Corporate crime and the discursive deletion of responsibility: A case study of the Paddington rail crash

Research into Social Understandings of Corporate Crime in Criminology and Media Studies

Corporate crime has been relatively neglected in the study of crime and deviance. It is, however, a widespread problem in all contemporary societies, so much so that it can be thought of as a normal part of how our societies in general, and capitalism in particular, operate (Minkes and Minkes, 2010). And even where such crimes are challenged they may come to be defined as ‘illegal’, but not ‘criminal’ (Geis, 1972). The way that corporate crimes are legislated against and dealt with may be in the first place through non-justice-related government departments and by governments that are keen to be seen to combat the ‘red tape’ obstructing the business environment (Tombs and Whyte, 2007). And while corporate crime is far more costly for society than other kinds of crime, it is simply not seen as comprising the same kind of societal burden as conventional crime and is therefore largely absent from debates about the ‘crime problem’ (Slapper and Tombs, 1999). Crucially, corporate crimes and offences are represented merely as an ‘aberration’ from the routine and otherwise legitimate activities of corporations (Tombs and White, 2007: 68).

Although the news media have always devoted at least some space to the crimes of the rich and powerful, there is still far less information about this type of crime than there is about ‘common’ or ‘street’ crime. Why this should be the case is not too difficult to see. A great deal of corporate crime is made invisible by the careful planning and execution of those involved in it, the relative lack of law enforcement and prosecution, and the lenient legal and social sanctions imposed on those who stand accused of it.

Many working in criminology and media studies have commented on the (ideological) lack of coverage of corporate crime in both the print and broadcast media (e.g. Box, 1983; Chibnall, 1977; Cohen and Young, 1973 [1981]; Jewkes, 2011; Slapper and Tombs, 1999; White, 2008). Cavender et al. (2010) distinguish between two traditions of media studies of corporate crime. One stresses a general lack of interest in corporate crime because it lacks ‘the brimstone smell’ (Evans and Lundman,1983: 529) and the ‘moral blameworthiness’ (Simpson, 2002: 49) that characterizes conventional crime. Corporate crimes are too complicated to make for a good story and therefore are not conventionally newsworthy (Lynch et al., 2000). The second tradition suggests that nowadays the public is interested in corporate crime and that the media do cover the phenomenon. However, here it is the nature of the coverage that is the problem. When the media cover corporate crime, Cavender and Mulcahy (1998) argue, they employ the same crime news frame as for ‘street’ crime, a frame that oversimplifies the phenomenon. Levi (2006) notes that the news media tend to prefer corporate crime stories that can be linked to the wrongdoing of one person and to the hypocrisy or incompetence of the ‘establishment’, rather than discuss it in terms of criminality or the criminogenic nature of capitalism. It appears that this tendency of the mainstream media to report on crime as a matter of individual pathology has hampered the investigation and condemnation of large corporations and governments for their criminal acts.

A number of criminologists (e.g. Tombs and Whyte, 2007; Walters, 2010) have raised the issue of language as one of the ways that the corporate origins and nature of corporate crimes can be obscured, although this has not been in the form of a systematic linguistic analysis. For example, they have observed that there is a tendency in the media to report on corporate crime in terms of ‘abuses of power’ and ‘scandals’, not least because that makes it more spectacular and therefore more newsworthy (Levi, 1987: 10). Terms such as ‘scandal’ and ‘abuse’ carry implications of immorality rather than criminal offence and make these crimes look novel and rare, while in fact they are widespread and routine (Slapper and Tombs, 1999). Wells (1993: 10) likewise has commented on the relative lack of labelling available for criminal acts committed by corporations, noting that the use of ‘anaesthetizing’ terms such as ‘accident’ is often the result of conscious corporate manipulation. The language of ‘accident’, and its associated terms ‘disaster’ and ‘tragedy’, is important for our analysis here, as all three were used in news reporting on the Paddington rail crash and are indeed terms commonly employed for occupational health and safety and environmental crimes. They are potentially ideological in that they connote ‘the unforeseeable, unknowable and unpreventable’, evoking ‘discrete, isolated and random events’ (Slapper and Tombs, 1999: 95). They also exclude intentionality and obscure the interrelated issues of causality, seriousness and criminality (Tombs and Whyte, 2007). Although the choice of this kind of language is often unconscious, it does suit corporations and the commercial media, which generally report on crime in a manner that evokes notions of spectacle (Jewkes, 2011). According to radical crime and media theorists, apart from investigative journalism, media institutions either downplay or misrepresent the crimes of powerful corporations. As a result, news reporting remains ‘coupled to state definitions of crime and criminal law’ (Jewkes, 2011: 24). However, an important reason for the reluctance of the media to use the term ‘corporate crime’ is the great risk of libel they face, when there is no such official definition being given by the police or courts (Levi, 2006).

In an important study that establishes a link between the criminological study of corporate crime and the language of media reporting, Mathiesen (2004) sought to identify the patterns commonly found in the reporting of ‘disasters’ that result from the drive for profit-making. His interest was in showing how the public is distracted from making any connection to the way an event could be seen as being part of ‘normal’ corporate activity. Providing examples from reporting of a disaster on an oil platform, Mathiesen (2004: 37–43) identifies a series of stages or ‘isolation techniques’ in this process, which he refers to as ‘pulverization’.

In the first place, the event is individualised and presented as somehow unique and unusual, reducing the sense that it is part of normal operating procedures geared to profit-making. It is therefore turned into something special and atypical, perhaps far too exceptional for any generalised lessons to be learned from it.

Second, the event is normalised by pointing out that the oil industry is a high-risk industry with many challenges. Issues of weather and other natural forces may be cited as reasons. The event may also be compared to other ‘tragedies’. This technique is in a way the counterpart of the first, as it turns the event into something usual.

Third, the event will be split up and reduced to a series of loosely connected minor details which are often presented as being very technical in nature. Tombs and Whyte (2007: 73), using Mathiesen’s model, cite the media discussion surrounding the Zeebrugge ferry sinking in terms of technical questions of ferry design and the British Paddington rail crash in terms of costs and merits of automated protection systems as examples of this.

Next, the event is placed in the future. A politician or a senior manager may comment that the main priority now is to rescue people by search operations or to identify whether the incident was a question of personal error. We will be told that this is not the right time to discuss details.

The follow-on stage is that the event is relegated to the past. So in the case of a rail crash it might be pointed out that an old signal system was used from before the new company took over, or an outmoded train, making it less relevant to current operations.

Finally, the event is elevated to history. A commentary might refer to the forces of nature or other factors that humankind has already had to struggle against. We might be informed that extracting oil has always been the risky work of brave pioneers or that shipping on the vast and unpredictable world oceans has been a challenge throughout human history.

For Mathiesen this ‘pulverization of totality or context’ is an important means of ‘silently silencing’ people and requires the techniques just described to be deployed. The use of apparently neutral terms such as ‘accident’ is one way of performing these techniques of isolation. If ‘accidents’ are discrete, unforeseeable events comprised of complex technical details, then there is no need for further, critical, investigation.

Another important concept for our discussion here is ‘neutralisation’. Originally coined by Sykes and Matza (1957) to describe the verbal accounts given by adolescent criminals to mitigate and justify their criminal conduct, the term ‘techniques of neutralisation’ has also been applied to ‘white-collar’ corporate officials (e.g. Box, 1983; Slapper and Tombs, 1999; Shover and Hochstetler, 2006). Just like ordinary criminals, corporate officials deny responsibility and one way of doing this is by claiming that negligent behaviour was an ‘accident’. Corporate officials also often deny injury and the victim. They may even appeal to higher loyalties, citing loyalty to the company or their duty to protect jobs as a superior moral imperative. Tombs and Whyte (2007) point out that safety crimes are very amenable to these neutralisation techniques because individuals may be able to cite multiple causes at several levels of the corporation involved. We will see below how responsibility is diffused in some of the media coverage of the case we go on to discuss now.

In this paper, using the case study of the Paddington rail crash, we explore some of the stages in the reporting of a corporate crime that was clearly the result of the ‘normal’ practices of ruthless profit-seeking. In so doing, we draw on Mathiesen’s and Box’s observations where relevant. But in this case we are equally interested in the ways the events were treated when the media did turn their attention to profit-seeking and the guilt of the rail companies.

Methodology

In this paper we analyse headlines and extracts from 17 tabloid newspaper texts selected from a corpus of 300 texts collected from the year 1999 (and one from 2009, where we consider the press coverage of the commemoration ceremony). The sample chosen allows us to demonstrate discursive patterns used in the reporting of the events. We carried out a Lexis Nexis search for ‘Paddington’ and ‘crash’ in the category of ‘British national newspapers’, identifying over 4,000 instances. Most of these texts were from the first few weeks of coverage, with a later surge around the period of the inquiry hearing. Here we selected articles from tabloid titles with the aim not of analysing specifically the different politics between them, nor with the aim of considering their difference from broadsheets (see Levi, 2006 for such a discussion), but with the aim of providing an analysis of the progression of the story coverage. We were particularly interested in tabloids, since these are often associated with lack of serious critical engagement with issues, which, as we show, was not always the case.

The analysis in this paper is divided into two sections with two different methodological approaches, although both are underpinned by the broader concerns of critical discourse analysis (CDA) with its interest in the ways that events become recontextualised in language, with actual participants, actions, settings and causality becoming suppressed, replaced and abstracted (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). As we shall see below, recontextualisation always involves the substitution of complex details and activities through generalisation or abstraction and the addition of other elements. This can serve specific ideological purposes. In the first section we draw on theories of news framing from media studies. It has been well documented by media scholars (e.g. Bennett, 2005) that journalists will rely on well-trodden news frames when writing on a topic. On the one hand, this provides them with a formulaic way to organise and plan their reporting and writing. On the other, this is important for news audiences who require clear and simple signals as to how to understand an event (Cottle, 2009). Such frames can be said to determine what becomes news more so than the events themselves. They also provide journalists with templates for how news stories should logically progress. As such we will show that there is a tendency to report corporate crimes in the first place through a frame and sequence of stages that is typical of disasters. In terms of a CDA analysis with its interest in the way events become recontextualised, we find that these news frames serve to substitute actual participants, agents and causes with those characteristic of the particular news frames.

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1995; Van Dijk, 1993; Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999) considers discourse as a form of social practice and is specifically concerned with the ‘relations between discourse, power, dominance and social inequality’ (van Dijk, 1993: 249) and how these relations are (re)produced and maintained by discourse. It is a tradition of discourse analysis that seeks to identify the kinds of models of the world or ‘discourses’ that are communicated by texts. In this paper we are interested in such models or discourses for representing corporate crimes. CDA can be carried out on the one hand through identifying the components of the discourse or the broader models that are present (Bishop and Jaworski, 2003). On the other hand, it can be done through a close analysis of texts at the level of grammar and language with the assumption that they often carry ideological meanings that remain less than obvious to the casual reader. It is this level of analysis that we draw upon in the second part of the paper where we turn our attention to the news reporting that raises actual matters of corporate responsibility. In the following section we look more specifically at how agents, actions and causality are abstracted, substituted, suppressed and replaced. What we show is that the notion of corporate blame may be present, but what is important is exactly how this is formulated.

The Paddington Rail Crash

On 5 October 1999 an Inter-City train travelling from Reading to London collided head-on with a train run by Thames Trains, at Ladbroke Grove outside Paddington station, London. One driver had passed a faulty and poorly placed signal. As a result, 31 people were killed, mainly from horrific burns as one carriage was engulfed by burning fuel, and more than 400 people were injured. In the final hearing outcome two rail corporations were each fined several million pounds. There were a number of key criticisms of the companies.

First, to avoid costs, the companies had grossly neglected safety. The privatisation of the railways in Britain has gone hand in hand with an emphasis on short-term profitability and gross neglect of safety and lack of investment in infrastructure (see Jack, 2001). The report of the public inquiry into the crash provided damning evidence of how the companies operating Britain’s trains since the privatisation of British Rail have consistently placed profit before public safety. In many cases appropriate measures had not been taken to resolve well-known and well-reported problems, including the faulty signal that had played a part in the crash. At the official hearing, it was claimed that the decision not to repair the signal reflected a concern not to pass the costs on to the travelling public. Railway workers had been told to meet deadlines and targets and to ignore problems and safety issues.

Second, the train driver had only three weeks’ experience and had received little training. There was much criticism of the training given to drivers following privatisation of the railways in 1994. Many experienced workers had been made redundant in order to cut costs. Previously, drivers had been recruited from existing, highly experienced staff and would ride with an experienced driver for one whole year before driving alone.

Third, some blame lay with the government, which had abandoned an early warning system installation programme in the early 1990s in the lead-up to privatisation. The estimated cost of £3 billion was thought to exceed normal safety investment criteria as measured by cost per equivalent fatality avoided, and the government had been concerned about the excessive price of the stock should the money be invested.

From the point of view of crime, we could argue that there were clear issues of the companies running the railways failing to maintain equipment, despite warnings from their own employees, and that they were guilty of reducing staff training necessary for the levels of experience required. We could also argue that the government likewise made decisions that contributed to the situation by not providing an adequate warning system and by failing to correctly monitor the rail companies. In the face of previous fatal train crashes, and knowledge of signalling problems and the inadequacy of warning systems, there was clear evidence that trains were operating in a way that could lead to further fatalities. The Paddington rail crash was only one in a series of fatal crashes that occurred in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s, which eventually led to the demise of Railtrack.

What we now attempt to show in the chosen news texts is how the news media reported the event, how responsibility was attributed and what penalties were called for. We look at the way the question of responsibility and blame was raised as the events took place and as they were discussed later when new information became available to journalists.

Corporate Crime and the Discourse of (Natural) Disaster

In the first place the Paddington rail crash was reported in terms of the images and stages that we would expect for any natural disaster. The typical sequence for natural disaster reporting is: inviting the reader to bear witness to the horror, heroes and hope: appealing to the moral community: and expressing dissent and disagreement (Turner, 1982).

Initially, the news media reported the drama of the event itself. Coverage focused on images of shock, suffering and disruption. For example:

PADDINGTON RAIL DISASTER: PEOPLE WERE JUMPING OUT ON FIRE. I STEPPED OVER A DEAD WOMAN … AND WEPT BY THE TRACK (Daily Mirror, 6 October 1999)

This was typical of the first reactions of the news media. Stories contained graphic descriptions of the collision and gave detailed accounts by survivors of what they had experienced during the crash, how they had been trapped, seen burning bodies and heard people screaming. These are the usual first responses to human drama found in large-scale disasters such as 11 September 2001 in New York and 7 July 2005 in London. Pantii and Wahl-Jorgensen (2007: 13) refer to this stage of media reporting as being characterised by ‘bearing witness and giving testimony to the carnage’. The use of the ‘ordinary’ person guarantees authentic details of misfortune. At this stage of reporting, the attention to actual analysis of responsibility and causes is replaced by the emotional reactions from witnesses. We could equate this stage of reporting with Mathiesen’s (2004) concepts of individualising and normalising of events. First, the event becomes individualised in terms of its horror and the suffering of everyday commuters in a British city. The event then becomes normalised by reporting on it in terms of another horrific accident in a long line of (train) disasters in Britain.

This first wave of stories was followed by a stage which celebrated the heroes of the day. Media scholars have commented on this phenomenon, noting how the initial phase of disaster reporting is followed by one which emphasises bonds of community and solidarity and honours the heroic acts of survivors and rescuers (see Turner, 1982). Here we see recontextualisation at work through the addition of the hero, which has the effect of sidelining critical analysis of the event. We find this characterised in the Daily Mirror two days after the event:

DISASTER AT PADDINGTON: HEROES OF HORROR; HOW WE HELPED RAIL CRASH VICTIMS: AMBULANCEMAN

This story recounts the experiences of ambulance workers, the sights they saw and the extra shifts they worked. Other newspapers ran similar stories about brave individuals. At this stage we will also find reflections on individual case studies (Cottle, 2009), such as in the Daily Mail (8 October 1999):

Bright futures snatched away amid tearing metal; TRAGIC DOSSIER OF THE FIRST IDENTIFIED VICTIMS DISASTER AT PADDINGTON

In other disasters, such as earthquakes, this is the stage where we are most likely shown the surviving mother and child as they are found in the rubble. We also find stories which point to the moral community, such as the reactions of family members. This can be seen in the following story from the Daily Mail (8 October 1999):

PILGRIMAGE OF SORROW

… They had seen pictures of the blackened wreckage on television and in newspapers. But now the relatives of the Paddington rail disaster victims faced the scene itself. In their desperate grief they could only cling together for comfort.

It is typical at this stage in the coverage of natural disasters to see more staged images of survivors and families uniting in sympathy and grief as opposed to the earlier images of victims and destruction (Pantii and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2007). In the above text, we find use of the word ‘victims’, but no reference to human or criminal agency. People are victims of the disaster itself, rather than of specific actions.

Later in natural disaster reporting, there will be further ritualisation through official ceremonies. Newspapers will call on the nation to pray for and remember the victims (Cottle, 2009). The following headlines from the Daily Mail are an example of this:

A candle for the daddies who will not be coming home (Daily Mail, 8 October 1999)

A tragedy making us one family (Daily Mail, 9 October 1999)

Again here we find what Mathiesen (2004) would refer to events being normalised. They become part of the expected stage of mourning and of social rituals at this point in this sequence of activities. It is at this point that politicians are required to comment on their own personal shock and grief. They will talk not of corporate responsibility, but of the need to unite the nation in its shock and grief.

The next stage in the ritual of disaster reporting is characterised by dissent and disagreement (Cottle, 2009). It is at this stage in the reporting of the Paddington events that we begin to find press criticism of the authorities or attempts to point to those responsible. But earlier in the coverage when ‘what happened’ was being rapidly written up by journalists, it appeared to be the fault of the Thames Train driver, as can be seen from the Daily Mail (6 October 1999):

Did driver jump a red light?; INFERNO ON THE 8.06 IN A GRIM ECHO OF SOUTHALL, HOW HUMAN ERROR may be to blame

The story reported on evidence that a light had been jumped and that ‘experts’ had commented that this was unlikely to be a mechanical failure. The story does level some blame but not in a specific way. Instead we find the following:

If, as seems likely, the Ladbroke Grove tragedy was caused by an overshoot, it will fuel anger against both the Government and the previous Tory administration.

Media scholars (e.g. Dayan and Katz, 1992) have observed that it is at this point that journalists may be able to raise concrete issues for concern, which are often more complex and therefore more difficult to raise, such as corporate power, social inequality, or, in a wider sense, the type of society we want to live in. We find this in the Daily Express (7 October 1999) only a few days after the crash:

CRASH WAITING TO HAPPEN

At this stage the journalist presents the incident as part of broader issues and trends, rather than dealing with the exact details of the train crash:

BRITAIN’S railways have seen an alarming increase in the number of dangerous incidents caused by trains running through red lights. Last year more than 50 drivers passed red lights, failing to stop within the safety distance, an increase above 25 per cent.

The rise paints a picture of an accident waiting to happen and was a cause for concern among safety professionals before the Paddington disaster.

Last month the Rail Inspectorate published the results of a year-long study into trains overshooting warning lights. There were a total of 643 incidents over the last year, but most involved trains which stopped 183 metres after passing the light – the recognized safety distance.

The report says companies need to devote more time and effort to ensure such incidents do not happen. It concludes that over-runs of red lights ‘probably give rise to the highest safety risk facing the rail industry and therefore demands an appropriate level of resource and commitment’.

Precise information about the activities of the rail companies involved was not available until the final official Cullen Report was released in 2001. Here the journalist has identified and used a report which more broadly dealt with railway standards.

What is interesting here is that no crime as such is identified and this is contextualised as part of a pattern which points to ‘an accident waiting to happen’ and ‘companies need to devote more time and effort’ to avoid further ‘incidents’. There is no reference to responsibility and consequences. This text also merges issues of driver error with company responsibility to improve standards.

One barrier to such events being reported as ‘crimes’ at this stage, even when journalists appear willing to do so, is that the usual definers of crime are absent. The journalist is dependent on the official definitions offered by the report. The police are not the first source from whom the public hear about this event and they are not even mentioned in the report. Instead, the sources are ‘safety professionals’ and the ‘Rail Inspectorate’. As Tombs and Whyte (2003) point out, in the first place these ‘safety crimes’ are not the responsibility of government departments dealing with law and crime, but those dealing with work and pensions. Therefore there is no mention of this as a crime. As Levi (1987) notes, this in part means that reporters cannot use terms such as ‘crime’ or ‘killing’, but rather have to resort to ‘scandal’ and ‘tragedy’. In the Daily Express article, we are told that companies should avoid ‘incidents’. Levi (2006) also raises the important issue of newspapers facing libel charges if they give ‘incorrect’ definitions and that, certainly in cases involving powerful people, stories would always have to be first signed off by legal departments. As Levi states:

In this sense, criminologists’ attempts to re-label harm by business as crimes are unlikely to be reflected in media coverage which uses that label, since to do so would be economic suicide. (Levi, 2006: 1049)

In summary, what we have shown in this first section is the way that events that had specific causes and responsibilities were in the first place reported through a discourse of natural disaster. In CDA terms, we can think here about the way that this discourse has recontextualised the events through replacement of participants (emphasis on heroes as opposed to perpetrators), actions (reports on saving victims as opposed to the immorality of corporate greed), causes (use of terms such as ‘accident’ as opposed to ‘callousness’) and sequences of activity (accident followed by shock and communal mourning). This sequence of reporting was followed by a more critical period during which journalists raised more difficult issues. But due to the absence of the usual definers of crime, as the incident was dealt with through official channels of health and safety, the event was not represented in terms of a corporate crime.

Below we will consider more carefully the language of reporting as journalists increasingly come to turn their attention to the issue of responsibility. Even though they become quite outspoken at times, we do not find the usual language of crime nor the ‘evil’ perpetrators on whom to hang it.

Agents and Actions in News Reports of Corporate Crime

At the point where news reports switched away from the natural disaster discourse and began to generate more background information about the dire state of the railway system, we can begin to analyse the details of how agents, actions and causality are represented through language.

In the newspaper articles written from this point there is still no mention of legal or moral responsibility. In the Daily Mail (9 November 1999) we find:

TERROR OF RAILMAN WHO SAW IT COMING; Six lights all on red, but still the train failed to stop

The article is drawn from an interim report on the events, produced by the Health and Safety Executive. It begins with the account of a railway worker who tried to change the signal when he saw the train passing, but it was too late. It then moves on to the list of problems that beset the rail system in terms of signalling and warning technology. We can look at the language used to describe causes and agents.

First we find that crash investigators:

said that possible driver error was ‘only one factor’ and an overall systems failure played a major part.

Here the ‘systems failure’ is personified as the agent, playing a part alongside the driver error. Neither the negligence of the companies nor the companies themselves are positioned as agents. Likewise we find the government’s direct level of responsibility avoided through the use of passive verbs in the sentence:

The report, by Chief Inspector of Railways Vic Coleman, said the accident would have been prevented if the Government’s planned Train Protection Warning System had already been installed.

Active verbs could have been used instead to make agency clear:

The report, by Chief Inspector of Railways Vic Coleman, said that the Government could have prevented the accident had it installed the Train Protection Warning System.

In the next section, however, there is direct mention of the possibility of criminal charges, where the report said:

The full investigation will focus on the ‘root causes’, immediate remedial action and whether enforcement, … action, including prosecution, is justified. There could be manslaughter charges if there is evidence of gross neglect.

There is no list of who those responsible might be. Instead, we find a number of nouns (‘root causes’, ‘evidence’) and nominalisations (‘investigation’, ‘enforcement’, ‘action’, ‘prosecution’) which all elide agency (Fairclough, 1995). Although there is an oblique pointer to corporate neglect further below in the text, this fails to establish a direct connection to the events. The company falls short of expressing responsibility for the crash:

Thames Trains managing director Keith Ludeman said his company was ‘deeply disturbed’ by the accident and pledged to do all it could to improve safety. But it emerged yesterday that Thames has cut its driver training by almost half this year, from 18–20 weeks to ten.

Saying the company is ‘deeply disturbed’ is an abstraction (Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999). What exactly does this mean? Again we find the crash referred to as an ‘accident’. The expression ‘pledged to do all it could’ to improve safety is not quite the same as saying the company ‘would’ improve safety. And importantly ‘pledge’ is another abstraction, as it glosses over what is actually being done, although here the article does add force to the likelihood of the company being blamed for the crash.

What is of note in this reporting is that it is not only the Mirror, which traditionally has been supportive of the ordinary public and unsympathetic towards company bosses, but also the traditionally right-wing titles, the Express and the Mail, that take a critical stance. One possible explanation is that the victims were for the most part not working-class labourers but middle- class commuters, although Levi (2006) points to a broader willingness in the press these days to attack elites for their hypocrisy and incompetence, if not criminality.

Five days after the crash we begin to find a more pronounced language of blame. However, this is phrased in language that points to moral rather than legal guilt. In the Mail on Sunday (10 October 1999) we find:

Sacrifices on the altar of rail profit

Internal Railtrack documents that we have seen show beyond doubt that, at the highest level, vital considerations of passenger safety were given a lower priority than cost and share prices.

Anyone who doubts that those who died were sacrificed on the altar of profitability should simply read our report on the Railtrack board’s decision in 1995 not to install the Automatic Train Protection system. It is clear that the seeds of last Tuesday’s disaster were sown then.

The fateful board meeting reveals an unedifying picture of cynical and short-sighted calculation.

No one is suggesting that board members actually expected that there would be any tragic reckoning for their rejection of the new system on grounds of cost. But what they hoped and expected is that even without ATP – which would have cost GBP 750 million at that time – there would be little likelihood of a serious crash.

For more than four years their gamble paid off. On October 5, outside Paddington, it came disastrously unstuck.

It is clear, moreover, that, consciously or not, the calculation was heavily influenced by the potential impact of GBP 750 million-worth of expenditure on the value of a company that was about to be privatised.

This is something that really puts the directors in the dock – morally, if not legally (though solicitors for the bereaved families might have a different view of that). For, with their substantial share holdings, they had a direct stake in ensuring that the value of the privatized company was as high as possible.

…

And they should have thought of it when they were accepting that, in a fragmented railway system, Railtrack would be able to resist paying more than it thought costs justified. In short, the directors felt confident that their decision would escape public scrutiny and criticism.

In the light of all this, the radical reassessment of Railtrack’s fitness to monitor and safeguard safety standards, announced yesterday by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, is entirely justified. And long overdue.

For, quite simply, our disclosures show that Railtrack cannot be trusted with the safety of the millions who must rely upon it every day of the week.

At the start of the article the link between the actions of the company and the death and burning of passengers is described through a metaphor and a passive construction, ‘were sacrificed on the altar of profitability’, which removes direct agency. This could, in the case of an accepted crime, read something more like ‘Those who were killed and burned by Railtrack through their decision not to install the system’. The motives of the company are described neither in terms of ‘monsterisation’ nor ‘pure evil’, as we might find in other kinds of crime/murder stories, but as an ‘unedifying picture of cynical and short-sighted calculation’.

We are then told that:

No one is suggesting that board members actually expected that there would be any tragic reckoning for their rejection of the new system on grounds of cost.

Here actual responsibility is again mitigated. We are told ‘no one is suggesting’ that board members did think there would be a crash. On the one hand, this is a presupposition that assumes that there is a possibility that someone might make this suggestion. On the other hand, it allows the writer to provide a sense of what everyone thinks. And in the next line this is described as a ‘gamble’ which had paid off for over four years. In this sense the use of the world ‘gamble’ loosens the connection to intentionality. In business terms we might argue that the managers took a legitimate course of action, making permissible and reasonable decisions based around profit orientation, which is after all what managers of corporations do. But such a decision had been made consistently, the evidence later showed, in the face of warnings and complaints from workers as to the massive risks to life.

We are then told about the actual legal status of their actions:

This is something that really puts the directors in the dock – morally, if not legally (though solicitors for the bereaved families might have a different view of that). For, with their substantial share holdings, they had a direct stake in ensuring that the value of the privatized company was as high as possible.

It is suggested that there may be room for legal responsibility, but it is also clearly stated here that this is a moral rather than a legal issue. The text offers solutions in terms of closer monitoring of the rail companies along with an assessment of Railtrack’s ability to inspire the trust of its customers. But this is conveyed through a language of ‘assessment’, not ‘guilt’ and ‘retribution’.

Importantly, what was lacking at this point in the unfolding of events was an individual who could be used to personalise the events. As Braithwaite (1984) reminds us, one reason corporate crime is too complex for news reporting is that it is often hard to explain the crime through the perverse character of one single evildoer.

Personalisation of the crime was, however, later provided through the head of Railtrack, Gerald Corbett. He became the face that personified the companies who bore moral if not legal guilt. The British news media will often convert such stories into cases of corporate ‘fat cats’, although Vaughan (2001) points out that this focus on individuals can serve to obscure the nature of corporate crime and how it is often part of the way the system is allowed to operate. We find an example of how Railtrack chief Corbett was dealt with in the following story from the Daily Mirror (12 November 1999). What we find is that Corbett speaks about resignation should his company be found at fault:

VOICE OF THE MIRROR: RAIL BOSS CAN’T SHIFT THE BLAME

RAILTRACK chief Gerald Corbett thought it would be good for him to come out fighting yesterday.

But his public defence of the company’s involvement in the Paddington disaster was so painfully inept that he would have been wiser to stay silent.

Mr Corbett promised he would ‘resign immediately’ if anything was found to be wrong with the fateful Signal 109. It was, he insisted, in ‘perfect working order’ on the day of the crash.

But when pressed, he indicated that the signal would almost certainly now be changed in the light of what had happened.

Changed? Why on earth would anyone want to change a perfect signal?

They will tell him that Railtrack’s relentless drive for profit at the expense of fixing potentially fatal signal sites and installing vital safety equipment is offensive. Very offensive.

What we see is that Corbett himself became the face of the rail company but was certainly never questioned in terms of his character. It is usual, as has been shown by media analysis of crime reporting (e.g. Jewkes, 2011) for criminals to be assessed on the basis of their criminal personality as much as the crimes they have committed. In this story Corbett is represented as saying that he will resign should anything be ‘found wrong with the fateful signal’. So here ‘resignation’ is presented as a possible punishment, and may be one way that corporations can show they are accepting responsibility, thereby diverting attention away from criminal responsibility. And here the continued emphasis on the signal draws attention away from broader issues of neglect and criminality. The signal is described by Corbett as ‘fateful’, rather than as the consequence of downgrading safety through deliberate profit-motivated decisions. Here we can see the ‘denial of responsibility’ technique at work, an important part of the neutralisation process on behalf of companies (Box, 1983). What is also evident in Corbett’s statement is the way that he attempts, in the fashion described by Mathiesen (2004), to draw attention to smaller technical matters rather than to broader issues of the drive for profit and its consequences.

In the coverage of elite persons such as Corbett there is of course the issue of libel noted by Levi (2006), where newspapers must be very careful of how to label actions. Levi points to the important fact that such elites are used to being primary definers of news and reality and follow the advice of their lawyers on how to relate information in such a way that gives reporters little opportunity to explore the issue of the criminality of their actions.

In the Mirror (25 November 1999) Corbett is criticised for being seen to shift blame onto the train driver who died in the crash:

POLICE RAP RAILTRACK FOR CRASH ‘BLAME’

Police may recommend that Railtrack bosses be charged with corporate manslaughter if there is evidence individuals in charge of public safety were criminally negligent.

In a Mirror interview days after the disaster we asked Railtrack boss Gerald Corbett if such charges would be appropriate.

He stormed out in a rage, saying: ‘I find that deeply offensive.’

Railtrack has tried to escape blame for the crash – which killed 30 people – by claiming a Thames train jumped a red light and stressing its own equipment was in order.

Here we do find the language of crime (‘corporate manslaughter’, ‘criminally negligent’). This is the first time reporters have received material from the traditional definers of crime, the police. The intention of the police is however represented through low commitment, ‘may recommend’. The rest of the text discusses more details of the case, which are repetitions of earlier information about the signal and the driver, and ends with a comment from the transport secretary:

And Mr Prescott will warn companies could lose their licence to operate if they fail safety standards.

Events are discussed again in non-criminal terms, such as the losing of licences since this is how it is presented by one of the story’s main sources. Nor do we find the kind of monsterisation strategy (Jewkes, 2011) of the ‘bosses’ that would be typical of those suspected of other kinds of criminal acts. After all, in many ways these people are respected figures in society. Minkes and Minkes (2010: 186) remind us that when lay people call someone a criminal they are not simply saying that they have broken the law. ‘Criminal’ has a broader meaning, conveying value judgements about a person being dangerous, ‘low-life’, immoral, a product of bad genes or bad upbringing. Most importantly, criminals are perceived as ‘different’, not like the rest of ‘us’ including company bosses.

What we find at this point in the reporting is that sometimes terms associated with crime are used but for the most part they fail to spell out what the company or government were actually responsible for and how they should be punished. For journalists, there clearly is a sense that the public have an interest in challenging corporations in this way. The problem is that this is never sustained in the fashion of conventional crime reporting. The Daily Mail (14 November 1999) wrote:

TRAIN CRASH BOSSES COULD FACE CHARGES

RAIL bosses could face criminal prosecutions and possible jail sentences over the Paddington crash, it emerged yesterday.

A senior police officer heading the disaster inquiry said his team would be examining whether there was evidence for manslaughter charges.

Superintendent Nick Bracken of the British Transport Police, who did not name any of the companies, said: ‘We are looking to see if there was individual or corporate criminal liability.’

Here terms such as ‘criminal prosecutions’, ‘jail sentences’, ‘manslaughter charges’ and ‘evidence’ are indeed used. However, the text does not explore which people might face charges nor what the punishment might be. We are told that rail bosses ‘could face criminal prosecutions’. It appears that the journalist exercises caution by providing a sentence hedged in low modality through ‘could’ and ‘possible’ to provide their own interpretation of what might result should there be manslaughter charges. However, this is still a significant step, as we begin to see some mention of the kinds of punishment usually associated with ordinary crime. But there is less confidence in the mode of writing. The journalist could have used more forceful modality by writing ‘bosses must go to jail’.

This news article then moves on to provide further details of signalling and mentions a number of aims of the government for changes in regulation. Here, importantly, the reporter is able to obtain information from a crime definer. Without this they had previously been unable to talk in terms of charges. But the difficulty in such criminal cases is mentioned if not highlighted in terms of the police looking for individual or corporate liability. In previous cases no prosecutions had been conducted as there was no clear single individual responsible.

The Sunday Mirror (17 November 1999) went on to openly discuss the idea of the law needing to be clarified for cases involving corporations:

JUSTICE AS LAW CATCHES UP WITH CORPORATE KILLERS

Politicians, both Tory and Labour, refused to accept responsibility for starving the rail network of funds and failing to insist on rapid action on the automatic safety system common in Europe.

Giant companies and their directors cannot be allowed to wriggle off the hook when they are responsible for disasters that devastate lives.

As we reveal today, Government plans for new laws to make it easier to prosecute directors and other senior employees on the grounds of gross negligence are welcome.

Under the current legislation there is a ‘catch 22’ that makes this virtually impossible.

In the Southall train crash charges of corporate manslaughter were not brought because a single individual could not be found responsible.

This is clearly a nonsense and everyone knows it.

Bosses on obscene salaries, giant bonuses, golden share options and platinum pensions must be forced to accept the responsibility for the health and safety of their customers.

All the way to the dock of the Old Bailey if necessary.

This editorial takes a bold stance by directly pointing to responsibility (‘corporate killers’), although this responsibility lies with companies only and not with politicians. There is no sense that events should be carefully scrutinised in order to understand how governments can run down public services before selling them off and how they can then permit companies to abuse these services for profit.

Lynch et al. (2000) point out that one problem with corporate crime in terms of news coverage is its complexity. A child abuse case is ‘simple’ and easily recognisable to the public, often rendered through a ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ polarity. In cases of corporate crime, politicians may be interwoven with companies and their interests. And in the Paddington case it appears that one of the rail companies was itself given the role of checking standards. In the text above the writer strives for simplification by creating a polarity of the ‘fat cat’ bosses and their customers. This seeks to give the public their ‘evil doer’. But as Fiske (1989) has pointed out, this can in some ways simply serve the ideological purpose of ritualising and neutralising public challenge to those in power.

However, systematic coverage of such follow-up events is rare. Scholars of news reporting show how news, including crime and disaster reporting, happens in fragmented ways (e.g. Benthall, 1993). The news may tell us a great deal about people’s suffering in one place at a particular time, but attention will soon shift onto something else. The attention span of the news media may have little connection to the actual flow of events at the place of reporting. Nash (2008) likewise points out that, in cases of disaster reporting, there may be some mention of causes and responsibility, but these will never be fully investigated and will be backgrounded by issues of suffering. Most likely, there will be no follow-up to report on whether the causes and responsibilities have been addressed.

There was some direct criticism of the profits made by the rail companies, for example, in the Daily Mail (5 November 1999):

ANGER AT RAILTRACK’S GBP 1.3M A DAY PROFITS

This item did not become a sustained part of the way that events were discussed. It also uses no legal language whatsoever. There was also no actual connection with profit-seeking as a cause of the crash. Profit was rather presented as evidence of the greed and immorality of a few ‘fat cats’, but this was not linked to effects of the privatisation of public services in late-modern capitalist society.

Over the next few months the story resurfaced occasionally as the results of investigations appeared, although the final verdict was not reached for several years. One more important reason events such as the Paddington crash do not get the same kind of coverage as other types of crime is the length of time they take to be solved, which may not fit with the usual rituals of crime reporting and patterns of news values.

In April of the next year, after a report by the police, the Daily Mail (1 April 2000) announced the following:

RAIL CHIEFS WILL ESCAPE JUSTICE OVER PADDINGTON

RAIL chiefs will not face corporate manslaughter charges over the Paddington train crash, the Daily Mail can reveal.

Although detectives have concluded there is proof of ‘negligence and incompetence’ in the lead-up to the accident which killed 31, they say the ‘unsatisfactory’ state of the law makes it impossible to launch a successful prosecution for manslaughter.

Then the sequence of events from the start was repeated and the text returned to the issue of there being no criminal charges:

Families of victims were last night infuriated by the decision not to press charges. Denman Groves of Hartpury, Gloucestershire, who lost his 25-year-old daughter Juliet, said: ‘We are all bitterly disappointed that the law of the land is so naive that it can’t deal with this murderous type of action. As far as I’m still concerned, my daughter and the others were really murdered by Railtrack.’

…

Ministers are under pressure to change the law on corporate manslaughter to make it easier for police to press charges in cases such as the Paddington and Southall rail crashes or the Herald of Free Enterprise disaster, which killed 193 off Zeebrugge in 1987. At present, a corporation can be found guilty of manslaughter only if a particular senior individual is proved to have been grossly negligent.

Police are also understood to have ruled out the possibility of bringing lesser charges under section 34 of the Offences Against the Person Act, which deals with endangering the safety of train passengers.

A source close to the Paddington case said yesterday: ‘The decision not to charge anyone with corporate manslaughter is very regrettable and undoubtedly a crushing disappointment for survivors and victims’ families. But it is unavoidable.’ It is understood that the police inquiry has highlighted serious negligence or incompetence within Railtrack and by Michael Hodder, the Thames train driver who lost his life when he went through a red signal.

…

‘There will be no charges.’ It is possible Railtrack may be prosecuted under Health and Safety legislation. If found guilty, the company could be fined heavily but no executives would be jailed.

What is of note in this article is that it takes no moral tone of its own. Neither the companies nor their bosses are accused of ‘escaping justice’ as the headline says. We are told that ‘Ministers are under pressure to change the law on corporate manslaughter’, but we are not informed who is creating this pressure. It appears that the pressure comes from the families, but this has been backgrounded to hint at something greater. What is backgrounded in this text, crucially, are some of the details of the actions of the rail companies and the government. We only learn that ‘the police inquiry has highlighted serious negligence or incompetence’.

Earlier in the coverage of the events, rail employees were quoted as saying that they had been told to ignore obvious signal faults in order to meet targets. None of this is stressed here. Yet in the coverage of more conventional crimes involving murder, it is more usual for all the details to be regurgitated on each occasion the story is revived (e.g. the James Bulger murder case).

The language used for the lack of prosecution is also described through the moderate words of one source who described it as ‘very regrettable and undoubtedly a crushing disappointment’.

Finally, we see how the language of corporate crime was completely abandoned by reporters when the event was commemorated in 2009. We see this in the following item from the Sun (3 April 2009):

SURVIVORS of the Paddington rail crash have marked the tenth anniversary of the accident at a memorial service for the 31 people who died in the tragedy.

The article summarises the events, playing down the suffering and carnage and foregrounding the mourning and solidarity of those present. It ends by pointing to the fines given to the companies:

A subsequent inquiry into the crash by Lord Cullen was highly critical of Railtrack and of the training of Mr Hodder.

Thames Trains was later fined £2 million, while in March 2007 Network Rail – Railtrack’s successor company – was fined £4 million for health and safety breaches at Paddington.

Lord Adonis said: ‘Paddington was a terrible tragedy and one of the worst in the world’s history.

‘I am glad that lessons were learned from the accident and that railway safety has improved but that does not reduce the nature of the tragedy and the impact it had on so many lives.’

The links between the events, the appalling decisions and practices that led to the ‘accident’ or ‘tragedy’ and the lack of criminal prosecution are not mentioned. While there were some calls in the press to change the law so that corporations could be prosecuted, there is no mention of whether this has actually taken place. The continual use of the terms ‘accident’ and ‘tragedy’ sidelines the legal issues which were present and which resulted in the companies being fined.

Conclusion

The analysis in this paper confirms that it is certainly not the case that the news media ignore corporate crime. Nor are they unwilling to raise the matter of corporate greed and irresponsibility. But due to the processes and conventions of news reporting, the media’s reliance on the definitions of official sources and the very nature of the institutions themselves that deal with safety crimes, there are obstacles to such events being reported through the language of crime. Both legally and in terms of news values, there is a problem in finding criminality because of the lack of individual agents who can be blamed for their actions. It seems likely that what is left in the minds of news readers in the case of events such as the Paddington rail crash is the narrative of the tragedy and the chaos of the accident, rather than the complexities of the accusations against the corporations.

In our society the media play a huge role in defining what we think crime is and what and who we believe to be threats to our wellbeing and to our social order. The media also give us a sense of why people become involved in criminality. But the very definitions they offer are based around established notions of criminality: views that reflect the interests of the powerful in a system where it is the most vulnerable and disadvantaged who are most likely to become criminalised. This is a view of criminality according to which the criminal represents the opposite of the values held by society upon which they are a burden. Criminals are not just law breakers, but are essentially different from the rest of us. The model of the successful and enterprising business person falls outside of these conventional parameters. In neo-capitalist society the highly successful and ruthless business person embodies the values cherished by that ideology. Yet it seems to be the case that what we have called ‘corporate crime’ in this paper is not deviant or unusual, as Minkes and Minkes (2010) point out, but is a routine part of corporate and business practice – which is to maximise profits and serve shareholders. In this sense, corporate irresponsibility as regards the public is not deviant. In this case we might argue that in an ideal scenario it is not so much that the media needs to cover corporate crime more, but that they should disseminate a more transparent account of what capitalism involves, namely that private companies, whether a bank or a corporation running a hospital unit a school, a railway network, will as a matter of routine seek to maximise profit at a cost. But given the impossibility of this due to the predominance of neoliberal ideology, and of course because most news outlets are themselves part of corporations dependent on advertising, one step in the right direction may be at least to shift away from the language of ‘accidents’ and ‘moral responsibility’.

This paper was written by authors who both work within the tradition of critical discourse analysis. This broad field of linguistic research is centrally interested in revealing the ideologies of (the) ruling elites that seek to (re)produce and maintain social inequalities which are buried in texts in media and other cultural contexts. In this paper we have only scratched the surface of the way that language can recontextualise corporate responsibility, looking in detail at some of the discourses that this involves. But it is clear that much more linguistic work needs to be done across different media. Drawing on the literature in criminology, this can allow us to explore more fully the role language plays in the mediated construction of crimes committed by corporations and governments and the way that language use is restricted by legal constraints.