Listening Rhetorically to Textual Silence: Intimate Partner Homicide Media Coverage

Abstract

This article combines Huckin's (2002) method of identifying textual silence and Ratcliffe's (2005) approach of rhetorical listening to examine the media coverage of intimate partner homicide. By examining a corpus of newspaper articles, this method listens to the silences surrounding intimate partner homicide coverage and thus reveals that the media, by foregrounding certain causes of partner homicide, reinforce the popular belief that partner homicide is an unexpected event, one in which the person snapped or in which a heated argument suddenly turned bad. Problematically, this framing does not offer an accurate view of the actual causes of intimate partner homicide.

Notes

¹Huckin provides a taxonomy of textual silence: speech-act, presuppositional, discreet, genre-based, and manipulative. For the purpose of this paper, I focus on manipulative silence.

²No attention was paid, on purpose, to the location of the crime in order to keep the information representative of U.S. discourse on partner homicide. A variation of this method whereby the researcher examines a particular region, perhaps a more politically liberal one, and compares it to another region, perhaps a more politically conservative one, may offer new insight into the textual silences found in the media coverage of partner homicide.

³The corpus of articles only includes heterosexual intimate partner homicide even though I did not exclude articles on homosexual intimate partner homicide.

⁴The exception was the case of the woman who was part of the Duke Lacrosse team scandal. She recently stabbed her boyfriend to death, but since she was previously in the public eye, her character was more of a focus.