REPRESENTATION OF DEATH CULTURE IN THE ESTONIAN PRESS

Introduction Death is an omnipresent part of daily life and evokes both personal and public reactions. In the news media, themes of death and remembrance are woven together in hard news, features, pictures and obituaries. Traditionally transport and industrial accidents (with multiple victims), murder cases, as well as major natural disasters and war news are considered newsworthy because the role of the news is not to mirror the world but to highlight problems and extraordinary situations. Journalistic coverage is different when reporting about the death of hundreds and thousands (in case of natural disasters, war or industrial accidents) or one person; nevertheless this dimension is usually in correlation to geographical distance and proximity (Adams 1986). Death imagery pushes journalists into the debate over whether, where and how they should publish images of death and corpses. Indeed, the issue of how to use images of death has never been entirely clarified. Although we do not focus, in this paper, on these dilemmas it should be taken into consideration that the Estonian media do not usually represent corpses in an identifiable way. In national tragedies, such as accidents causing many injuries and deaths, natural disasters and the death of people representing the national elite, etc., the aspect of death and the subsequent mediated (public) mourning rituals are likely to become media events (Dayan & Katz 1992; Pantti & Sumiala 2009). Indeed, coverage of a funeral and public mourning can be so intensive that it interrupts everyday life and broadcasting programs (e.g. funeral of a president or mourning of Princess Diana). In addition to media event the journalism studies provide more or less elaborated concepts for different types of intensive coverage where the media plays a significant role in framing and social amplification of a certain event or topic: mediated scandal, media hype, news waves of smaller amplitude than media event (Paimre & Harro-Loit 2011). However, such death-related intensively reported cases should be analysed separately from the daily news flow that is the focus of the present research. The general death-related media context is broad and varied, ranging from the individual (death of a hundred years old person) and private funerals to national and international news reports about the victims of wars, catastrophes, accidents and murders. These reportages represent cultural ideas about the many meanings of death but it is also valuable to notice what is not reported concerning the death-theme. Regardless of their specific topic and circumstances--natural disaster, workplace accident, murder or the natural passing of the elderly--the stories told about death in journalism are ultimately about grief. News stories of the dead are about the living far more so than about the dead (Kitch & Hume 2008, 187) and they focus in particular on the emotions of survivors (Walter et al. 1995). The goal of this study is to analyse how Estonian daily newspapers represent death in everyday news flows and find the elements of death culture in the news stories. Consequently, we analyse neither the representation of grief and death-related rituals such as funerals, public mourning and commemoration nor the discussions about the cause and guilt concerning violent deaths, etc. We exclude obituaries as "it is widely accepted that the emphasis in obituary composition should be on capturing life rather than describing the death" (Starck 2007, 373). In mapping the variety of ways that the media cover death, we aim to create a model for qualitative content analysis that helps to define the elements of death coverage in newspapers and enables seeing which parts of the death discourse are included or excluded. We propose a seven-dimensional model for analysis that partly comes from theoretical news value theory and partly from studies concerning death coverage in news media. …