Narratives of violence in the local press

This chapter offers an analysis of the narration of Camorra violence found in the local press and outlines the main semantic fields brought into play in constructing a collective understanding of violence. The analysis is built around queries made to a database elaborated during the fieldwork, which brings together a corpus of articles concerning events of Camorra violence, published in the local editions of the daily newspaper Il Mattino from 2013 to 2016. What emerges is that media are not only sources of information about the phenomenon analysed but true agents in themselves, considering the hyper-coverage of mafia violence, its symbolic and communicational aspects and the spectacular forms of Camorra violence, with a chain reaction triggered between traditional media, social media and the protagonists of the violence. Through the analysis of the vocabulary used in headlines published by the local press and a number of selected violent events, the author emphasises how the narration of Camorra violence often evokes a sort of plague from which the social fabric suffers, destroying its equilibrium and thus contributing to a general atmosphere of social insecurity, while the links between violence and its economic, social and political implications become virtually invisible.