Public attitudes towards white collar crime are affected not
only by how such offenses are treated by government officials,
but also by the criminal defense bar, the media, the public relations
industry, and the academy. Defendants in white collar
criminal cases are much more likely than those in street crime
cases to have the money to hire lawyers, investigators, paralegals,
jury consultants, and others to assist in their cause. Highly paid
white collar criminal defense lawyers are more successful at
almost every stage in the criminal justice process than their public
defender counterparts. They do a better job of persuading
prosecutors not to indict, preventing the prosecution from
obtaining evidence needed to convict, keeping witnesses from
talking to prosecutors, presenting their case in the media,
obtaining favorable plea bargains, pursuing post-conviction
appeals, and arguing mitigation in sentencing.55 Some white collar
defendants even hire publicists and launch websites intended
to help repair reputations damaged by allegations of criminal
conduct.56 All of those retained are expert at exploiting the
moral ambiguity of white collar crime, whether at trial or in the
larger court of public opinion. The seriousness of white collar
crime also tends to be minimized by the media. Both newspapers
and broadcast media tend to give more attention to conventional,
interpersonal, sensational, and violent forms of
criminality than to their more subtle white collar counterparts.57
The more limited media coverage of such crimes seems to be
attributable to the complexity and supposed “dullness” of the
conduct involved, the more indirect nature of the harm experienced
by individual victims, and the fact that such criminality
tends to produce fewer striking visual images on which television
news in particular thrives.58 In addition, it may be that media
organizations are more likely to be intimidated in their coverage
of white collar crime by the possibility that corporate sponsors
might withdraw advertising and that deep-pocketed targets of
white collar investigations might institute defamation suits.