The Mourning News

A conventional wisdom in media studies is that "when it bleeds it leads". The media love violence and from the newsroom perspective, negative news is good news. Violent death often makes it to the headlines, and mass violent death events often become media events that receive immediate continuous attention worldwide. However, reporting violent death is not only about sending information, but also about the maintenance of society. News about violent death functions as media rituals which elicit grief and inform a sense of care and belonging. Accordingly, this book takes a broader sociological and anthropological approach to considering the role of death and the media in organising social life in a global age. Based on literature on solidarity and social cohesion, death rituals, media rituals, and journalism studies, this book examines whether and how the performance of the media at the occurrence of mass violent death events informs solidarity and interconnectedness on a cosmopolitan level.

List of Illustrations - Acknowledgments - Introduction - Solidarity, Rituals and the Media - The Mediatisation of Death - Global Crisis Reporting and Cosmopolitanism - Towards the Analytics of Grievability - Empathising Grief-The Case of the 2011 Norway Attacks - Judicial Grief and Condemnator - Moving Grief-The Case of the 2010 Haiti Earthquake - Mediatised Grief and the Fallacy and Promise of Cosmopolitanism - Conclusion - Appendix A - Appendix B - Index.