, regulators and professional self-regulatory
agencies, as well as the accountants and lawyers acting for the various parties. This
theme is echoed in various British cases, such as Barlow Clowes, BCCI, Maxwell and Asil
Nadir’s Polly Peck, and is symbolized in the Private Eye terminology for the Department of
Trade and Industry as ‘the Department of Temerity and Inactivity’ and the Serious
Fraud Office as ‘the Serious Farce Office’ and the ‘Seriously Flawed Office’. Fooks
(2003) argues that such attacks on competence discouraged the SFO from risky prose-
cutions that challenged the City of London’s mores, since media criticism might have
led to the SFO’s closure as ‘ineffective’.
The treatment of white-collar crimes in the business press shows that even if Sutherland
was originally correct in asserting that the media are uninterested in white-collar
crimes, quite the reverse is the case nowadays provided that there is some event-peg such as a
fine or a prosecution or a liquidation upon which to hang a story.11 Clearly, the number of
these international stories varies enormously, but illustrate both (a) the willingness to
publicize white-collar investigations, at least once some official action and/or market
reaction occurs, and (b) the geographical spread of the issues, at least in a globalized
financial press reporting on a multinational corporate world. Thus, the Geneva paper
Le Temps reported (10 May 2002) stories (my translation) on the decisions of Prosecutor-
General in relation to one major financial crime; the arrest for active and passive cor-
ruption of a retired Swiss Foreign Office staff member and two others in Switzerland;
the potential loss of US$49 million by the Cantonal Bank of Vaud from an alleged

11
See, for an earlier review, Stephenson-Burton (1995). We appreciate that some colleagues might counter that specialist busi-
ness media falls outside the loop because there is no need to mystify them; but this does not take into account the realities of mod-
ern news-gathering and story generation, in which journalists rely on each other to an ever increasing extent. The Financial Times is
generally available on the street and news stands, and is collected by radio and television journalists when deciding what stories to
run with.

1052
THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

fraud on the London Metals Exchange; the embarrassment caused to UBS (Union
Bank of Switzerland) by the Enron allegations; the fraud allegations against Zurich-based
FIFA President Joseph Blatter (carried in many newspapers around the world and devel-
oped in 2006 in a UK BBC-TV ‘Panorama’ programme, ‘The Beautiful Bung’, 11 June

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2006, and a book by long-term investigative journalist Andrew Jennings (2006)); and a two-
page spread on whether Swiss banking secrecy would disappear and what would be the con-
sequences. It is not suggested that this level of coverage happens every day—just that any
regular reader of business broadsheet or even tabloid newspapers would be aware that
crimes are not produced solely by the working and unemployed classes, even if their judge-
ment of who are the ‘dangerous classes’ remains immured in the poor and the foreign.
In many of the emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe, in Latin-America
and, more sporadically, in Africa and Asia, many newspapers enthusiastically publish scan-
dal about people in high places, even when they are not owned or financially supported by
opposition parties, though, as coverage of corruption allegations against the Berlusconi
governments and against Kenyan government in 2006 showed, this becomes more partisan
where the media are fervently politically connected, and different messages are conveyed.
Though not always in a consistent way over time, across and between nations, scandal
and prosecutions affect shareholder valuations, the corporate image credibility upon which
so much marketing is invested and—perhaps to a lesser extent—the social status ambitions
upon which many leading business people are focused. In a consumerist society and one
obsessed with ‘personalities’, the media can also gain from warning the public of risks from
sorts of activities and firms, and from attacking greedy corporations even if the latter are
also their advertisers, though the prospect of losing revenue may put a brake on their
attacks on particular firms. Thus, we see consumer columns in several newspapers (and tel-
evision programmes), including the very popular right-wing ‘middlebrow’ newspaper Mail
on Sunday. Encouraged by government, this and many other newspapers regularly attack
banks, car dealers/manufacturers and other large businesses under the banner ‘Rip-Off
Britain’. This does not appear to harm capitalism—indeed, given such huge, anonymous
markets, it may help capitalism to function as well as make it seem fairer. It also embodies
the tensions between encouraging consumer spending (and advertising to promote it), on
the one hand, and ‘fairness’ expectations by readers and viewers, on the other.

Conclusions
At a wider structural level, the ownership of the mass media may inhibit certain forms of
reporting first, by not investing the staff recruitment and time or travel budgets needed,
especially for transnational investigations which are extremely expensive; second, by
interlocking interests and webs of influence that may transcend direct economic co-
ownership conflicts; and third, by ideology that may be semi-autonomous from economic
interests, such as not undermining confidence in the financial services industry (which is
a heavy advertiser and employer), though few think that capitalism is at risk from fraud
stories. The impact of these factors may vary substantially between cultures and over time,
for traditions of media independence can and do impact on conduct, even though not
embodied in formal procedures or law, and though capable of being broken by ruthless
entrepreneurs in a global market. The impact also depends on what level of political and
law enforcement involvement either in crimes of deception or in ‘organized crime’ gen-
erally exists. In Britain, where such involvement is relatively low, the importance of media
1053
LEVI

problem distortion may be less than in Italy during the post-War period or in countries in
transition such as Serbia. In the United States, although television is even less interested
in complex fraud stories than in the United Kingdom, reporters such as Kurt Eichenwald
appear to be given substantial space by the New York Times to comment at length on finan-

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cial scandals such as Enron. This is not the case for British reporters, although, for over
two decades, journalists such as Michael Gillard, Paul Lashmar, David Leigh and Tom
Bower have sought to get the resources to cover complex financial crime stories and cor-
rupt/ fraudulent entrepreneurs, while people like the Mail on Sunday’s Tony Hethering-
ton have tirelessly covered smaller-scale consumer and investment frauds.
What normally happens in Western societies is that once a scandal breaks and espe-
cially if some official action is taken, all the major media are given funds to throw some
extra light on events that are deemed ‘newsworthy’. It would be too crude to account for
this in terms of its looking like too obvious suppression to ignore a major financial scan-
dal: Enron, for example, was rather like Texan ‘soaps’ such as ‘Dallas’ or ‘Dynasty’ in its
sensational connections with the White House and politicians of both parties, and American
prosecutors and District Attorneys are fond of making white-collar suspects do ‘the perp
walk’ in handcuffs before the television cameras (as satirized brilliantly by Wolfe (1987)).
However, there may still be some ‘spin’ or avenues deliberately left unexplored about
relationships between white-collar criminals, organized criminals and senior figures in
the state, whether through active suppression or simply the common understanding that
unless the researcher can find alternative employment via this ‘path to glory’ (and sell the
story to another newspaper/television programme in the same or another country), such
obsession with uncovering networks of relationships is a career-limiting move. Most
frauds by volume are reasonably covered as one-off events (like most crimes). However, in
others, the sheer length of time taken for investigations, prosecutions and appeals gives
ample scope for redefinition, and for this subset of financial crimes, the sense of there
being an unfolding story is much greater than for normal crimes. The Bank of Credit and
Commerce International (BCCI) was closed down by the Bank of England in 1991, and
numerous criminal, civil and regulatory actions around the world ensued; it was only in
2006 that the attempts of the liquidators to sue the Bank of England for regulatory negli-
gence failed, with a massive order for costs against them. Not all actions have yet been
finalized, 15 years on. Thus do structural, cultural and personal factors interweave and
interpenetrate to ‘produce’ news and documentaries on white-collar and organized crime.
Some fraud and corruption cases come to symbolize the ‘state of society’. The current
Chairman of Deutsche Bank, Joseph Ackermann, received significant publicity in the
business sections of the press when prosecuted for corruption after he and others alleg-
edly approved around 60 million Euros in bonuses for themselves following their agree-
ment to sell ‘their’ company, Mannesmann, to Vodaphone in 2000. In this case, as in
other European scandals involving Ahold (the Dutch retail group), Skandia (the Swedish
insurer) and Volkswagen, the publicity becomes the template for cultural conflicts over
the international homogenization of ‘business values’ and their corrosive effects on the
more civilized and disciplined national ethos whose virtues were depicted in Weber’s
focus on capitalism and the ‘Protestant ethic’.
The ways in which these media reports will be interpreted by the public is less
well understood. How, for example, do the Italian public view the stories on Parmalat,
produced by media that are more explicitly politicized than in the United Kingdom?
Do they see it as a gross crime, aided by a complicit set of regulators; as a fraud operating
1054
THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES

in the interstices of national regulators unable to coordinate the control of a global set
of businesses with different corporate entities in jurisdictions with different levels of
transparency; as a ‘bonfire of the vanities’ by the founder caught up in the machismo of
competition among industrialists to run their ‘family’ soccer clubs (like Parma) and

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support family businesses; or as ‘organized crime’? The impact of the media upon
these alternative constructs remains unknown, but this is an important though difficult
arena for theoretically informed empirical analysis.
Films such as ‘Wall Street’, ‘Rogue Trader’, ‘Catch Me If You Can’ and ‘Enron: The
Smartest Guys in the Room’ may catch the zeitgeist and hold up a light to particular corpo-
rate or individual values, are accessible to the wider public and not very technical on the
financial world. However, as some television journalists have complained in interviews
with me, fraud is not a coherent signifier of images of disorder and pain, though some
white-collar suspects can be demonized, and hostile images are available for some sub-
types of fraud like those against ‘widows and orphans’. A rare example of an attempt to
re-frame the public debate (from petit bourgeois rather than elite suspects) is the extraordi-
nary press conference called by the organizer of cockle-picking (seafood) in Northern
England, following the tragic drowning of 20 Chinese labourers on shifting sands while
working at night (The Guardian and most other newspapers, 14 February 2004), which led
to legislative reforms. Headlined ‘Arrested Cockle Buyer Lashes Out at Police’, the direc-
tor accused police and the government of inventing the term ‘gangmasters’ to shift
blame for the tragedy from local people whom, he alleged, had committed racist attacks
on the Chinese who were not being underpaid by him. Lancashire police—who normally
would be regarded as ‘primary definers’ of the news agenda—responded: ‘Two men are
currently on bail after being arrested on suspicion of manslaughter, and it is completely
inappropriate for them to be commenting on this inquiry.’ On one interpretation, the
normal role of suspects is to remain at the mercy of whatever hostile publicity the police
and media might generate against them; so it is deemed ‘inappropriate’—even for busi-
ness people—to contest this social definition of their situation as villains rather than vic-
tims. Yet, in other cases, such as the ‘Natwest 3’ in 2006, more elite business people are
better able to create a sense of ambiguity over ‘what happened’ and to deconstruct the
official interpretation of the harm done and/or their culpability for it (though they were
extradited in the end). Thus, there remains a dynamic discourse in which police, prose-
cutors, regulators, suspects, victims and pressure groups vie for audience by media that
will publicize the case or conduct and their construction of it, mainly if it contains
‘famous names’, unusual features or significant harm that they expect to be visualizable
by their readers and viewers. Though insecurities about investment, mortgage and pri-
vate pension schemes may mount over time, and there is widespread disillusionment
about the integrity of business (Karstedt and Farrall, this volume), no areas of socio-
economic harm or risk of harm from business activities have as yet attracted a visceral
reaction from either the media or the public that compares with identity fraud,12 still less
with other areas of ‘moral panic’ such as paedophilia.

12
Cynics might be tempted to argue that this is because identity thefts and frauds seem well suited to help justify the UK govern-
ment’s obsession with identity cards as a solution, but this would be too crude an account, quite apart from the empirical problem
of just how—even if the technology works—such cards would help with online and consumer frauds. See Levi et al. (2007) and
Tombs (2006) for discussions of the harm from different forms of violence, including health and safety at work, and the ‘problems’
of getting people to think differently about what ‘violence’ means. In general (see also Ericson and Doyle, in this issue) the rela-
tionship between risk and either harm, incidence or prevalence is very poorly dealt with in event-driven media accounts.

1055
LEVI

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