Murder-suicide in the news: Doing the routine and the drama

Abstract

In this article I use Finnish newspaper reports on murder-suicide to explore how the moral orders of gender, heterosexual relationships and family are used in constructing newsworthiness or routine. The two main contexts of murder-suicide, a homicide followed by the perpetrator’s suicide, were the family and the heterosexual relationship. I concentrate on femicide-suicides because it is the largest group of murder-suicides, and it is the group that is characteristically routine or mundane and only occasionally breaks into news visibility. The study is ethnomethodological: I inspect how members of society — as journalists are seen here — make sense of extraordinary events by relying on conventional ideas about gender, the relations between different people and family in their practical daily task of sorting out routine from the newsworthy. The data was gathered from four of the most widely read newspapers and local papers in a five-year period from 1996—2000.