Murder! Mayhem! Social Order!

“True Crime: The Origins of Modern Sensationalism” by Joy Wiltenburg, in The American Historical Review (Dec. 2004), American Historical Association, 400 A St., S.E., Washington, D.C. 20003–3889.

“SLASHER KILLS FIVE” is the sort of gruesome headline that makes us sigh not just in sadness but in vexation with the cheap sensationalism of so much of modern journalism. Yet sensationalism has an honorable history, says Wiltenburg, a historian at Rowen University in New Jersey, and it still serves some of the same functions its inventors intended.

One of the earliest sensationalist works was a German pamphlet describing the horrific hatchet murders of four children by their mother (and her immediate suicide), written by Lutheran minister Burkard Waldis in 1551:

She first went for the eldest son

Attempting to cut off his head;

He quickly to the window sped

To try if he could creep outside:

By the leg she pulled him back inside

And threw him down onto the ground

[and though the boy pleaded for his life]

She struck him with the self-same dread

As if it were a cabbage head.

Waldis’s tract established several hallmarks of the genre: language of extreme pathos designed to arouse the reader’s senses (hence sensational), a breakdown of the family unit (providing an opportunity for a lesson on maintaining a strong, church-centered morality), and a relaxed attitude toward factuality.

Sensationalism was born in a time and a place (mid-16th-century Germany) in which  the printing press made possible the widespread distribution of pamphlets and broadsheets. According to Wiltenburg, such accounts were “produced and probably pur­chased mainly by the literate upper levels of early modern society.” Many were written by established clerics and educated burghers. They fancied themselves authors of the “war­haf­ftige newe Zeitung” (truthful new report), but they didn’t let a few missing facts stand in the way of dramatizing a “deeper moral truth.” Their different faiths produced alternative takes on events. A 17th-century Cath­olic pamphlet, for instance, used a man’s murder of his family to discuss the inevitable punishment of sin, while Protestant authors “could use similar content to stress the power of God’s word to redeem even the worst sinners through faith.” But sensationalism also served important secular purposes. In an era when rudimentary, state-sponsored criminal justice systems were starting to emerge, sensationalist writings stirred crucial  “right-thinking people” to support them.

Sensationalism has shifted form and focus over the centuries. In 17th-century England, ballads “fixed their gaze squarely on the criminal,” and increasing attention was paid to the motive behind the deed. Murderers were seen as having transgressed more against the state (by violating laws) than against God (by sinning), a change of perspective that moved the implied causes of criminal violence in a decidedly more secular direction.

Today’s blood-soaked sensationalist crime reports may have strayed far from their religiously oriented, morally straitening roots, but they still “exert substantial political and cultural power.” Studies suggest that they promote an exaggerated sense of the incidence of crime and of an individual’s perception that he or she is likely to be a victim of crime. As Wiltenburg points out, such fears can affect a broad range of choices and attitudes about our society, from where we choose to live to “what punitive governmental actions to support.”