Discourses of Corporate crime as natural disaster: the case of the Paddington Rail Crash

Drawing on the literature in criminology and media studies on the nature of social understandings of corporate crime and its representation in the media, this paper takes one small but important step in this direction by carrying out a linguistic case study on the news coverage of one sequence of events which resulted from corporate negligence – the Paddington rail crash, a sequence of news events that were important as they led to legal change as regards corporate responsibility in Britain. The paper concludes by showing that while the news coverage played an important part in leading to a change in the law regarding corporate responsibility, although this received little coverage in the press.