Implicit language and news framing in reporting feminicides. Between (misleading) clickbait function and (apparent) feminist pollination

This chapter addresses the news reporting of feminicides by the Italian online press, based on the idea that news framing and implicit linguistic strategies may work as mind engineering practices, able to reinforce biased sociocultural repertoires. Adopting a theoretical and applied approach that bridges media studies and pragmatics, we collected and analyzed two corpora of headings devoted to two feminicides that occurred in Italy in 2023, Giulia Cecchettin’s and Giulia Tramontano’s. The results show that the reporting of Tramontano’s case persists in opacifying the sociocultural context of feminicide, thus proving to be textbook in terms of biased gender-based violence news reporting. The reporting of Cecchettin’s feminicide shows some innovations apparently interpretable as an attempt at mind engineering reversal. However, a deeper analysis opens doubts about the cultural genuineness of such pollination.