How News Deals With Identities. Hate Speech and Representation of Minority Identities in Italian Newspapers

This essay focuses on the problems arising from the use of social identity terminology such as ethnic, national and racial identities in newspaper headlines and articles. Traditionally, in journalistic work the use of descriptors for people in media texts was ruled by a professional theory focused on the “truth criterion” (e.g. journalists must only give true facts, not false ones) as a way of showing a neutral stance. However the truth criterion seems to be not enough when dealing with the use of racial, ethnic or national descriptors. So how to describe members of minority identities involved in criminal acts has become troublesome and several codes of conduct have been developed to deal with this problem. This essay uses Membership Categorization Analysis to critically discuss current codes of conduct related to the problem of journalistic reporting and argues that, among different rules of conduct, the rule of relevance is the most important criterion to avoid spreading racist attitudes via news.