Exclusion by Silencing: When Violence is Not News

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Faced with violence, news media may respond with front-page headlines and lead stories or they may opt for a silence that renders the victims of violence invisible and powerless. That choice influences how violence and its victims are perceived in popular culture and can reproduce violence as a cultural norm, too routine to be news. Over the past 50 years, states have encouraged that silence with direct threats or by simply withdrawing protection. Journalists have complied because they are coerced, complicit, or simply unable to convince editors of the importance of news compared to competing reports from other world hot spots. Combinations of those factors result in silences that cede power to perpetrators of violence. Resistance to those factors has empowered unexpected actors. These choices continue to raise questions about the role and responsibilities of media when confronted with violence against excluded groups, violence that may also quickly be directed against reporters. Journalists-turned-academics examine the reasons for those silences and their cultural and political consequences via case studies from throughout the region.

Sub Track

• Culture, Power and Political Subjectivities

Chair

• Rick J Rockwell, Webster University

Individual Presentations

• The Solidarity Media after the 1973 coup in Chile - Victoria A Goff, University of Wisconsin

• Learning Silence in Argentina - Juanita M Darling, San Francisco State University

• Selective Silences in Guatemala’s Femicides - Sarah C England, Soka University of America

• Violence, the State and Impunity in Mexico: Why Crimes Against Freedom of Expression and Journalists Go Unpunished - Celeste Gonzalez de Bustamante, University of Arizona