A growing number of criminologists are urging their peers to engage the general public concerning criminal justice issues in order to reverse the discipline’s marginalization and curb the recent intensification of punitive policies. This study examines the practical implementation of public criminology’s pedagogical practices in a sample of Canadian news media on a recent ‘tough-on-crime’ legislation. Overall, this study found that the ‘void’ of criminological evidence in mass media, which is so often lamented in the calls to public scholarship, was entirely absent. The author argues that the call to public criminology is already being answered by stakeholders outside of the academy, whose mass-mediated pedagogical practices are directed towards the furtherance of partisan agendas.