From the street to the news: a homeless woman murder in Rio de Janeiro and its media framing

Abstract

The homeless people are a group usually ignored by the media most of the time, except for situations in which a fact related to it attracts the public eye. This happened in 2017, when a street woman named Fernanda Rodrigues dos Santos was killed in Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro. Based on a theoretical-methodological contribution based on framing theory, with an analysis carried out in two technical stages – the first, which isolates the news frames, and the second, which analyzes the keywords of 25 texts that compose the research corpus – this article sets out to describe the elements that outline the framework of media coverage of the murder and to infer whether they are organized in a way that builds a stigmatized portrayal of women or develops a balanced framework of the case. As a result of the analysis, we can see the presence of frames such as sources of information, characterization of the victim and perpetrators, justifications for crime, timid presence of gender perspectives and social context, as well as four groups of classes of keywords that reinforce the poverty of this last aspect.