True Crime draws on and makes available to American readers--and tests out--work on systems theory and media theory (for instance, the transformative work of Niklas Luhmann on social systems and of Friedrich Kittler on the media apriori--work yet to make its impact on the American scene). True Crime is at once a study of a minor genre that is a scale model of modern society and a critical introduction to these forms of social and media history and theory.