Shades of violence: The media role

SynopsisThis article analyzes the specificities of gender representation in newspapers' portrayals of violence against women and children, choosing Romania and Canada as research fields in order to understand how these social constructs operate in a young democracy and a transitional country as compared to a well consolidated democracy and developed country. Media products are cultural artifacts that are deeply embedded in cultural, social and economic structures. The authors assume that these social constructs might show variations according to the types of societies studied. Journalists use dominant frames of interpretation of the world and events they present in the news, which are consistently defined and organized in a determined visual or verbal path.