This book follows the evolution of news reporting in 17th-century murder pamphlets and explores how persuasive discourse features were used, modified and re-adapted over the decades in order to bias people's perception of crime and justice in relation to the ideological imperatives of the time. Originally presented as moralizing publications aimed at safeguarding the social well-being of the country, murder pamphlets became an object of political propaganda in the years of the Irish Rebellion and the English Civil War and developed into a gradually more secularized source of public...