Sick puppy or terrorist? Investigating newspaper representations of white and ethnic minority mass shooters

Newspapers continue to employ perpetrator-oriented narratives on mass shootings, focusing not only on the shooter’s criminal action, but on the characteristics, problems and values associated with them. Combining Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) with Corpus Linguistics (CL), this study compares the discursive representation of white and ethnic minority mass shooters in newspapers from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Sourced from Nexis and comprised of online articles from 1st January 2015 to 31st December 2019, computational analysis of an 11 million word corpus examines representations of race and religion whilst also investigating distinctions between the geographical, ideological and formatting aspects of newspapers (broadsheet v. tabloid). Through the analysis of headlines, Chapter 4 offers a microcosmic perspective of the corpus’ main themes of terrorism, mental health and sensationalism, looking particularly at the phraseological profiles of racialized terms (white, black and Muslim) and the systemic- functional roles of political, perpetrator and victim social actors in broadsheets and tabloids. Investigating nomination and predication strategies, Chapter 5 analyses the referential nouns and predication devices used to categorize individual mass shooters, focusing on the constitutive effects that repeated labelling devices have on the construction of in-groups and out-groups in society. Finally, Chapter 6 explores the (re)contextualization of political voices within the reported speech of three national leaders, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Jacinda Ardern, specifically considering how journalists from left-wing and right-wing newspapers use evaluative reporting verbs and speech frames to show ideological agreement or disagreement with the quoted argument. Ultimately, it is argued that white perpetrator representations fuel sensationalist narratives on mental illness, harmful ideologies and loner temperaments. Conversely, the presumption of terrorism and foreignization of ethnic minority perpetrators shape exclusionary prejudices to project representations of otherness onto and construct and maintain representations of fear around their wider non-white communities.