Journalistic Complexities: Framing, Interpellation, and Talk-Back

Abstract

This chapter introduces key overarching themes around the complexities of news framing on familicide. It discusses the complex ways news framings reflect not just journalistic practices, but processes of interpellation—the ways journalistic practices are positioned within a wider discursive environment that shapes the framing possibilities available to journalists, editors, and various other social actors on which they rely (Little in Journalism 22:1450–1466, 2021). It examines the significant role played by news sources in framing and shows how issues around the use of news sources are particularly fraught in reporting on familicide, with some of the most disquieting news frames constructed through a reliance on news sources with significant experiential or expert authority. This chapter also points to the increasingly influential role being played by ‘talk-back’ news pieces—editorial content that directly challenges dominant news framings from within the news media, and often through a feminist lens. This contributes to a dynamic news space, working to constitute news on familicide as a process of contested meaning-making.