The new prominence of ordinary voice in crime journalism – claims to have seen things, experienced things, felt things ‘first-hand’ – has the potential to decenter elite perspectives and open up crime news narratives to the voices of systemically criminalized subjects. However, I argue in this paper that the political potential of ordinary voice can only be realized in and through concrete instances of its use, and so needs to be examined within news texts as sites of micro-political struggle over meaning. Looking at Australian current affairs television coverage of so-called ‘African gang’ crime in Melbourne, this paper approaches crime news texts as sites of vulnerability politics, where different and sometimes competing claims to vulnerability encounter one another and struggle for public recognition. A close multi-modal analysis of three episodes of current affairs television uncovers four specific strategies of textual composition and presentation by which the criminalization of Black African youth is able to persist despite the testimonial interventions of the criminalized: appropriation, marginalization, subjugation and calculation. The paper concludes by considering the implications of this analysis for future studies of ordinary voice and citizen testimony in news reporting.

犯罪新闻学中普通话语的新突出之处-声称看到了事物，经历过的事物，感觉到了“第一手的东西”-有可能使精英观点失去中心并使犯罪新闻叙述面向系统地被刑事定罪的对象的声音。但是，我在本文中认为，普通声音的政治潜力只能在其具体使用中并通过其具体实例来实现，因此需要在新闻文本中进行考察，以作为对意义进行微观政治斗争的场所。纵观澳大利亚时事电视台报道的墨尔本所谓的“非洲帮派”犯罪，本文将犯罪新闻文本作为脆弱性政治的网站，在这里脆弱性的不同主张有时是相互竞争的主张相遇，并为公众的认可而奋斗。对时事电视的三集进行的密切多模式分析发现了四种具体的文本构成和呈现策略，尽管犯罪者的证言干预，但仍可以继续将黑人非洲青年定为犯罪：挪用，边缘化，征服和计算。本文的结论是考虑了这种分析对新闻报道中普通话语和公民证言的未来研究的意义。