Morte no cartão postal: uma empresa, dois jornais e três vítimas

In this essay, we analyze the narrative configuration of urban violence in two newspapers of the same editorial group (O Globo e Extra, both from Infoglobo), from the covers and stories published about an armed robbery that had a strong mass media repercussion. We study how the characters of victim and aggressor compose each narrative, relating them to the notions of politics of pity and virtual victim. We conclude that victims of different orders are in question: fatal, social and virtual. The study highlights how, beyond the “raw fact”, journalistic narrative can configure an event in different ways, since the newspapers need to individualize themselves in the editorial market and, therefore, give several intelligibilities to the social experience of violence, according to different dramatic projects.