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Giulia Cecchettin’s feminicide in the Italian online press

How headlines changed the narrative, if they did at all

ORCiD logo with link | Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca
ORCiD logo with link | Università degli Studi dell'Aquila
Published online: 30 April 2025
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.24135.com
Abstract
Giulia Cecchettin’s feminicide, which took place in Italy in November 2023, raised high media attention. Our research accounts for how it was covered by the national online press, and whether and how news reporting narratives differed from those about previous feminicides. Driven by both literature on the news framing of gender-based violence and linguistic studies on communicative functions of implicit strategies, we analyzed the headlines and subheadings concerning Cecchettin’s feminicide that were published online by the newspaper leading the case. We replicated the analyses on a control corpus including the online headlines and subheadings dedicated by the same newspaper to Giulia Tramontano’s feminicide, which took place in May 2023. Results indicate that the description of both the victim and the perpetrator is less stereotypical (though still anchored in a telenovela-style episodic narrative) in the coverage of the Cecchettin case, which, however, exacerbates the instrumental spectacularization of feminicide for clickbait purposes.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.News coverage of feminicides in Media Studies
  • 3.Linguistic insights into the news reporting of feminicides
  • 4.Methods
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1A less prototypical character depiction?
    • 5.2The staging of a spectacular feminicide
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
References (51)
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