The Carcavelos mugging as a media hype

Abstract

Crime provides the news media with headlines on a silver platter and is an inexhaustible source of reporting to serve up to the public. To a certain degree, the consistency across media, consensus among the reporters, the volume of news coverage, and the “massaging” of the events into a form that is palatable to the public quickly generates a series of “waves” or hypes of reporting. This is a phenomenon that has been neither placed into its sociological setting, nor studied with regard to its impact on that setting. This article examines the way in which the “Carcavelos mugging of 2005” conforms to the media hype model advanced by Peter Vasterman, and goes a step further by suggesting that when the tide of news enjoys widespread consensus, it is rare that the news coverage includes elements that go “against the tide”.