Open AccessDisrupting a Canadian Prairie Fantasy and Constructing Racial Otherness: An Analysis of News Media Coverage of Trevis Smith’s Criminal HIV Non-Disclosure Case
Author(s) -
Colin Hastings,
Eric Mykhalovskiy,
Chris Sanders,
Laura Bisaillon
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
canadian journal of sociology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.357
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1710-1123
pISSN - 0318-6431
DOI - 10.29173/cjs29472
Subject(s) - criminalization , mainstream , criminology , white (mutation) , sociology , construct (python library) , fantasy , criminal justice , law , media studies , political science , literature , art , biochemistry , chemistry , computer science , gene , programming language
This paper studies how HIV criminalization is portrayed in the mainstream Canadian press by examining news representations of Trevis Smith. Smith’s case is the most reported case of criminal HIV non-disclosure in Canadian history. Our analysis is based on a corpus of 271 articles written about Smith between 2005 and 2012. Our analysis shows that coverage of Smith’s case is distinct from reportage of other criminal HIV non-disclosure cases because he was a well-known Black athlete playing for the Saskatchewan Roughriders at the time of his criminal charge. We argue that news articles represent Smith as a particular kind of threatening racialized “other” through forms of writing that link crime reporting with sports reporting. Our analysis of headlines and quotation patterns emphasizes how news articles construct Smith as a blameworthy outsider and produce Canada as an imagined white settler nation.