A Reply to Buckingham's “Newsmaking” Criminology or “Infotainment” Criminology? Inaccuracy, Distortion and Feminist Doctrine

Abstract

This edition of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology carries an article by Judith Buckingham dedicated to discrediting my criminology and, via me, the PhD thesis of my former student, Samantha Jeffries. Inter alia, I am accused of hijacking the public consciousness of New Zealand through a dominating presence in the news media, of negatively influencing the Jeffries' PhD, and of writing a book called Crime in New Zealand which erroneously depicts women's role in domestic violence and their treatment by the criminal justice system. In this response to Buckingham's attack, I argue that she has made unsupportable claims in relation to my influence in the news media, has completely misunderstood Jeffries' thesis, has distorted, misreported, misconstrued and misrepresented the content of Crime in New Zealand and has accused me of making errors when a check of the facts shows that the errors are her own. She has given false meanings to things I have said and defaced me by focusing on small, decontextualised fragments of writing and ignoring the bulk of my work.