How could it have come to this?

The way journalists report on crimes and court cases paints a revealing picture of the role that perpetrators victims and the question of guilt play in society. This representation has changed over time and reveals a societal shift in values and norms. This thesis analyses this change by means of court reports in order to draw conclusions about the social view of crime and journalistic practice. The theoretical construct behind the analysis is the evolution of court reporting from pamphlet collection to social critique changing values and framing as a classification of social reality. A total of 40 court reports published in the news magazine DER SPIEGEL and the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung within two study periods (1980-1989 and 2010-2020) were analyzed.