Levi, 2006
Levi, 2006
Levi, 2006
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.
* 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
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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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
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-
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”.’
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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
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
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
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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
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.
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
7
See also the account of this investigation at http://nakedspygirl.blogspot.com.
1046
THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES
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
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.
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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
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
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-
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.
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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’
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.
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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
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-
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
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
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REFERENCES
AITKEN, J. (2000), Pride and Perjury: The Rise and Fall of a Political Giant. London: Harper
Collins.
——(2004), Psalms for People under Pressure. London: Athlone Press.
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THE MEDIA CONSTRUCTION OF FINANCIAL WHITE-COLLAR CRIMES
LEVI, M., MAGUIRE, M. and BROOKMAN, F. (2007), ‘Violent Crime’, in M. Maguire, R. Morgan
and R. Reiner, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 4th edn. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
MASON, P. ed. (2003), Criminal Visions. Cullompton: Willan.
1057
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