Discursive practices of territorial stigmatization: how newspapers frame violence and crime in a Chicago community

Abstract

This article deciphers the discursive practices through which Chicago's two major newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, stigmatize the South Shore community on Chicago's South Side. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article provides an in-depth linguistic analysis of the causation of territorial stigmatization through press coverage. It demonstrates that the two newspapers not only stigmatize South Shore through practices of hyperbolic naming, but that territorial stigmatization also flows from the transitivity of newspaper articles itself. By focusing on the transitivity of newspaper articles and their role in the production of territorial stigma, this article broadens our understanding of how territorial stigma is produced through symbolic defamation and denigration of spaces. It is argued that the two newspapers normalize and naturalize violence and crime as commonsense characteristics of everyday life in South Shore, thereby producing an image of South Shore as a space determined and indelibly shaped by violence and crime. segregation and discrimination, underscored by the erection of architectural and material borders, marginalizing and discriminating urban planning decisions, such as public housing transformation, and the policing and the criminalization of black communities (Shabazz, 2015;Rothstein, 2017;Chaskin and Joseph, 2015;Massey and Denton, 1993). In media representations, Chicago's South Side constitutes an economic Badlands in which street gangs are drivers of urban violence and insecurity (Wacquant, 2008;Aspholm, 2020;Stuart, 2020). It is in this historical and socio-cultural context in which newspapers' discursive practices of territorial stigmatization operate, and which they also reproduce and reinforce.In an attempt to transcend the well-known finding that newspapers and journalists are specialists in the symbolic defamation and stigmatization of spaces (Wassenberg, 2004; Devereaux et al., 2011), this article examines how -that is, through which discursive practices -newspapers and journalists exert territorial stigmatization. Drawing on a five-year discourse analysis of press coverage on the South Shore community by Chicago's two major newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, this article demonstrates that both papers stigmatize the community as a space determined and indelibly shaped by violence and crime.Both papers normalize violence and crime as quotidian to communal space in South Shore. I argue that this normalization of violence and crime in South Shore takes place via three discursive practices. First, both newspapers stigmatize South Shore through various naming practices, such as calling the community 'crime-infested', 'ailing', or 'a warzone'. Second, both papers sensationalize violence and crime in South Shore through hyperbolic descriptions of violence. Third, territorial stigmatization is produced by journalists' transitive choices when reporting on shootings in the South Shore community. Instead of informing about the ci...

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