‘Man I’m all torn up inside’: Analyzing audience responses to Making a Murderer

Abstract

Despite the preoccupation with media depictions of crime and criminal justice, few studies have employed qualitative methodologies to investigate how audience members engage with, react to, and interpret media content. This analysis of Reddit forums dedicated to the 2015 Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer reveals the wide range of responses to the series and demonstrates the value of looking to user-generated content on social media platforms to understand how we think and feel about crime-related matters. I argue that Reddit users’ reactions to the series are consistent with existing research outlining the complexity of the public’s views regarding criminal justice policy and these responses are intelligible when we consider the broader socio-political context in which the series was released. Particularly important, in my view, are individuals’ affective responses – including empathy, confusion, heartbreak, anger, frustration, fear, and helplessness – and the ways these emotions are linked with beliefs about the efficacy of the criminal justice system and the purposes of punishment. Consequently, this article buttresses recent calls to consider the entire spectrum of human emotions and to investigate the ways these emotions are related to our multifaceted beliefs about crime and criminal justice.

“Whenever there’s trouble, just yelp for help”: Crime, conservation, and corporatization in Paw Patrol

“…Consequently, future research might add to the growing body of crime media audience reception research (e.g. Boda and Szabó, 2011; Kennedy, 2018) and investigate the ways children and parents engage with PAW Patrol and other children’s television programming.…”

Free Mo Robinson: citizen engagement in response to a crime event on social media

“…Building on printed media analysis of crime ideologies (e.g. Hall et al 1978;Cohen and Young 1981), cultural criminology has extended its scope of enquiry to the production, negotiation and contestation of crime across a range of media, such as film (Rafter 2007), TV dramas (Cavender and Deutsch 2007) and the internet (Yar 2012;Kennedy 2018). This last, emerging subfield of what has been called a "digital criminology" (Stratton, Powell, and Cameron 2017) explores the nature of citizen participation on social media in response to crime events (see Powell, Overington, and Hamilton 2018;Salter 2013).…”

Forever trapped in the imaginary of late capitalism? The serialized true crime podcast as a wake-up call in times of criminological slumber

“…As such, recent years have seen a re-engagement with emotions within the academy and an 'emotionalization' of the topics explored by criminologists (see for example Karstedt, 2002;Kohm, 2009;Loader, 2005). However, as Kennedy (2017) notes, such studies have explored particular emotions in specific contexts -notably negative emotions like shame and remorse in relation to restorative justice and anger, vengeance and humiliation regarding discussions around the punitive state. Other emotional states conveyed via popular criminology -for instance 'sensationalist' emotions like disgust and revulsion -appear altogether absent from criminological theorizing, as do more positive states like sympathy, empathy, joy and happiness.…”