Representing people in execution news: Reference terms, identity, and ideology

Abstract

Integrating a social psychological perspective into Van Leeuwen's framework of social actor representation (2008), this study investigates the ways in which various forms of person reference are selected to position executioners, executed persons, and victims in execution reports. Based on a corpus of major broadsheets in Thailand, the analysis reveals extreme and, oftentimes disturbing, labels that assign polarized identities to each group. Exclusion and impersonal nominations mystify the executioners. Oppositional functional and identification labels disparage the executed individuals by exaggerating impression of legal violation and brutality, while idealizing the victims by emphasizing innocence, vulnerability and helplessness. It is argued that the patterns therein, motivated by the retentionist ideology, are socially divisive: they work to facilitate the public's moral disengagement from feeling complicit in the execution and constitute key to normalizing the violence of state killing from that inflicted by the condemned.