Comparative Study of Representation Patterns of Criminality in the Iranian and German Press with Emphasis on Punitivity

Important information published on newspapers includes those found in their news on crime and criminal incidents which, neither qualitatively nor quantitatively, correspond to the real-world situations and official statistics. The way crime is represented based on its “news values” or newsworthiness can importantly shape people’s view of crime, punishment, and criminal justice systems. The present paper adopts a comparative approach to examining portrayal of crime, punishment, and victims in Iranian and German press. Using qualitative and quantitative analysis of content, we studied the content of two popular newspapers in Iran and Germany (Hamshahri and Bild, respectively) for the period January 21, 2020 to April 3, 2020. Our findings on crime representation by 311 titles in Hamshahri and 134 titles in Bild revealed an insignificant difference in representation of such crimes as murder, manslaughter, and rape. The two newspapers, however, differed significantly in terms of representing criminal justice response as Hamshahri dedicated 60% of its stories to “death penalty” and “qisas” and only 4% to detention and incarceration while Bild covered only one case of death penalty (and that was a case in New Guinea) with 86% of its stories representing detention and incarceration, meaning that Hamshahri, the Iranian newspaper, in general adopted a more punitive approach in terms of the quality and the nature of representing criminal justice compared to the German newspaper Bild. As far as the way of representation is concerned,