Moral disengagement, mass-media and criminal cases

Abstract

The present paper intends to verify the presence of Bandura’s mechanisms of Moral Disengagement in the narratives about three criminal cases (the so called “strage di Erba”, the case of the aggression to Giovanna Reggiani, and the so-called “crime of Iole Tassitani”), reported by five Italian newspapers (Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, Il Messaggero, Libero and Il Manifesto). The construct of Moral Disengagement was developed by Bandura in the context of social-cognitive theory and was subsequently extended to the study of aggressive and violent behaviours. This paper aims at verifying if, in media communication, veiled distortions of narrated events can result in a detachment from ethical standards. For this purpose, two independent judges reviewed 177 newspaper articles: a descriptive analysis allowed to discover the most frequent mechanisms of moral disengagement in the different newspapers and the different cases.The coefficient K of Cohen shows a good degree of agreement between independent judges. Some considerations on the possible role that media can play with relation to issues of legality and security.