Linguistic purification of violence in the press: a comparative critical discourse analysis of execution news

Abstract

The aim of this study is to probe for the discursive construction of shared beliefs about capital punishment. Drawing upon a specialized corpus of execution news, the study explores representational practices, including social actor naming, action description, and incorporation of voices, and compares respective lexico-grammatical choices that are orchestrated to reconstruct the events of executions in Thailand from 1997 to 2017. The findings reveal that these discursive choices purify state killing and hide the violence of state killing. While representation choices become less overtly negative over time, the underlying ideological position of the press has not changed. Throughout these periods, executions are represented as a routine procedure by minimizing and/or concealing state agency and as a commensurate punishment for the executed individuals, while the law enforcement and justice systems in place are intertextually framed as unproblematic and effective in deterring crime, based on the perspectives of few elite sources. By way of demystifying subtle linguistic choices, this study makes transparent the way in which the press endorses, normalizes, and perpetuates favorable stances toward death penalty in a democratic society.