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Research on racial-ethnic portrayals in television crime news is limited and questions remain about the sources of representations and how these vary for perpetrators versus victims. We draw from power structure, market share, normal crimes, racial threat, and racial privileging perspectives to further this research. The reported race or ethnicity of violent crime perpetrators and victims are modeled as functions of: (1) situational characteristics of crime stories and (2) contextual characteristics of television market areas. The primary data are from a stratified random sample of television newscasts in 2002–2003 (Long et al. 2005). An important innovation of our work is the use of a national, more generalizeable, sample of local news stories than prior researchers who tended to focus on single market areas. Results indicate that both the context of the story itself and the social structural context within which news stories are reported are relevant to ethnic and racial portrayals in crime news. We find limited support for power structure, market share, normal crimes, and racial threat explanations of patterns of reporting. Racial privileging arguments receive more extensive support.

In this essay, I read the discourse of territorial control, population surveillance, and border security from a fundamentally ecological perspective. I have selected three novels and one short story as the textual basis for the following analysis. All of these works are structured around a single character, either a paid assassin or a drug smuggler, and all four imagine the open spaces of northern Mexico as places of both transit and surveillance. Although organized crime and drug cartels bring to mind large networks of individuals working in consort, the works of narconarrative studied here feature individuals existing in isolation from both their cohorts and the larger society. In their efforts to stalk a victim or evade detection, both the sicario and the smuggler produce much of the genre's dramatic force. The depiction of these characters also contributes to the literary formation of landscapes of surveillance and counter surveillance resulting in an image of both human society and the natural environment under constant observation by the military, police and cartels. In the process, these works also reveal the influence of semiotic practices typically found in contemporary journalism. One element in particular, the cartel map, has become a common visual tool to illustrate the regions of Mexico that have fallen under the control of organized crime. The mapping of cartels in order to construct geographical spaces of power, mobility and surveillance informs a type of narco-panoptic literary discourse that I analyze in the following pages of this essay. After surveying works by Elmer Mendoza and Bernardo Fernandez, I will conclude this essay with an extended analysis of Eduardo Antonio Parra's novel, Nostalgia de la sombra, a work of narrative fiction exceptionally rich in its integration of violence, surveillance and ecology.

The importance of characters in fictional audiovisual productions has received much emphasis in research on media entertainment. However, despite the centrality of characters, analysis of the factors that influence their design is a topic that has scarcely been approached. The objective of this research study was to analyze the process of designing fictional audiovisual characters. Participants (N = 303) were audiovisual communication students whose task was to create a fictional character while being manipulated experimentally (through instructions) as to the type of character to design (general versus immigrant character) and the fictional setting (hospital versus police station). The dependent variables were related to the attribution of narrative characteristics, socio-demographic characteristics, personality traits and potential for audience identification with the character. The results show that the type of character and narrative setting influenced the occupation assigned to that character: when the character to be designed was an immigrant and the action was to take place in a police station they were most frequently considered criminals. It was also confirmed that the character type to be designed affected the narrative role, role in the plot, educational level and socio-economic status assigned to the created character. In addition, the immigrant character was assigned a lower identification potential and this, in turn, influenced the personality traits assigned to the character.

Philip K. Dick's work, such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968, the source for the stunning film Blade Runner), Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974), and what Dick considered his masterpiece, A Scanner Darkly (1977), all have obvious detective story and police procedural elements. Many other examples of cross-fertilizing between the mystery and sciencefiction genres could be mentioned. Since the character of the detective is often what makes the mystery engaging, it seems almost obvious that aliens, robots, androids, and all sorts of future beings might be used as characters in interesting ways, and futuristic milieus such as faraway planets or space stations can be an appealing setting in which to create a locked-room mystery.

Surrounded by a kaleidoscope of characters and with a Mafia war in the background, which sees two families, the Sinagras and the Cuffaros compete for control of the territory, Inspector Montalbano investigates a wide range of cases: from bourgeois crimes, caused by jealousy, selfishness, revenge, or greed; to deaths ordered by the Mafia or by other criminal organizations; to false kidnappings and horse rustling. [...]private crimes often intertwine with organized crime or political plots, or are mistaken for Mafia activities. The idea of the family as a fortress has disintegrated. [...]the omertà (code of silence) is becoming more and more of a myth, as can be seen throughout the series and especially in La gita a Tindari (2000, translated as Excursion to Tindari, 2005), where in a hilarious scene, a group of elderly people quarrels over who has the right to testify first at the Vigàta police station (Excursion to Tindari 68-69). Since I don't like to leave things incomplete, I wrote a second novel, just to finish off this character. Coming back to detective fiction, I noticed that the majority of writers you cited are from Mediterranean countries. [...]you set your stories in Sicily, despite living in Rome for many years.