‘Crimes of passion’ or ‘horrific murders’? A corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis of reporting on domestic and non-domestic violence in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Daily Telegraph.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the current state of print news reporting of violence against women (VAW) in Australia. Specifically, it examines how blame and responsibility is encoded in articles on domestic violence (DV) and non-domestic violence (NDV), and considers the flow on effect of this on attitudes and understandings of VAW amongst broader society. The data are from two Sydney newspapers, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Daily Telegraph. Six cases overall are investigated, three DV and three NDV, which create a small, specialised corpus of 54 texts. It uses the emerging technique of corpus-based CDA, combining corpus methods with computer-assisted ‘manual’ text analysis in order to examine how the victim, perpetrator and the act of violence (AOV) are portrayed. The analysis reveals how blame and responsibility is often encoded in texts through the activation or passivation of certain social actors and different naming practices of perpetrators of DV and NDV. This study contributes to existing research on representations of VAW in the media and is the first to analyse this issue specifically from a linguistic perspective within the Australian context. It is also perhaps one of the only corpus-based CDA studies on VAW in the media. Through this, it offers methodological innovations as well as important findings related to the depictions of VAW in news media.