Media and fears. The journalistic coverage of insecurity in Argentina

Abstract

An event becomes news when the journalists consider it relevant enough to make it public. These issues are significant to the audience depending either on their own direct connection with the story or on the acknowledgement and emphasis the media put on their coverage. The newsmaking process responds to multiple factors that have been thoroughly studied from diverse perspectives. Among them, the Framing theory states that the frames, the standards, the symbols and meanings found in media coverage belong to the society in which they are embedded.

When analyzing the news treatments of criminal cases, for example, it is easy to see that the “sensation of lack of safety” is dealt with as if it were synonymous with “misdemeanour” or “felony” despite the big differences these concepts show.

In the last few years, the feeling of vulnerability became the mail concern among the citizens and, when such a feeling scales, it turns into panic and runs the risk of being spread to the whole society. In this context, when analyzing the treatment media give to criminal cases, the Framing theory can strongly support the analysis of the “feeling of lack of safety” (Kessler, 2009), the “moral panic” (Cohen, 2009) or the “waves of violence” (Fernández Pedemonte, 2005).