Discursive practices of territorial stigmatization: how newspapers frame violence and crime in a Chicago community

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article deciphers the discursive practices through which Chicago’s two major newspapers, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times, stigmatize the South Shore community on Chicago’s South Side. Through a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article provides an in-depth linguistic analysis of the causation of territorial stigmatization through press coverage. It demonstrates that the two newspapers not only stigmatize South Shore through practices of hyperbolic naming, but that territorial stigmatization also flows from the transitivity of newspaper articles itself. By focusing on the transitivity of newspaper articles and their role in the production of territorial stigma, this article broadens our understanding of how territorial stigma is produced through symbolic defamation and denigration of spaces. It is argued that the two newspapers normalize and naturalize violence and crime as commonsense characteristics of everyday life in South Shore, thereby producing an image of South Shore as a space determined and indelibly shaped by violence and crime.