Minimalist storytelling: the natural framing of electoral violence by Mexican media

Abstract

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, Mexico's so-called drug war claimed around a quarter of a million lives. Adapting to this enduring epidemic of violence, the print media have adopted a minimalist reporting style that gives only thin, formulaic accounts of violent events. As I argue, established journalistic minimalism does more than provide little information about violence. With practised impassiveness, it frames violence in a way that creates a certain narrative: not of social actors to be understood but of natural events to be endured. Through a qualitative content analysis of over 1200 news reports, I examine the persistent force of this "natural" frame in the face of an extraordinary development: the unprecedented intrusion of political violence into the 2018 general elections, when forty-eight candidates were assassinated.