Emotions Contests and Reflexivity in the News: Examining Discourse on Youth Crime in Canada

The author explores how three Canadian newspapers address appropriate reactions to youth crime during the 1990s. While recent scholarship has emphasized the ways in which moral panics have become more complexly represented within mass media, the author pays attention to how such representational tactics are played out, drawing particular attention to emotional reactions to youth crime. Comparing and contrasting regional and national, as well as tabloid versus broadsheet newspapers, the author draws attention to “emotions contests,” which are closely related to victim contests over young offender culpability and identity. Emotions contests occur where emotional reactions to social problems become, themselves, the source of contention. News reflexivity is a central feature of these articles, whereby references to “the media’s” representational strategies are often espoused through the media themselves. The author suggests areas for advancement of constructionist analyses of emotions discourses in relation to social problems debates.