Discursive (de)legitimation of media bias in news reporting of high-profile crimes: The case of Missing White Woman Syndrome

This study addresses a gap in research on media bias in news coverage, focusing on how news consumers engage with the issue. Using online news site comment sections, the study examines how commenters discuss the issue of Missing White Woman Syndrome, referring to the heightened coverage of cases involving young, white, middle-class women. The study employs a novel approach in applying corpusbased methods for discourse analysis, using 5-grams to identify broader patterns of discourse in the dataset. The Appraisal framework and (de)legitimation are applied to analyse the identified themes in more detail. The study finds that social categories are invoked in order to raise the issue of media bias within the comment sections. However, the study reveals that the media interest is legitimated by other commenters, who attribute the coverage to other elements of the stories, or delegitimate the discussion of prejudice through accusations against those who raise the issue of incivility. Consequently, the conversation around media bias is contracted and the issue constructed as irrelevant.