FEMICIDE IN ROMANIA. SOCIAL REALITIES AND MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS CASE STUDY: A FEMICIDE FROM AUGUST 2021 PRESENTED BY THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA
FEMICIDE IN ROMANIA. SOCIAL REALITIES AND MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS CASE STUDY: A FEMICIDE FROM AUGUST 2021 PRESENTED BY THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Summary/Abstract: Objectives. Femicide and violence against women (VAW) represent two phenomena with a major impact concerning the public health, women rights and the freedom of speech. This article aims to capture the manner in which a Romanian femicide case is framed in news reporting, the depictions of the victim and the abuser and the context, sources, language used in media news reporting on femicide. Material and methods. The analysis emphasizes media patterns (frames, portrayals, linguistic structures), which represent an important instrument in shaping public opinion and awareness. For this study, there were selected 20 articles which present a Romanian femicide case - August 2021. In order to get specific results, there were used two qualitative methods - critical discourse analysis and frame analysis. Results. Media news were analyzed from several points of view: the general context, the representation of the victim and of the perpetrator, the narrative of the event, the management of voices which appear during the description of the event and the language used by the journalist. The key findings show that femicide articles published in Romanian print media actualize the negative sensationalistic news tendency, detrimental to civic mobilization and public agenda change. Conclusions. The denunciation of violence committed by men against women has been and continues to be one of the major issues of the contemporary society, which needs an appropriate mediatization and framing; violence against women and femicide were accentuated by the pandemic context as well as by the race, class, age of the abused women.

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