"In Racket Town": Exposing Organised Crime in Wartime Leeds, 1941-1945

Description

Crime news was a media staple throughout the Twentieth Century. What we read, heard and watched shaped popular perception and sometimes prompted official action. The same remains true today. While we know much about what the media reported, we know little or nothing about the working practices of crime reporters before the mid-1970s. Using a police investigation of press allegations of black marketeering and corruption in wartime Leeds, Mark Roodhouse considers whether the antics of journalists working during the golden age of crime reporting, which ran from 1930 to 1960, were any less reprehensible than those revealed in the Leveson Report into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press. Was reporting saloon bar title-tattle as fact and paying for it forgivable? And what impact did investigative reporting of the underworld have on popular perception of serious and organised crime?

Period	15 Nov 2016
Held at	Yorkshire Philosophical Society, United Kingdom