Epistemology of journalistic rituals : the case of domestic violence

Jontes, Dejan (author), Luthar, Breda (author)

This paper explores journalistic strategic rituals in newspaper and television reports of domestic violence, emphasises the importance of formal aspects of the media representation of violence and argues that these institutionalised forms produce the (un)importance of the issue of violence as a public problem. The purpose of such deconstruction of conventional journalistic narratives is the denaturalisation of those standard procedures of telling and framing the news that mythologise violence as an effect of individual pathologies. By overlooking its social dimensions, they establish violence as a natural, i.e. acceptable part of performing masculinity and most importantly, the social background of violence remains unexplored regardless of genre, whether it is in episodic television news stories, daily news items in quality dailies or in journalistic documentary melodramas. The most important function of these ritualised conventions is thus not so much the consolidation of the truthfulness of messages as in the act of establishing and narrowing what can be said at all.

• Language: English
• Work type: Not categorized
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: FDV - Faculty of Social Sciences
• Year: 2015
• Number of pages: Str. 21-37
• Numbering: Year 21, no. 3
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-82526
• UDC: 070:343.62
• ISSN on article: 1408-032X
• COBISS.SI-ID: 33819741
• Publication date in RUL: 25.05.2016

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Anthropological notebooks
• Shortened title: Anthropol. noteb.
• Publisher: Društvo antropologov Slovenije = Slovene Anthropological Society
• ISSN: 1408-032X
• COBISS.SI-ID: 62755072

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian

Abstract

Članek obravnava strateške rituale v novinarstvu na primeru časopisnega in televizijskega poročanja o nasilju v družini. Izpostavlja pomen formalnih vidikov medijskih reprezentacij nasilja in trdi, da te institucionalizirane forme proizvajajo (ne)pomembnost nasilja kot družbenega problema. Namen tovrstne dekonstrukcije konvencionalnih novinarskih naracij je denaturalizacija tistih postopkov upovedovanja in uokvirjanja novic, ki mitologizirajo nasilje kot učinek individualnih patologij. S tem, ko spregledajo družbene vidike nasilja, vzpostavljajo nasilje kot naraven, to je sprejemljiv del uprizarjanja moškosti in - kar je ključno - ne pojasnjujejo družbenega ozadja nasilja neglede na žanr, pa naj gre za epizodične televizijske novice, dnevna poročila v tisku ali novinarske dokumentarne melodrame. Najpomembnejša funkcija teh ritualiziranih konvencij tako ni toliko utrjevanje resničnostni sporočila kot pa v omejevanju tistega, kar je sploh lahko povedano.