Abstract
This chapter advances a ritual theory of journalism to explain how news media contribute to social change not only through moments of disruption, advocacy, or reform, but through long-running, repetitive practices that shape moral judgement, collective memory, and social visibility over time. Drawing on James Carey’s ritual view of communication and extending scholarship on journalism, memory, and symbolic power, the chapter conceptualises crime reporting as a process of ritual amplification—a cumulative practice through which journalism constructs moral boundaries, hierarchies of victimhood, and shared frameworks of public meaning.
Rather than treating journalism as an information system or watchdog institution, the chapter positions news as a cultural practice that sustains social order through recurrence and repetition. These processes are particularly evident in crime reporting, where narrative forms, symbolic language, and spatial imaginaries are reproduced across time, shaping public understandings of danger, responsibility, and social value.
Empirically, the chapter is grounded in a longitudinal case study of crime reporting in Western Australia, focusing on coverage of the Claremont serial killings across multiple periods (1996–1997; 2008; 2016–2020). The analysis demonstrates how journalism operates as an ongoing cultural practice rather than a series of discrete events, mobilising gendered, classed, and spatial frameworks that shape public understandings of risk and innocence.
The chapter introduces the Glennon Effect as a specific manifestation of ritual amplification, describing how victims aligned with dominant norms of femininity, class respectability, and spatial belonging are elevated through sustained media attention, producing hierarchies of victimhood within public discourse. Conceptually, the chapter situates this analysis within the framework of peripheral media centres, arguing that concentrated media environments can intensify symbolic power and stabilise moral narratives across time.
Methodologically, the chapter employs longitudinal textual analysis informed by journalism-memory scholarship and theories of symbolic power. It contributes to debates on journalism and social change by demonstrating how routine reporting practices participate in the slow production of moral order while simultaneously reproducing social inequalities.