The objective of this paper is to discuss some representations that circulated on press media about the bus kidnapping case that occurred in the city of Rio de Janeiro, in June 2000. The kidnapping was aired live on TV with a big mass media coverage, and it had a tragic end. Our analysis comprised two reports of magazines of national circulation and seventy news reports of an important newspaper from São Paulo, read all over the country. The focus of the analysis is the figure of the agent of violence - the criminal, adopting the otherness production perspective. The results showed that media contribute to mystify the violence, and to sustain the conception that violence is an individual problem of someone who cannot deal with emotions and difficulties, and therefore deserves to be excluded from social ground.
violence; kidnapping; criminal; media