Her name was Clodagh: Twitter and the news discourse of murder suicide

Quinn, Fergal; Prendergast, Muireann; Galvin, Audrey

doi:10.4324/9781003143307-6

Cited by 3 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 1 publication

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…On RTÉ ‘Morning Ireland’, the main presenter described a photo of Alan Hawe with Liam, Niall and Ryan, which had appeared in national newspapers. Thus, the tendency to foreground Alan Hawe rather than Clodagh begun in print coverage (Quinn et al, 2019) was carried over into broadcast coverage. Only one outlet, TV3, afforded more mentions to Clodagh.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Mega cases are those that particularly offend society and become a reference point for understanding subsequent homicides. Notably, the outrage surrounding the Hawe case was driven in part by an objection to the media coverage (Quinn et al, 2019). Ultimately, we argue that existing media guidelines for coverage of domestic violence and IPH are limited by their lack of attention to the concerns of broadcast news and suggest that guidelines need to address the practical needs of journalists and the public need for accurate coverage.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In short, a consistent and very obvious pattern emerges in the first 2 days of coverage whereby Alan Hawe was given more attention on the public service broadcaster than the people he murdered. Unsurprisingly, the nature of this broadcast coverage, which was mirrored in print coverage, provoked anger and instigated an online campaign # HerNameIsClodagh (Quinn et al, 2019).…”

Section: Blame or Exonerationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Importantly, the majority of these studies examine print media rather than broadcast media or social media. For example, only one study has examined social media (Twitter) representations of IPH and familicide in Ireland (Quinn et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Reporting familicide-suicide in broadcast media: An Irish case study to inform better practice

O’Brien

Culloty

2020

Journalism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

News media coverage plays an important role in the public recognition of intimate partner homicide (IPH) and familicide as crimes. However, studies find that news coverage typically fails to contextualise these crimes, relies on non-expert sources, and often engages in victim-blaming. Existing studies have primarily investigated print media. The lack of attention to broadcast media is significant because broadcast news attracts a larger share of public attention and it relies on distinct routines and practices that may influence coverage. To address this gap, this study presents an in-depth analysis of the broadcast news coverage surrounding a 2016 case of familicide-suicide in Ireland. Our analysis identifies patterns of decontextualisation, non-expert sourcing and perpetrator exoneration. Specifically, coverage decontextualised the crime through an emphasis on the family and the response of the community and through the privileging of (male) local sources, including male religious voices, over expert sources. Although victim-blaming was not very explicit, coverage frequently exonerated the perpetrator through references to his good character. Thus, we find that broadcast news replicates the patterns of print news and that the preference for on-the ground reporting privileged sources who were proximate to the crime rather than those who could provide an expert understanding of it. These findings are discussed in terms of efforts to change media practices for more accurate representations of IPH and familicide in news media.

show abstract

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Blame or Exonerationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Reporting familicide-suicide in broadcast media: An Irish case study to inform better practice

O’Brien

Culloty

2020

Journalism

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This mental illness referent arises when news media ‘attempts to “translate” an incomprehensible event’ by drawing on ‘a populist discursive paradigm of mental illness’ (Little and Tyson, 2017: 10). This theme has been picked up in Quinn et al’s (2019) case study on familicide in the Irish media, which identifies a ‘mental health frame’, although this is not explored in-depth.…”

Section: The Mental Illness/distress Framementioning

confidence: 99%

Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news

Buiten

Coe

2021

Crime, Media, Culture

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Familicide – the killing of a partner and child(ren) – is a rare and complex crime that, when it occurs, receives intense media coverage. However, despite growing scholarly attention to filicide in the news, little research to date has looked at how familicide is represented. Situated at the intersection of filicide, intimate partner homicide and very often suicide, how the knotty and confronting issue of familicide is reported on is telling of the discourses available to understand complex forms of family violence. In this article, we argue that reporting on familicide mirrors broader feminist concerns about the tendency to frame fatal family violence at the hands of men in individualised terms – often as driven by mental illness – at the expense of an accounting of gender and power. Here, we seek to elaborate on and contextualise what we call the mental illness/distress frame as part of the broader tendency towards psychocentrism. This is amplified in cases of familicide where cultural signifiers for the increasingly publicly conceived of issue of ‘domestic violence’ are often not apparent, leading to popularised psychological explanations to be assumed. The mental health/distress frame operates not only to obscure the role of gender and power in domestic and family violence; it obscures the connection between gender, mental distress and violence, naturalising (and gender-neutralising) mental distress and violence as a response to it. We argue that intersecting discourses – of gender, age, disability and the heterosexual nuclear family, for instance – operate in important ways to suggest, support and rationalise this frame. We illustrate these ideas through a detailed case study analysis of news reporting on a case of familicide in Sydney, Australia.

show abstract

Discursive Constructions of Domestic Violence Among Iranian Instagram Users

Ebadijalal

Weisi

2021

J Interpers Violence

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Domestic violence (DV) is a widespread social phenomenon, adversely impacting public mental and physical health. The abatement of such issue necessitates a priori social awareness and a posteriori social support. With that in mind, the present study aimed at disclosing dominant discursive constructions of DV among Iranian Instagram users. Driven by Fairclough’s (1992) notion of “moments of crisis,” critical discourse analysis was employed as the theoretical framework to elucidate the results obtained from 1,028 comments on nine DV-related posts. Our primary objective was to uncover Iranian Instagram commentators’ perception of the causes and consequences of DV as well as the perpetrator and victim’s roles through probing into the embedded social values and assumptions underpinning such discursive constructions represented within comments. Meticulous inspection of the data yielded six major themes, namely, (a) blaming the responsible, (b) offering solutions to the victims, (c) portraying the male perpetrators, (d) overgeneralizing the transgression, (e) disregarding men’s rights, and (f) portraying the female perpetrators. The results indicated that female and male commentators held dissimilar perspectives with regard to DV and that though the conceptualizations of DV were not destitute of prejudice, both perpetrators and victims were encouraged to take requisite steps to minimize the adverse impact of DV on their families and relations as well as on social and public health. The discursive themes identified in the current work may serve as the stepping stone toward the mitigation of DV within society.

show abstract

Her name was Clodagh: Twitter and the news discourse of murder suicide

Cited by 3 publications

References 1 publication

Reporting familicide-suicide in broadcast media: An Irish case study to inform better practice

Reporting familicide-suicide in broadcast media: An Irish case study to inform better practice

Competing discourses and cultural intelligibility: Familicide, gender and the mental illness/distress frame in news

Discursive Constructions of Domestic Violence Among Iranian Instagram Users

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About