From News to Comment: Tracing Text Trajectories in News Reporting about the Amanda Knox Trial
Michael S. Boyd · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2016
This chapter focuses on the ways that newspaper producers and readers represented the Italian justice system and its criminal procedure through the various phases of Amanda Knox’s arrest, trial, conviction, acquittal, and retrial (in absentia). Specifically, it considers how news readers textually interacted with and reacted to articles dealing with the case through the online comment function. The work aims to demonstrate how text producers (the media and text commenters) selectively recontextualise and possibly transform elements of the case based on previous versions recounted by the media. A quantitative analysis exploits tools from Corpus Linguistics in order to determine the specific legal lexical representations in a number of different corpora of both newspaper articles and comments from different periods of the case. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.