Derailed Accountability: The Greek Media Representations of Greece's Deadliest Rail Collision

Abstract

Media coverage of crimes of the powerful remains limited and ambiguous, often presenting the harmful outcomes as isolated events, accidents or unforeseeable tragedies. The 2023 Tempe rail collision in Greece, which resulted in 57 fatalities, provides a critical case study for examining media representations of state-corporate harmful practices in media discourse. The aim of the current endeavour is to research how Greek news media represented the Tempe rail collision and also, the implications they have on constructing harmful practices of powerful actors in media discourse. To sufficiently address the impacts, the perspective of social harm penetrates the study on crimes of the powerful overcoming legalistic limitations of crime definitions. The study embraces cultural criminology and zemiology to explore and initiate a broader theoretical discussion on researching crimes of the powerful. The methodology consists of content analysis and critical discourse analysis of 92 articles from four major Greek newspapers and eight TV broadcasts, supplemented by six in-depth interviews including journalists, lawyers, and survivors. The outcomes revealed competing narratives about the case with some reproducing or confronting power structures. The causes, the responsible actors, the enormous costs and counter narratives are sidelined detaching the event from its context. The harm becomes a continuous experience in the aftermath of the collision due to media representation, politicians’ media machination and victims’ internal conflicts resulting from the broader lack of accountability from competent actors. The findings demonstrate the need for more critical examination of how crimes of the powerful are represented in media discourse, as a means to promote accountability against widely victimising practices that fall outside the scope of criminal law.