Death is an omnipresent part of daily life, and evokes both personal and public reactions. In contemporary mediated society we might have less personal experience of grief, but we get daily information about the death from the (news) media.
On the one hand, the orientation on youth, health, happiness, success, strength, and growth marks death as failure, loss or error, not as a normal ending to all that lives. This situation is described as lack of death culture as it was known before the era of antibiotics and chemical weapons. On the other hand, death actually appears regularly in a variety of forms in the mass media. However, the way journalism covers death and grief is influenced by a specific discourse of journalism: mediated information is selected, framed, and presented in a certain conventional form.
The aim of the present study is to analyse the representation of death in Estonian daily newspapers in 2010. In order to map the wide spectrum of death coverage in our everyday news, a flow a seven-scale analysis model was created. The model is on the one hand based on news factors and newsworthiness, on the other hand its aim is to capture the specific nature of death: inevitable, unexpected, final, violent, etc.
Adams, W. C. 1986. Whose lives count? TV coverage of natural disasters. – Journal of Communication, 36: 2, 113–122.
Allan, S. 1999. News Culture. Open University Press, Buckingham, Philadelphia.
Aries, P. 1974. Western Attitudes Toward Death: from the Middle Ages to the Present. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD.
Balćytiene, A. & Harro-Loit, H. 2009. Between reality and illusion: re-examining the diversity of media and online professional journalism in the Baltic States. – Journal of Baltic Studies, 40: 4, 517–530.
Borah, P. 2009. Comparing visual framing in newspapers: Hurricane Katrina versus tsunami. – Newspaper Research Journal, 30: 1, 50–57.
Dayan, D. & Katz, E. 1992. Media Events. Harvard University Press, Cambridge.
Dimitrova, D. & Lee, S. K. 2009. Framing Saddam’s execution in the UK press. – Journalism Studies, 10: 4, 536–550.
Elmasry, M. 2009. Death in the Middle East: an analysis of how the New York Times and Chicago Tribune framed killings in the Second Palestinian Intifada. – Journal of Middle East Media, 5: 1, 1–46.
Hanusch, F. 2008. Valuing those close to us. A comparison of German and Australian quality newspapers’ reporting of death in foreign news. – Journalism Studies, 9: 3, 341–356.
Höijer, B. T. 2004. The discourse of global compassion: the audience and media reporting of human suffering. – Media, Culture & Society, 26: 4, 513–531.
Keppinger, H. M. & Ehmig, C. 2006. Predicting news decisions. An empirical test of the two-component theory of news selection. – Communications, 31, 25–43.
Kitch, C. 2000. ‘A news of feeling as well as fact’. Mourning and memorial in American newsmagazines. – Journalism, 1: 2, 171–195.
Kitch, C. 2003. Mouring in America: ritual, redemption, and recovery in news narrative after September 11. – Journalism Studies, 4: 2, 213– 224.
Kitch, C. & Hume, J. 2008. Introduction and conclusions. – Journalism in a Culture of Grief. Eds C. Kitch & J. Hume. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, New York, xi, xxiv, 187–202.
Konstantinidou, C. 2008. The spectacle of suffering and death: the photographic representation of war in Greek newspapers. – Visual Communication, 7, 143–169.
Kübler-Ross, E. 1969. On Death and Dying. Macmillan Publishing Co, Inc, New York.
McGill, D., Iggers, J. & Cline, A. 2007. Death in Gambella: what many heard, what one blogger saw, and why the professional news media ignored it. – Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 22: 4, 280–299.
Paimre, M. & Harro-Loit, H. 2011. Media generated news waves – catalysts for discursive change: the case study on drug issues in Estonian print media. – Journalism. Theory, Practice & Criticism, 12: 4, 433–448.
Pantti, M. & Sumiala, J. 2009. Till death do us join: media, mourning rituals and the sacred centre of the society. – Media, Culture and Society, 31: 1, 119–135.
Shoemaker, P. 2006. News and newsworthiness: a commentary. – Communications, 31, 105–111.
Silcock, W. & Schwalbe, C. 2008. ‘Secret’ casualties: images of injury and death in the Iraq War across media platforms. – Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 23, 36–50.
Starck, N. 2007. Revelation, intrusion, and questions of taste. The ethical challenge for obituary editors. – Journalism Practice, 1: 3, 372–382.
Traber, M. 1992. Death and the media: an introduction. – Media Development, 39: 4, 3–5.
Walter, T., Littlewood, J. & Pickering, M. 1995. Death in the news: the public invigilation of private emotion. – Sociology, 29: 4, 579–596.
Winfield, B., Friedman, B. & Trisnadi, V. 2002. History as the metaphor through which the current world is viewed: British and American newspapers’ uses of history following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. – Journalism Studies, 3: 2, 289–300.
Wolfsfeld, G., Frosh, P. & Awabdy, M. 2005. Journalistic Mechanisms for Covering Death in Violent Conflicts: News about the Second Intifada on Israeli, Palestinian, and Al-Jazeera Television. Conference Papers, International Communication Association, Annual Meeting, New York, NY.
Wolfsfeld, G., Frosh, P. & Awabdy, M. 2008. Covering death in conflicts: coverage of the Second Intifada on Israeli and Palestinian television. – Journal of Peace Research, 45: 3, 401–417.
Zelizer, B. 2005. Death in wartime: photographs and the “Other War” in Afghanistan. – The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics, 10: 3, 26–55.
