Parking Humanity at the Door? Journalists and Editors Perspectives on Covering Murder-Suicide in Ireland

ABSTRACT

This study examines how the production of news making is evidenced in published content about the complex social phenomenon of murder-suicide. Building on Reese and Shoemaker’s hierarchical model (2016), this study aims to understand the impact of the individual, routines, ideological, organisational and social institution levels on news content surrounding a case of murder-suicide in the Republic of Ireland. Data was gathered from in-depth interviews with journalists and news editors who detailed the nexus of competing interests that influence their work processes. Findings reveal how organisational structures, coupled with ideological orientations, industrial routines and the professional ideology of objectivity, acted as crucial gatekeepers, encouraging a dependency on elite sources. A crime narrative supported through the operationalisation of a media template perpetuated a hierarchy of victims. These representations served to mirror the institutionalised patriarchal power.

KEYWORDS:

• Murder-suicide
• journalists
• editors
• Ireland
• Interviews‌
• news media production

Introduction

Studies of news production shed light on the constraints, contingencies and complexities at work and provide a theorisation of the operations of the news media and the production of the discourses at play within news media representations (Cottle 2007). Journalists and scholars have suggested that the formulaic nature of such practices when writing about sensitive issues such as murder-suicide is problematic (Dahmen et al. 2018). The challenge according to Turkewitz (2016) is in conveying “the magnitude of each tragedy to a nation that has heard this story before”. In a study of how the news media cover mass shootings in the US, Muschert and Carr (2006) found that reporters follow “a similar pattern”,¹ which can lead to “compassion fatigue”. Using the hierarchy of influences framework (HOI model) (Reese and Shoemaker 2016), this study explores the construction of sensitive news stories from the perspective of media professionals based at Irish newspapers. This multi-level analysis is conducted in order to understand how five levels of this framework; the individual, professional routines and practices, organisational characteristics, the ideological and social institutions level, influence individual journalists and news editors.

Semi-structured interviews with news editors and senior journalists from national newspapers in Ireland reveal how each of the levels under examination exert influence on the construction of stories of a typification of murder-suicide, namely femicide-suicide, which is a sensitive under-researched topic. Following Hartley (2013) this study views the construction of news as an interaction between the social producers of news and the objective social reality. The following sections detail a review of the literature on murder-suicide and femicide-suicide. An exploration of media representations of murder-suicide is then put forward followed by an explanation of the theoretical framework, the Hierarchy of Influences. The case study of the Greaney femicide-suicide is set out along with the methodological approach adopted for the project and a comprehensive analysis of the interviews conducted with senior journalists and editors.

Categorisation of Murder-Suicide and Femicide-Suicide

Murder-suicide is a generic term that refers to an event in which an individual commits murder and immediately or shortly thereafter dies by suicide (Adinkrah 2014; Panczak et al. 2013). The National Suicide Research Foundation in Ireland, an independent research unit, has recorded 27 murder-suicides in Ireland between 2004 and 2021 including filicide-suicide, familicide, (NSRF 2021)² and murder-suicide involving friends and colleagues (the list does not include probable murder-suicide cases and cases of filicide without suicide). Suicide rates in Ireland for the same period show 7920 people died indicating a far greater rate of death by suicide than murder-suicide and highlights the rarity of incidents of murder-suicide in Ireland (CSO 2000).

Femicide-suicide involves the killing of a woman by a male intimate partner (Dawson and Gartner 1998). This typology accounts for most murder-suicide events (Banks et al. 2008; Flynn et al. 2009). It is a strongly gendered phenomenon (Enander 2010), typically carried out by men and involves killing a female victim (Karlsson et al. 2021). It is often the culmination of years of male perpetrated violence (Moracco, Runyan, and Butts 1998).

Media Representations of Murder-Suicide and Femicide-Suicide

Research has found that murder-suicides are more likely to be covered by the news media than incidents of suicide as they represent a higher news value (Jamieson, Jamieson, and Romer 2003). Femicide-suicide is the most commonly reported murder-suicide typology by the news media (Wood Harper and Voigt 2007). Media coverage of murder-suicide in Ireland has been the subject of much debate and has been described as “concerning” with critics pointing to the sympathetic coverage of the perpetrator (see Dunne 2016; Lally 2016).³ The mainstream news coverage of a case of murder-suicide in Ireland drew criticism and instigated an online Twitter campaign (#HerNameWasClodagh) that critiqued positive portrayals of the perpetrator and the erasure of the victims in coverage (Quinn, Prendergast, and Galvin 2019). There is a paucity of research on journalists perceptions of media production of cases of femicide-suicides. Cullen, O’Brien, and Corcoran’s (2019) research found that sources, conventions, and institutional constraints all represent challenges when reporting on cases of domestic violence. Research into the reporting of familicide-suicide in Irish broadcast media identified patterns of decontextualisation, non-expert sourcing and perpetrator exoneration (O’Brien and Culloty 2022). In cases of femicide-suicide, reporting the facts is a convention that allows journalists to be selective, interpretive, and constructive. Poorly constructed representations can deflect criticism from the perpetrator and obscure the issue of violence against women (Monckton-Smith 2012), especially given that domestic abuse and coercive control are not clinical conditions, but rather patterns of behaviour (Monckton-Smith 2010). These discourses can serve to reinforce a dominant patriarchy while the gendered nature of the crime goes unacknowledged. Furthermore, the crime is depicted as random and outside of its wider social context (Limbrick 2013). The accepted moral order of the family dynamic is sustained. In reporting crimes such as this factually, features that would distinguish them, such as representations of male coercive power and control, are not highlighted as they do not fit into this reporting convention (Dahlgren 1988). Cases of femicide-suicide are reported in an over-simplistic manner. Therefore, the public are not accurately perceiving femicide-suicide as a case of extreme domestic violence. The media construct a “special reality” of crime (Quinney 1970, 281) that is prone to biases determining what the media does and does not publish. Jewkes cites that the news media do not explicitly cover all forms and expressions of crime and victimisation but shed light on elements of the crime by exaggerating and dramatising relatively unusual crimes such as murder-suicide (Jewkes 2004). One of the central claims of femicide-suicide coverage is that it is focused on the perpetrators, their motivations, rather than on the victims and their desire not to be dead (Quinn, Prendergast, and Galvin 2019). Perpetrators tend to be portrayed, not as men who committed the most extreme form of domestic violence, but as individuals who failed to live up to the modernist ideas about masculinity (Chesney-Lind and Chagnon 2017). Scourfield et al. (2012) cites that what can often drive a femicidal killer is the concept that the loss of money and or work which are seen as representative properties of the hegemonic breadwinner, and “can result in a loss of masculine honor” (p.13) and the perpetrators are ultimately portrayed as individuals who “just snapped” (Niblock 2018, 2455).

This paper builds on previous research that examined media framing of three cases of murder-suicide in Ireland (Galvin, Quinn, and Cleary 2021). It found evidence of four causal frames to explain the three typologies of murder-suicide. The causal frames uncovered are mental health; financial debt; fall from grace; and “out of the blue”, while a domestic violence frame was notable in its absence (Galvin, Quinn, and Cleary 2021).

The media play a powerful role in how an issue can be portrayed and indeed understood, whether it be through the prism of crime (Jewkes 2004), providing a causal reason for the incident (Dimitrova and Strömbäck 2005), victim blaming (Lamb and Keon 1995; Meyers 1996), or excluding the wider social and patriarchal context in which the murder-suicide occurs (Cullen, O’Brien, and Corcoran 2019). The media can also only provide a limited picture of murder-suicide because of selection decisions that are made at multiple levels.

Van Dijk (2015) has found that “us” versus “them” rhetoric produced within media discourse can allow certain social classes to “belong” more than others. Quinn and Vaughan’s research (2019) found that the media depersonalised events concerning minority “lower social class” groups, which has implications for the perpetuation of unequal power relationships within society. Greer (2004) cites that not all victims receive equal attention in the media. The “ideal victim” includes those who are perceived as vulnerable, defenceless, innocent, and worthy of sympathy and compassion (Christie 1986, 18).

Taylor (2009) cites that the media’s portrayal of women mirrors the overall treatment of women in society. Women are subjugated by men through the social structure and media representations of these cases can reinforce this reality, which is representative of patriarchy as a dominant social institution. Femicide-suicide is the most extreme form of violence perpetrated against a woman and is the most extreme form of the patriarchal system (Masciave 2019). Elite sources, such as the police and other agents of the criminal justice system act as gatekeepers of crime information and can reinforce the dominant representation of patriarchal power. What they choose to make available to or withhold from journalists plays a role in shaping the news media’s construction of crime (Chermak 1995). Journalists can present their stories in hegemonic ways because they rely on elite sources and have been subsumed by the dominant ideology within a powerful social institution such as law enforcement (Fowler 2013). The immense time pressures to publish cross platform content may also contribute to the oversimplification and routine reporting of a complex issue like murder-suicide. Kitzinger (2000) cites the use of media templates as instrumental in shaping narratives around particular social problems and claims that they are used as a type of rhetorical shorthand. Templates are powerful, often invisible, influences on how media power operates. In the process of transforming a key event into a media template, details may be obscured and facts be misrepresented or omitted (Kitzinger 2000). Templates are instrumental in shaping narratives around particular social problems, guiding public discussions, and are crucial to developing understandings of how reality is framed and how media power operates. They can filter out dissenting accounts, camouflage conflicting facts, and promote one narrative. They are used to highlight patterns in particular social problems. The meanings attached to templates may be reinforced or altered as they are applied to events as they unfold. These templates are created and maintained by source strategies, journalistic routines and organisational influences (Kitzinger 2004).

Hierarchy of Influences

While a specific case study of femicide-suicide emphasises the importance of a particular typification of murder-suicide, the HOI framework identifies the “structuring mechanisms and logics that have wider significance” (te Walvaart, Van den Bulck, and Dhoest 2018, 902).

The individual level considers the personal traits of news workers, the news values they adhere to, and identify within a story, professional roles, moral agency or ethics, and other demographic features such as gender and class (Willnat, Weaver, and Wilhoit 2019). Routines and practices enable the journalist to minimise the uncertainties of newsgathering by providing access to reliable sources, the management of information, and the structuring of content. This has led to a standardised approach to news production through the adoption of media templates, routine news gathering processes such as fact checking, news values, and presentation of content (Hanitzsch and Mellado 2011). Definitions of newsworthiness allow media professionals to see some events as news and not others. Factors such as news values of conflict, fascination with extreme levels of violence, and organisational power structures can influence whether an event is selected as news and how it becomes defined (Robinson 2005). These routine structures of news gathering give us important information about how the media organise resources, which can serve to frame stories in a particular way.

A central focus of the research at this level is acknowledging that the freedom of journalistic work routines is in large part set by organisational structures that must balance commercial with professional concerns. For example, the impact that codes of practice have on the everyday operation of news work is ambiguous and manifestly unclear in a news media production context as well as in its content. Organisational pressure may increase demands for productivity but may devalue standards and quality (Berry 2013, 2). Boeyink (1994) suggests codes of ethics and practice are considered in discussions over controversial content and exist in tandem with the pressures of construction and the processing of the news product.⁴ News organisations can also impact how journalists and editors function at this level and “how power is exercised within it” (Reese 2001, 181). In this regard, organisational incentives and control mechanisms have the potential to act as powerful influences on the selection and shaping of content (see Preston 2009).This level is not always overt in terms of assessing its impact on the construction of stories, due in no small part to the authority of its hierarchy and the power wielded therein. Critical media scholars (see Chomsky and Herman 2002; Hallin 1994) link the shaping power of ideology to the production of news content. Here the media serve a “hegemonic function” by constantly amplifying dominant ideas and positions (Shoemaker and Reese 2014, 81) where journalists will agree with the elite-held perspective.

The social institutions level demonstrates the influence of a pervasive patriarchy as a social institution on the media and how this is reflected in media production practices and their representation of cases of femicide-suicide. As a social institution, the patriarchal framework maintains men’s power, this interacts strongly with media representation of cases of femicide-suicide, which maintain dominant representations of femicide-suicide as a regular crime and not as an extreme demonstration of patriarchy (Masciave 2019). This level aims to illuminate the structures of patriarchal communication embedded in the social practices of storytelling and reporting in a case of femicide-suicide. This meso-level helps to perpetuate dominant values articulated at the macro-level and inspire practices and routines at the micro-level (See DeCillia 2017).

Digital media technologies and news outlets have altered all aspects of news reporting and production. They have introduced alternative routines of news production through the emergence of user generated content with users having a footprint in the representation and circulation of published content. Numerous studies have highlighted that a great deal of Twitter platform content, for example, relies on mainstream media content either via sharing, responding to and critiquing (Rogstad 2016), and as an amplifier and filter (Asur et al. 2011)This networked and interactive media environment affects media work, tools, processes, and ways of thinking (Ai, Gibrilu, and Zhang 2022).

This study of a particular case of murder-suicide in Ireland focusses on the five levels of the HOI model described above: (1) Individual, (2) Routines and Practices, (3) Organisational, (4) Social systems level, (5) Social Institutions level (Table 1).

Table 1. Definition and characteristics of news shaping content (Shoemaker and Reese 2014).

Level	Definition	News media shaping value	HOI level
Individual	Personal traits, professional roles, gender	Autonomy within the web of constraints within which they operate	Micro
Routines and practices	Rules, forms, habits, methods, patterns	Fact checking, news values templates and presentation routines,	Micro
Organisational	Structures and policies of the news organization	Agency control through organisational structures, top down information flows, resource allocation	Meso
Social institutions level	The constraining influence of a social institution such as patriarchy on, the media as another social institution.	Gate keeping influence; embeddedness of the reporters within institutions which reinforce, justify and normalise cultural frameworks privileging men over women (McManus and Dorfman 2005)	Meso
Social systems level	Ideology	Autonomy of journalists, reinforcement of hegemonic elite consensus.	Macro

Table 1 details the various news media forces and phenomena as laid out by Reese and Shoemaker (2016), such as fact checking, sourcing and agency, which are normative conceptions of journalism and applied in the context of the phenomena under study, femicide-suicide.

To explore the experience of practice from the perspectives of journalists and editors, this study explores the following research questions:

1. How do journalists and editors perceive the five levels of influence of the HOI framework in the construction of stories in a case of femicide-suicide?

2. In what way do they feel these factors impact on their end news product?

The following sections explain the methodological rationale for this study and the main findings.

Methodology

The case under investigation for this study is a femicide-suicide that took place in Ireland in December 2014. Fifty-three-year-old Michael Greaney of Cobh, Co Cork, fatally stabbed his wife, 49 year-old Valerie, and injured one of his two adult children, Michelle Greaney, before taking his own life. Print media was chosen as the main focus primarily due to the ongoing influence of the medium in an Irish context, the intensity of the coverage of this incident on this media platform,

This case was selected as femicide-suicide represents the second highest rate of death of all murder-suicides in Ireland. The impetus for this study arose from the previous research by Galvin, Quinn, and Cleary (2021) found that a history of mental health problems in the Greaney case was used by the media to excuse the act of femicide-suicide; this was not an act of extreme violence but as a result of chronic depression. Controlling and proprietary attitudes towards women were not acknowledged, while racialised attitudes and patriarchal framing were present, placing a higher news value on Michael Greaney than his victim, Valerie. In interviewing journalists, I was able to establish why these stories were framed in a particular way and verify the accuracy of these frames and representations. This study used rich data provided by a relatively small sample of expert informants on an important but under-researched topic Data was derived from semi-structured interviews with a purposive snowball sample of seven key media professionals from print outlets.

Three of the journalists were personally known to the author and respondents suggested the other candidates. Samples in qualitative research tend to be small in order to support the depth of case-oriented analysis fundamental to this mode of inquiry (Sandelowski 1996). Additionally, qualitative samples are purposive, that is, selected by virtue of their capacity to provide richly-textured information, relevant to the phenomenon under investigation. All journalists interviewed had written multiple articles about cases of murder-suicide and had written about the Greaney case during the three years prior to being interviewed or were editors who played a role in managing and directing coverage. Two of the interviews were recorded face to face and five were recorded remotely and were then transcribed. Each interview lasted an average of one hour (Table 2).⁵

Table 2. List of participants.

Job title	Role	Gender	Age range	Years working in journalism
News Editor 1	News Editor of National Broadsheet	Male	Mid 50’s	30
News Editor 2	News Editor of National Tabloid	Male	Mid 50’s	30
News Editor 3	News Editor of National Tabloid	Male	Mid 50’s	32
Journalist 1	Regional Correspondent for National Broadsheet	Male	50’s	29
Journalist 2	Former News Reporter for National Tabloid	Male	30’s	12
Journalist 3	National Freelance Journalist	Female	40’s	20
Journalist 4	Regional Correspondent for National Broadsheet	Male	50’s	30

Semi-structured interviews with journalists and editors sought to determine the various factors that they deal with in constructing stories of a case of femicide-suicide. Journalists and editors were asked questions using five themes adopted from the hierarchy of influences model (Shoemaker and Reese 2014): individual, routine, organisational, ideological and social institutions. For each level of influence, journalists were asked questions using an interview guide that carries key questions related to the following themes:

• Individual level:

  • o What types of personal challenges do you face while reporting on the Greaney case of murder-suicide?

  • o How do you view the task of covering a murder-suicide?

• Routine level:

  • o Talk me through how you covered the Greaney case.

  • o Is this typical of how you would usually cover these types of cases?

• Organisational level:

  • o How do organisational rules, policies and resources affect your reporting in this case?

  • o What, if any, input is there editorially?

• Social system level:

  • o How do ideological forces influence journalists’ reporting?

• Social Institutions level:

  • o What are the broader institutional challenges (including social and cultural) that reflect journalists’ influences on their reporting of the Greaney case?

The interview forms developed for the editors were only slightly different from those of the journalists: The content was similar but some adjustments had to be made owing to the different nature of the work and working conditions.

The coding process required a detailed reading of the interview transcripts followed by a grouping together of common patterns, ideas or themes, and putting them into categories. Once themes emerged, a further analysis was conducted to establish if they overlapped with another level of the HOI model under examination in this work. A thematic web emerged (Attride-Stirling 2001) that identified core themes from the interviews and the linkages each of these discourses may have to other themes.

Results

I have presented the common themes that emerged from the dataset as separate categories. However, many share common elements and, thus, should not be considered as mutually exclusive. For example, the reliance on expert voices, such as law enforcement, as primary or first tier sources, supports the crime frame narrative, which tends to minimise the social context while drawing attention to isolated incidents. Patriarchal constructions are exemplified by issues of financial loss and mental health problems that fail to call out the event as the most extreme form of patriarchy. Similarly, the use of a media template as a rhetorical shorthand fits with the notion of the “ideal” victim and accommodates a hierarchy of victims in how stories are operationalised and constructed, be it consciously or subconsciously.

Use of Media Template

All respondents cited the use or direction of a pre-determined framework or template, which they used to make sense of the Greaney story. The template is operationalised at a routine and organisational level and facilitates typical news-making conventions such as the inverted pyramid structure and helps to define the who, what, when, where and how in a fast-paced environment.

So for me it was quite regimented. Day one is literally what happened in the Greaney case. Day two is who did it happen to? Day three is why it happened. (Journalist 1)

It’s like you’ll get the old journalistic thing of the inverted pyramid. The major details, the who, what, where, when, how. Then you’ve got your story over the line. (Journalist 2)

Editorial control can influence the form of the media template. One senior journalist, who has over thirty years experience, said that the editor had the final input into the structure and placement of stories on murder-suicide.

I might think A is the most important element of the story. And he might disagree and say, “no B is”. He’s the boss, so it’s his call that ultimately holds sway. (Journalist 2)

One journalist said he would not challenge his editor if he felt the wrong news line was being taken.

I might pitch a top line but the news editor would go, “no, no” … the editor makes the decision. (Journalist 4)

A news editor for a national newspaper said he “designs” what he wants, “to a very large extent I do my own thing” (News Editor 1). He determines how a story is covered, what resources and space are given to it. Another editor of a national newspaper said he would direct the journalist as to what he needed and who to speak with in the course of their coverage of the Greaney case

We briefed the journalist on maybe who to contact in Cork. We would brief them on the best people to talk to in those kinds of circumstances. (News Editor 2)

Here we can see how power relations operate within the production of news work at both an ideological and organisational level and the implications for journalistic agency and news construction.

“Expert” Voices

Organisational pressures dictate that news production is time and resource efficient to facilitate the publication of stories that are often presented as episodic,⁶ dramatic, and unusual (Reul et al. 2018). Interviewees were asked who they first approached in the immediate aftermath of a case emerging. One journalist explained how the Gardai (the name of the Irish police force) were the first point of contact when starting to investigate the Greaney case, “Garda contacts, its always the Gardai” (Journalist 4).

They also sought out local politicians, neighbours, and members of the clergy as secondary tier sources of information.

I spoke to local politicians to locals in the area, and people who are in a position of responsibility in the area. People who are in a position, of authority, like a parish priest. (News Editor 2)

It was a local Councillor, or some local here in the community that I was familiar with. (Journalist 3)

Media professionals can also exert agency when determining whose voice to prioritise. In this way, they are not simply disseminators of other people’s information, but are also active players in the construction and promotion of their own frames (Callaghan and Schnell 2001). In accessing conventional sources of information, the broader phenomenon and structural issue of violence against women is lost. The absence of other voices works to keep in place dominant discourses of understanding femicide-suicide as a regular crime and not as an extreme demonstration of patriarchy.

The organisational environment imposes its own set of limitations or rules as to what is and is not acceptable in terms of news and also in relation to the selection of sources. The process of news selection and journalistic sourcing is shaped by long-established and quite stable professional standards and routines (Reich 2009). Journalistic efficiency is obtained through the optimal allocation of scarce resources in terms of space and time at an organisational level, whereas power considerations have to do with the perceived authority that journalists attribute to their sources. Therefore, journalists are inclined to respect a certain source hierarchy in which they ascribe more credibility to official elite sources, such as known experts and representatives, than to unofficial sources, such as ordinary citizens (see also Sigal 1973).

Reliance on a Crime Narrative

Respondents were asked whether or not they were aware that stories of the Greaney case were constructed through a crime narrative and not as a wider social issue or as a case of extreme domestic violence and if so, why.⁷ All respondents said they believed that writing the story using a crime narrative was appropriate in the context of the Greaney murder-suicide.

If you’re not going to write it as a crime story, how do you write it? Murder is a crime. Murder-suicide is different. Because a crime has been committed. And the perpetrator isn’t around to face justice. When an innocent person, or innocent people, including children are killed, of course it’s going to be written from a crime perspective. (Journalist 1)

When journalists write stories through the prism of crime, they employ the news genre convention of “reporting the facts”. This was justified by one journalist in the following way:

So that was always kind of journalism with numbers … ., get the names, get cause of death, get a line that we hang splash off. Parking humanity at the door is what has to be done. (Journalist 2)

Using a crime narrative or fact-based convention, allows stories to be “quickly and easily portrayed” (Lawlor and Tolley 2017, 969) and studies have shown that the media tend to disproportionately report on violent crimes (Chiricos, Eschholz, and Gertz 1997). One journalist suggested that the news cycle could have accommodated a wider representation of the Greaney story at a later date to include information from advocacy groups, researchers etc. but not before the crime focus has been established.

You’ll see a story will suddenly change direction and it stops being so much a crime. And it becomes like a societal issue, whether it be domestic violence. Whether it be mental health resources. But that usually happens twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours into the story. (Journalist 4)

Several respondents cited the demands of writing content for online as well as for the published paper and resources as barriers in developing the issue of murder-suicide to include a more thematic focus. Journalists had to bend to the organisation and its financial needs, which is a common influence on work routines:

We have a certain window of time where we report on a story. Our resources mean that we have to dictate to a certain extent that we’ve to report on the story itself. (News Editor 3)

The marketability of the story will influence what stories get selected and the duration and length of coverage they receive (Sigal 1973) and often have little to do with “the realities or the complexities of the crime” (Sherizen 1978, 206). Media professionals working in each news organisation must do more to produce stories but with less time and resources. Journalists must also meet the challenges of publishing for online, which can often mean “you’re rushing and you are making very, very quick decisions” and they must “just scratch the surface and then move on”. (Journalist 3)

Journalists and news editors were unaware they had constructed a single narrative, one which identified potential causes for the murder-suicide. Previous reports at the time of the murder-suicide cited that Michael Greaney “had a serious mental health issue” (Excerpt, Greaney, Irish Daily Mirror, 29 December 2014). The media implied that the act of murdering his wife and attacking his daughter was not one of extreme violence but of “chronic depression” (Irish Daily Star, 1 February 2017). In the context of the Greaney murder-suicide financial debt and mental health were put forward as central causal reasons for the murder-suicide. One journalist said:

I would’ve been very reluctant to speculate on motivation. I just think the media doing it is wrong. Though I actually see that I’ve done it myself, in this case, which surprised me … it always strikes me that journalists are just always too quick to be far too authoritative on things that they knew nothing about the day before. And suddenly, I see media writing with great authority on what the story is all about. (Journalist 4)

There is an interesting dynamic that was revealed when analysing organisational structure and journalists’ descriptions of their work routines that showed that organisational structure can at times lead to a contradiction in journalistic ideology. Here we can see how one journalist was unaware that they had constructed the story in such a way as to direct the interpretation of it for the reader.

By pointing to causal reasons for femicide-suicide, the male killer is not looked upon as the perpetrator of the most extreme form of patriarchy but rather an individual who had mental health issues and was in financial debt, These dominant representations of the perpetrator reflect institutionalised patriarchal power (Hearn 2004).This evidences the power of patriarchy as a social institution, which permeates coverage of this case.

Hierarchy of Victims Prevalent in Coverage of Murder-Suicide

Two respondents believed there is a hierarchy of news value in terms of murder-suicide deaths and the social class of the victims. One respondent said

If it happens in a middle-class area, then it becomes far more shocking than a working-class area. If it’s Travelers ⁸it’s lower news value. Any story involving Travelers, I’m not sure anybody will say. But its news value decreases. Similarly, Eastern Europeans, I mean theres a hierarchy of victims in Irish media purely to my mind. The amount of coverage of murders, or violence among those is very little, relative to settled, middle-class people. (Journalist 4)

This position chimes with research by Gekoski, Gray, and Adler (2012), who found that newsworthiness is greatly, possibly even primarily, concerned with measuring the “worth” of the life lost. Another journalist cited the fact that those who are not identifiable as “us” or who is “a so called pillar of the community”, are higher on the news value threshold than those who are not considered to be indigenous Irish, and “seem to get more prominence” (Journalist 2). This is also evidence when we consider the overemphasis placed on the male perpetrator in coverage of cases of femicide-suicide (Quinn, Prendergast, and Galvin 2019). Richards, Kirkland Gillespie, and Dwayne Smith (2011) found that the presentation of women in the media is reflective of their status in society, which supports hierarchical gender roles that position women as secondary to men.

Discussion

This study found that the operationalisation of media templates encompasses a routine of news-shapers’ organisational and editorial influence. Journalists and editors constructed a template to “promote one type of narrative” around the social problem (Kitzinger 2000, 76). Furthermore, the primary focus was on getting information from sources “that they could stand over” (Journalist 3). From an ideological perspective, participants understood their role in constructing these stories to be about “getting the facts”. Websdale and Alvarez (1997) call this “forensic reporting”, while Bullock and Cubert (2002) call it the “police frame”. Journalists’ reliance on elite sources served to reciprocate the ideology and personal agenda of those sources with little challenge to these positions. It reproduced a dominant social order and failed to problematise the destructive effects of hegemonic masculinity. Galvin, Quinn, and Cleary (2021) found that this selection becomes problematic when sources are reproduced in reportage as verifiable and factual, prioritising these sources may leave limited space for alternative, more informed viewpoints who could offer greater context. The media typically will focus on cases on femicide-suicides intensely and disproportionately because they represent high values of news. They are stories which can be produced quicky and efficiently with few resources required from an organisational level (Chermak 1995). The primary tension here, lies between the structure at the organisational level and the agency of the individual journalist (Reese 2007). The journalists in this study were aware of a hierarchy of victimisation, both reflected and reinforced in media and official discourses. As such, the newsworthiness of a story will decline where the victims are seen as less worthy. These simplistic binaries produce/reproduce hegemonic assumptions about acceptable and deviant expressions of class (Madriz 1997). Within the context of media production, these class-based assumptions are produced, legitimised, and consumed through discourses about the other. This is also a gender hierarchy, promulgated by media production practices that favour a greater and more sympathetic coverage of the perpetrator,which serves to reinforce patriarchal power (Kappler 2012). This points to the ways in which the media manage to create the illusion that they are objectively reporting on things as they happen. In that context, and with some notable exceptions, the lack of reflexivity on the media’s own part, as to their role as the primary definer of these, is quite worthy of note.

The gender imbalance between male and female journalists and editors in this study raises questions about how mainstream media, embedded within cultures heavily influenced by patriarchal institutions, will portray gender and power-based issues when writing about such stories as femicide-suicide. Research has shown that male dominated work environments and work routines within news organisations all contribute to the hegemonic ideology of men’s subordination of women (Meyers 1996; Websdale 2010). It is also important to acknowledge that the sample here is reflective of the wider imbalance between male and female reporters in crime reporting. Research has shown that the perspective of female news reporters can provide alternate viewpoints and diversity to news content by their “different values, interests, and priorities to the newsroom that will affect the manner in which news stories are researched, framed and written” (Rodgers and Thorson 2003, 659).

Our study builds on Galvin, Quinn, and Cleary (2021) work by capturing data about journalists’ experiences of their practice and processes when reporting extreme and private events. Findings affirm the assertion that media professionals will focus on elite sources, who are available to them, which was also supported by research from Cullen, O’Brien, and Corcoran (2019). This study further revealed these sources help to construct a specific narrative, which can be accommodated within a media template. These representations serve to reproduce hegemonic masculinity and reveal media assumptions about gender and class hierarchies. This research reveals from journalists a conscious hierarchy of victims, which has not been acknowledged in media representation of cases of murder-suicide in an Irish context. Equally, journalists were unaware that they had constructed a particular narrative that served to position the perpetrator as someone who was not responsible for the death of his wife, but rather a victim of his circumstances. While the findings from this study are based on a small-scale Irish case study, they may be relevant beyond this case and have applicability in other international contexts. Further research is required to examine if this is the case.

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 The study found the volume and pattern of coverage spiked in the two to four days following a shooting but diminished gradually thereafter. Coverage also tended to focus on the same frames following each shooting.

2 The term familicide-suicide describes different types of intrafamilial homicide, including the killing of a spouse and one or more children (Wilson, Daly, and Daniele 1995), and the murder, by a parent or step-parent, of a current or ex-partner and/or one or more of the couple’s children and/or children from a previous relationship (Sabri, Campbell, and Dabby 2016), together with the suicide of the perpetrator. Filicide-suicide refers to the phenomenon where one or more child is killed by a parent, stepparent or equivalent guardian and is followed by the suicide of the perpetrator (Brown, Tyson, and Arias 2018).

3 A blog post by Linnea Dunne in the days after the Hawe murder-suicide, where Alan Hawe murdered his wife and three children, had a particularly significant influence on the articulation, amplification and inspiration for what would later become the #hernamewasclodagh campaign. It criticised mainstream media coverage for its perceived omission of Clodagh Hawe, positive emphasis on the murderer, non-acknowledgement of the domestic violence aspect and emphasis on unfounded speculation, such as the perpetrator’s mental health issues (Quinn, Prendergast, and Galvin 2019).

4 A number of codes of practice in an Irish context place duties on journalists, whilst others are directed towards publications. These duties include reporting truthfully, accurately, fairly, and honestly, as well as reporting with sympathy and discretion, whilst guaranteeing that the public have the right to make a complaint. However, the Irish Code of Practice does not establish how journalists or publications should act when duties conflict; for example, what journalist path should one take when privacy conflicts with truth.

5 In order to ensure the confidentiality and safety of interviewees, all interviewed journalists have been quoted using numbers (ranging between 1 and 7). All interviews were conducted by the author, who has a background in journalism and as such, in ethnographic terms, “speaks the language” (O’Reilly 2005), which facilitated the interpretative process.

6 Episodic is defined here as event or exemplar-orientated, as opposed to thematic, which is issue-orientated.

7 This question was derived from previous research concerning the framing of murder-suicide in Irish print media. See Galvin, Quinn, and Cleary (2021).

8 Traveller refers to the community who are identified by themselves and others as people with a shared history, culture and traditions, who historically live a nomadic way of life on the island of Ireland (Ireland, Equal Status Act, 2000). Media discourses on the traveller community in Ireland reinforce the image of a problematic minority group with deviant lifestyle choices (Cihan Kova-Helvaci 2016).