True Crime Research Project

Your objective is to analyze the media coverage of a criminal murder or missing person’s case. You are expected to use proper research protocol in every way, including writing style and MLA annotation of sources. This project asks you to trace the narrative of a true crime case as you examine the following levels of media coverage.

1. A print newspaper or magazine

2. An online newspaper or magazine

3. A podcast

4. Free television coverage (coverage of the crime on one of the “free” major stations-ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, or FOX). This coverage might have been nightly news or a made for tv documentary.

5. A true crime novel or streaming documentary (coverage that requires a streaming subscription)

Retrace the presentation of your chosen case through these five outlets. Concentrate your analysis on how specific evidence is found, discussed, analyzed, and displayed as the case shifts representational venues.

Make sure you are focusing on the media coverage of the case and not the details of the case.  Imagine that you are a lawyer, and your job is to convince the jury that the media coverage across these five levels of coverage had X effect on the narrative of the murder.  You should provide 1-2 specific media examples from each level and fully analyze each of those rhetorically (you may need to revisit some notes from Comp. I) to support your thesis.  For each media example, you need to introduce the title of the source, the author/journalist/host, the date published, and any other contextual information needed.  Then, you should quote that source extensively pointing out the places where that source contained details that support your thesis.  For print sources you might consider the diction used, the details included vs the details left out, the use of humor or images, the comparison of that source with other sources published earlier or later.  For TV broadcasts, talk shows, podcasts, and documentaries, you can also consider the body language of the speaker, voice inflection, facial expressions, etc…  Your entire focus on this paper should be an analysis of the media coverage to prove that the media coverage as it moved through the five levels of coverage had X effect on the narrative of the murder.

Your goal as a writer is not to categorize one source as true and the others as false; treat all with equal suspicion regarding their subjectivity. Your paper should present an analysis of how the “story” of murder influences the presentation of “evidence” and how that narrative may change over time as a case progresses through the stages of a prosecution and against the backdrop of the court of public opinion.

You may choose different points in a case‘s timeline and connect those with different venues of coverage. You could choose one point in the case (initial report, indictment, trial date, or verdict) and explore that moment‘s reportage across the five venues.

Follow this format when preparing your written report:

Establish the context of the study in your introduction. You will need to provide scholarly sources proving that the media has influence over the general public. Before you can prove that the media affected the public perception of the case, you have to prove that the media has power to influence the public. Use at least one source provided by me about crime in media, but you can also research to find additional scholarly sources to back up your analysis.

Explain how the media played a role in your chosen criminal case (this is your thesis and should be the final sentence in your introduction)

• Thoroughly analyze at least seven sources from the five levels of coverage to support and prove your thesis. You should look at each source rhetorically and discuss how each communicated the information, why they chose to communicate it that way, and the effect of these rhetorical choices on the reader/viewer. You could also look at other media sources, but those must be approved by me.
• Use MLA citation format for all resources

You should find a minimum of 10 sources (three scholarly sources to anchor your analysis and at least seven media sources to analyze) and integrate all of those into your final paper.  While the media sources will be biased and not scholarly, all sources must be credible—meaning they come from reputable news outlets or podcasts.

• Since your job in this essay is to analyze the subtle and substantial changes in coverage as a story moves from venue to venue and through its timeline of investigation, I encourage you to look beyond the HTML version of coverage especially when dealing with local, national newspapers and news magazines. This demand is not to make your research process more difficult; it is an effort to help you recapture the specifics of layout and design from print that are often edited, reduced or drastically reformatted in an online version.  This may mean calling the local paper or local library in the area the crime occurred to request photo copies of the newspaper coverage during the week(s) following the crime.

You are welcome to use Wikipedia as a starting point for your crime; however, it cannot be a source in the essay. It is my advice that you begin with national searches first so you can see how far the coverage of the case reached. Then start searching back to the more local level. Optimally, you want to find a case that gives you a mix of published print, online, and television texts to analyze.

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