“Is this terrorism?” The Italian media and the Macerata shooting

ABSTRACT

“Media events” and, even more, “contested media events” offer a unique opportunity to analyse how specific interpretative frames come to dominate public debate within a hybrid media system through complex transmedia processes. In this article, we look into how mainstream media and, in particular, daily newspapers, reported on and re-contextualised the fierce debate concerning the “Macerata shooting” that had exploded on Twitter and contributed to obscure the interpretative frame initially proposed by the writer Roberto Saviano, qualifying it as an act of “terrorism”. An analysis conducted on a corpus of 143 articles shows that newspapers helped to both spread a mitigated and reassuring picture of the attack, and reaffirm the hegemonic vision of terrorism that sees terrorists, by definition, as alien to the community of victims.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• social media
• mainstream media
• recontextualisation
• critical discourse analysis

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Italian University and Research Ministry (MUR) under Grant PRIN 2015 prot. 20159NJ7YK_002 Area 14.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

^1. Throughout the previous month, prominent political figures of the Northern League have repeatedly defined immigration as an emergency, depicting asylum seekers as potential criminals and accusing the government and left–wing parties of pursuing an “open–door policy to immigration”.

^2. According to Entman (1993) news messages can be analysed as textual and visual structures built around a set of elements that provide an interpretive framework for the audiences. Through framing, some aspects of reality are selected, emphasised and interpreted as an expression of a typical issue whose causes can be diagnosed, about which a moral judgement moral can be suggested and /or expressed, as well as actions and solutions can be proposed.

^3. Tv news show a similar pattern, too. On this point, see (Maneri 2020; Binotto, Nobile, and Rega 2020).

^4. As far as Italy is concerned, we must remember that the category of terrorism has also been widely used since the seventies to define the violent ideological radicalisation of far–right or far–left groups.

^5. As to whether the Macerata shooting could be considered an act of racist terrorism is testified by how the event was defined in one of the main sedimentation sites of collective memory: Wikipedia (Maneri and Quassoli 2020), as well as by the first–degree sentence passed by the Court of Assizes of Macerata on 24 December 2018 and by the fact that Brenton Harrison Tarrant wrote Traini’s name, together with that of other “heroes” in the current Western Crusade against Islam, on one of the cartridges he used in the Christchurch massacre. However, qualifying an intentionally homicidal attack by an Italian citizen (white) against migrants or asylum seekers (black) as an act of terrorism was unprecedented in the Italian media landscape. For example, the topic of terrorism did not enter the public debate when reporting on the anti–gipsy pogrom of Naples (2008) and Turin (2011) or the indiscriminate killing of two Senegalese citizens, chosen as targets and killed by two Italian citizens (Gianluca Casseri and Roberto Pirrone), on 13 December 2011 and 5 March 2018 in Florence, because of the colour of their skin. On these events, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Cristina_and_Violetta_Djeordsevic (last access on 07/30/2021); http://www.errc.org/news/four–convicted–of–violent–hate–crimes–against–roma–in–turin–lose–appeal–at–italian–supreme–court–small–victory–for–rule–of–law–in–italy (last access on 07/30/2021);

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Florence_shootings (last access on 07/30/2021);

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Florence_shooting (last access on 07/30/2021).

^6. According to this hypothesis, the resulting exponential increase in transactional models of communication and the increasing fragmentation of audiences into self–referencing subnetworks – similar to echo chambers – would promote forms of disintermediation as regards the synthesis function guaranteed by legacy media (Boccia Artieri, Bentivegna 2019).

^7. In this regard, many scholars have recently advanced convincing arguments supporting the idea of the so–called “digital politics” (Vaccari 2013) due to the pivotal role web communication, and social media have assumed in mediating and mediatising politics (Coleman and Freelon 2015; Krzyzanowski and Tucker 2018).

^8. As Broersma and Graham (2012), Broersma and Graham (2013) highlight, the public nature of tweets and the opportunities for interaction they offer make Twitter a useful tool for finding information, interacting with possible sources, checking the temperature of public debate (see Marwick and Boyd 2011) and influencing news coverage by traditional media (see Kiousis 2009; Kiousis et al., 2011; Marland 2012).

^9. See, https://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/1814/71951/italy_results_mpm_2021_cmpf.pdf?sequence=4.

^10. See (Bonerba et al. 2018) for a quantitative analysis of the frames used by newspapers to report on the Macerata shooting.

^11. Forza Nuova is a far–right political group, funded by Massimo Morsello and Roberto Fiore in 1997 whose political programme is focussed on fighting immigration, abortion, crime and whose ideology explicitly refers to the experience of historical fascism.

^12. As we already highlighted, this insurgent community, while losing ground over the course of the week we analysed, remained majority in the Twittersphere

13. See https://www.ilgior.nale.it/news/politica/sinistra–cala–lasso–coinvolgere–salvini–mandante–morale–1490173.html.

^14. See https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/in–edicola/articoli/2018/02/04/saviano–il–mandante–e–salvini–forza–nuova–sta–col–pistolero/4135606/

^15. The article was published on the printed version of the newspaper, and it is not available online.

^16. See https://www.repubblica.it/commenti/2018/02/03/news/chi_fa_finta_di_condannare_il_raid_di_macerata–300762833/.

^17. See https://ilmanifesto.it/si–chiama–terrorismo/

^18. For a more in–depth analysis see Anselmi et al. under review.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Monica Colombo

Monica Colombo, PhD, is a researcher in sociology at the Department of Psychology of the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. Her research interests include racist and anti-immigration discourses, ethnic discrimination, urban security, critical discourse studies and political discourse. On these topics she has published several journal articles and chapters in edited volumes. She guest edited a special issue of the Journal of Language and Politics on discourse and politics of migration in Italy.

Fabio Quassoli, PhD, is a professor of sociology of culture at the University of Milan-Bicocca, where he teaches Qualitative Research and Intercultural Relations. His research works has focused on multiculturalism, immigration control policies, immigrants’ criminalisation, institutional racism, and urban security. On these issues, he published some books, and various articles in international and national journals. He recently coordinated a research project on media, terrorism and the public sphere in Italy.