Waves of violence are a way for the media to manipulate crime news. Following the publication of a story about a particularly shocking crime of a specific type (for example, the murder of a child), more news stories of that type of crime appear. It's as if, for a period of time, crime news editors develop a heightened sensitivity to detect and cover one type of crime, to the detriment of other types of crimes that are also occurring.
The media follows a routine for producing current affairs: police news "routinizes" the exceptional aspects of the criminal world. They do this by using the same narrative structures to place the news, however disruptive it may seem, within a model that is relatively familiar to both journalists and readers.
But there are inexplicable events, dissonant to common sense, unspeakable. More than twenty years ago I published a book dedicated to police news: the violence of the narrative. At that time, along with my friend, the writer Carlos Battilana, I coordinated a writing, reading, and criticism workshop entitled "Narrating the Unspeakable," which focused on the intersection of police, strange, and journalistic narratives.
We worked with texts, triggers for the production of new texts, as disparate as Paul Auster's *Red Notebook*, David Lynch's series *Twin Peaks*, or the prologue to Ricardo Piglia's curious crime anthology *Las fieras*. The first of the texts mentioned articulates a series of stories based on real events whose common denominator is the fact that in all of them, what produces surprising outcomes is chance. By chance, precisely, I ran into Piglia on the street at that time, told him about the workshop, and he suggested I read Roland Barthes's article "Structure of the Event." Indeed, the French critic intuited there many of the issues that I was later able to verify in my investigations of shocking violent cases.
According to Barthes, if a political assassination is information because it can be explained within a known world—that of politics—an “event,” on the other hand, is an unclassifiable occurrence, a “monstrous,” total, immanent piece of information that contains within itself all its knowledge. It is a closed structure that cannot be explained by any external information. As terrible as the crime of Cecilia Strzyzowski It can be interpreted in light of politics. This is not the case with the crime of Joaquín Sperani, the 14-year-old boy murdered in the quiet town of Laboulaye in Córdoba, allegedly at the hands of a 13-year-old friend.
Television journalists denounce, characterize, and repeatedly dwell on the same few known details—that the perpetrator was a close friend of the victim, that he killed him by striking him ten times in the head, that he later provided false leads—to stage ever-increasing outrage. The media uses headlines with words like "horror" and speaks of the "exceptional" nature of the case. One outlet ventures that there is no similar case in the country's criminal history: the murder of a minor by another minor within a context of friendship. And they reveal the "disturbing hypothesis" being considered by the prosecution: "that the perpetrator was in love with his victim."
The biggest mystery lies in the killer's psychology. “Leandro is a psychopath; he was a lifelong friend of Joaquin“His parents say. The fact that he led him to an abandoned house, where the pipe he used to beat him was located, would indicate premeditation; the viciousness with which he did it would reflect the level of hatred that motivated him. The boy is not criminally responsible, but if mental health problems were detected, his hospitalization could be ordered, provided he is a danger to himself or others. In a way, if it were an outburst of anger due to a psychiatric disorder, there would be a possible explanation. The behavior before and after the self-incriminating child's crime does not seem to correspond to a momentary explosion of violence. The mother insists on broadening the hypotheses and studying the possibility that more people participated in the murder. In that case, the act would also begin to be explained by social and even political motives. (The decontextualized and inexperienced debate about lowering the age of criminal responsibility also adds fuel to the election campaign.)
Today, it is the algorithms of digital media that determine the placement of the crime news. Joaquin in a series. They do this through sections that link it on screen to other crimes in diverse contexts: “Continue reading,” “More on crime,” “You might be interested in.” The articles that appear under these section titles are selected by the algorithm based on the interest they generated. As with “Most Read,” readers define the articles that the publication will give more importance to and update more frequently, just as minute-by-minute ratings data defines the time allocated to an article featuring family members, teachers, or coaches. Joaquin On TV.
“Brutal femicide in Tucumán: a 28-year-old man killed his 15-year-old girlfriend and threw her into a well.” When it comes to shocking cases, almost all media outlets resort to sensationalism due to a lack of adequate narrative resources. Algorithms contribute to creating waves by associating very different cases with each other, each of which is exceptional because of its unspeakable nature. “Killing out of hatred and pleasure. The case of the 14- and 17-year-old teenagers who burned a boy and filmed his agony,” are some of the cases with which the Laboulaye case is associated. Added to this are the comments on news websites: “Horror. AJoaquin (14) He was premeditatedly murdered by his best friend, a 13-year-old boy. Cecilia She was murdered and burned by her 19-year-old boyfriend, Sena. Nico Cernadas was tortured and burned to death by two young men, ages 14 and 17. Just to name a few… What is happening to us as a society?”
