The “Men Who Kill” Through the Lenses of the Media: Performing Images of Criminal Suspects

Abstract

The media plays an important role in producing narratives and representations of transnational male criminals in crime news stories. The sample examined here includes historical analysis of news published in European newspapers in 2014-2016 related to the coverage of certain highprofile criminal cases. Relatively few studies have focused on media analysis of offenders in general, and even fewer have examined how the media portrays "men who kill" within a specific transnational context. I argue that different newspapers use convergent approaches based on a moral view of gender, guided by the ideology of criminal practices related to masculinities. I conclude that the press, through its style, treatment, and tenor, tends to (re)produce biased, sensationalised, and stereotypical portraits of the behaviour of male criminals, performing them as "monsters", "insane", and "ancestral". This also often occurs by attributing different notions of "otherness" when focusing excessively on "migrant criminals" associated with particularly marginalised populations such as male sexual predators.