Deviance of the Foreign Immigrant in the Mass Media: Results of a Survey in Salento (From Images of Crime: Representations of Crime and the Criminal in Science, the Arts and the Media, P 131-168, 2001, Hans-Jorg Albrecht, Afroditi Koukoutsaki, et al, eds. -- See NCJ-192094)

• NCJ Number: 192097
• Author(s): Alberto D'Elia
• Date Published: 2001
• Length: 38 pages
• Sale Source: Max-Planck-Institute Fur Auslandisches und Internationales Strafrecht
• Publication Format: Book (Softbound)
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: Germany (Unified)

Annotation

This article examines the collective practices of exclusion of specific social categories, as they are reflected in the mass media.

Abstract

This article outlines the characteristics common to the categories of deviance and of the stranger, in order to examine the manner in which the mass media handle the interrelation of these two themes. The theoretical review is followed by empirical verification of the outlined themes, by means of empirical research on the daily press of the wider Salento, Italy, area in the summer of 1996. The article thus moves from analysis of the social interaction through which specific collective practices of exclusion against certain social categories are formed, to the manner in which these very practices are reflected on the field of discourse and language. The way in which the mass media deal with the deviance of the economic immigrant is based on the parallelism of the two categories, "foreign" and "deviant." The article focuses at the level of confrontations that occur within the sphere of identification of the reference group, since the notion of "alien" ("deviant") does not entail an ontological reality, but rather a relationship, one pole of an interactionist model which also incorporates the opposite pole. Notes, tables, references