Reporting on Gender-Based Violence on Bosnia and Herzegovina Portals – Sensationalism or Sensibilism?
Keywords:
Violence against women, media, sensationalism, tabloid journalism, investigative journalism, victimization, stigmatizationAbstract
The aim of this paper is to point out the often present shortcomings and ethical errors that oppose proper objective and professional media coverage of violence against women. The dynamics of reporting on online portals is very fast, therefore journalists often create sensational headlines, usually with quality content of scarce texts. Tabloid phrases are often additionally dramatized with exclamatory sentences. All this leads to the suppression of the primary idea of the text, even to the indirect justification of the issue. The news is focused on the details of the crime and the description of the circumstances instead of questioning the causes and consequences of gender-based violence in society. On the other hand, investigative journalism im-plies a deeper analysis of these issues and a way of reporting them that relies on facts, analysis of omissions in laws and responsible institutions. Research portals analyze the causes of violence. It is precisely the topic of gender-based violence that is extremely important due to worrying data on the prevalence of the problem in Bosnian and Herzegovian society.
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