Ella McCreton Media Analysis

Gender, violence and abuse Assessment 1 This essay will focus on the article “Man kills his new wife of their wedding day in front of horrified crowd of guests”, written by Stewart and Lynch (2022) and published in the Mirror online, and will provide a critical analysis of the way in which the Mirror has represented this case of gender-based violence by using literature and theory to support the analysis. The chosen article regards the murder of Oksana Poludentseva by her husband, Stephan Dolgikh, on their wedding day in Russia. Before critically analysing the way that the Mirror has reported on this case, it is key to note the contextual background of the article, as it adds to the way in which the analysis will be interpreted. Firstly, the Mirror is a British tabloid, which according to Nadkarni, are “aimed at working class people” and tend to cover “sports, scandals and humor” as well as “scrappy entertainment” (2011), meaning that it doesn’t tend to be a platform to provide only factual accounts of events, in comparison to broadsheet newspapers. Instead, they tend to sensationalise and overemphasise events, which will therefore be considered when critically analysing this article. To begin with, the title of the article itself is questionable in terms of the way it refers to the event that took place. Initially, when looking at the title of the article – ‘man kills his new wife’, no names are provided. Arguably, there could be a question as to whether the victim’s family wishes to keep the victim’s identity hidden or out of the public eye. However, the victim’s name, Oksana Poludentseva, is used later on in the article which suggests that this is not necessarily a matter of anonymity, but rather obscuring the victim’s identity to bring attention to the perpetrator instead. By using the terms “man” and “his wife”, it could be suggestive that the Mirror is removing power from the victim and placing it onto the perpetrator instead. The term “his wife” suggests that, outside of this, Poludentseva had no