Proximate racialisation and moral panic in Italian news discourse on maranza

This article examines the discursive construction of maranza through a Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of 36 crime-news headlines and their accompanying visual material, published by 27 Italian news outlets between 2025 and 2026. Thirty-four available static images were included in a descriptive inventory, while 10 images were subjected to close multimodal analysis. The findings show how the label operates as an already intelligible classificatory noun through which heterogeneous episodes are organised around youth deviance and public security. Verbal collectivisation, the recurrent visual de-individualisation of alleged aggressors and the salience of law-enforcement actors contribute to this construction. Explicit reference to ethnic background occurs in only one headline, while several images representing alleged aggressors activate racialised meanings through bodily, sartorial and spatial markers. This asymmetry suggests a multimodal division of discursive labour, although the pattern is not uniform across the corpus. The headline–image configurations also provide restricted social contextualisation, partly reflecting the condensed and event-oriented conventions of crime reporting. By integrating MCDA with the moral panic framework, the study shows how verbal and visual resources can reconfigure a historically established label as a recognisable contemporary folk devil across geographically dispersed news contexts.