When Telling is Silencing

Based on a comparison of the media coverage of two incest cases – the “Fritzl affair” and the “Gouardo affair” – the author shows how the media’s treatment of a crime depends on the particularities of the narratives reported and of their protagonists, and especially on the media’s representation of the “real” and the “false” victim. She examines the possibility (or not) of media coverage of incest through the choice of mediatized elements and the course and entanglement of media coverage of two stories. She also analyses the way in which the media coverage of the Lydia Gouardo story finally served to silence the telling about incest.