There has always been awareness of white collar crime, especially by those who worked on Wall Street.
Look at the Google ngram that I linked to. In 1997, when you were 13 or so (you mentioned that you were 20 in 2004), the phrase "white collar crime" was at a relative low. Since then, the phrase "white collar crime" has grown in popularity in tandem with your maturation, which would account for your perception that the media is become more aware of it. However, the latest data available show that it is still not as popular is it was in 1996.
It may be the case that people are using the term "white collar crime" increasingly to refer to phenomenon which they used to just call "fraud". Another Google ngram search [1] shows that "fraud" is orders of magnitude more popular than "white collar crime".
There are plenty of other subjects where the popularity of equivalent nouns varies. For example, what do you call the people who fight wars? Soldiers? Troops? Warriors? [2].
Comments
There has always been awareness of white collar crime, especially by those who worked on Wall Street.
Look at the Google ngram that I linked to. In 1997, when you were 13 or so (you mentioned that you were 20 in 2004), the phrase "white collar crime" was at a relative low. Since then, the phrase "white collar crime" has grown in popularity in tandem with your maturation, which would account for your perception that the media is become more aware of it. However, the latest data available show that it is still not as popular is it was in 1996.
It may be the case that people are using the term "white collar crime" increasingly to refer to phenomenon which they used to just call "fraud". Another Google ngram search [1] shows that "fraud" is orders of magnitude more popular than "white collar crime".
There are plenty of other subjects where the popularity of equivalent nouns varies. For example, what do you call the people who fight wars? Soldiers? Troops? Warriors? [2].
[1] http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=white+collar+cr...
[2] http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=soldiers%2Ctroo...