Thesis title: I valori notizia del femminicidio nella stampa quotidiana: un’analisi di dieci anni di giornalismo italiano
This research examines the representation of femicide in Italian daily newspapers over the last decade, with the aim of identifying the news values that shape its discursive construction. The study adopts the Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) approach (Bednarek and Caple, 2017), which conceives newsworthiness not as an intrinsic or objective property of events, but as a cultural and professional effect produced through journalistic discourse.
For this purpose, an original corpus named CorFem10 was compiled and analysed, consisting of 4,941 articles published between 2015 and 2024 in ten national newspapers. The analysis combines Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis, employing the software Sketch Engine for the quantitative component.
Findings show that the newsworthiness of femicide does not follow criteria of social relevance, but rather depends on narrative and cultural logics that selectively construct and hierarchize cases. While confirming the persistence of well-established frames in the literature, such as the “romantic love” and “loss of control” frames (Lalli and Gius, 2014), the study identifies a new discursive pattern, defined as the “announced tragedy” frame or the “yet another femicide” frame. This representation acknowledges the recurrence of the phenomenon but depoliticizes it, turning it into a form of collective fatality.
Another original contribution concerns the emergence of a discursive form of Eliteness, understood as a linguistic mechanism that attributes symbolic centrality to certain cases and produces a hierarchy of visibility among victims and stories. This observation supports and further develops the theoretical proposal, already suggested in previous studies, of a hierarchy of news values, showing how journalism not only represents violence but also constructs it symbolically, shaping public perception and the social boundaries of discourse on gender-based violence.
Finally, the research elaborates and proposes a preliminary list of news values specific to femicide —(Personalisation, Consonance, Impact, Proximity, Superlativeness, and Eliteness ) outlining the linguistic devices used for their identification and their main discursive characteristics.