Press releases after forty years of the last coup d'etat in Argentina

Abstract

What social representations are currently circulating about the last coup d’état in Argentina? Almost twenty years ago, we set out to answer this question by analyzing how the national press reconstructed the main events, actors and cause-effect relationships in referring to the last Argentine military dictatorship. At that time, we set up a corpus with the central news of the moment which had been published by the morning press to commemorate the 20^th anniversary of its beginning, on March 24, 1996 (Zullo, 1999). Over the last few years, the question has given rise to other research that addressed pedagogical materials produced for students and primary school teachers (Zullo, 2014, among others). However, the 40^th anniversary of the beginning of the dictatorship invites us to rethink the question and to return to what we concluded many years ago. In order to do so, we study a corpus of Clarín and La Nación editions of March 24, 2016 from a global perspective; we undertake a comparative analysis of two editorials that are articulated in three levels: first, the design and the formal organization of the texts and the graphic information of printed editions (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996), dealing with the macroestructural organization of news (van Dijk, 1978); secondly, the axis of the syntactic-semantic organization of the utterances of two articles of opinion from which we determine the participants, processes and circumstances, as well as the frequencies and types of transformations and the processes of over-lexicalization present in these texts (Hodge and Kress, 1993); thirdly, the enunciative dimension (Ducrot, 2001) of these articles, which gives rise to certain types of questioning that both newspapers make to the authorities and to civil society (Trew, 1979). Beyond the differences with respect to the journalistic versions of twenty years ago, we find significant contrasts in the ways of presenting and organizing information in these newspapers in 2016. However, the systematization of these linguistic differences does not allow us to establish ideological differences, since both diaries contribute to the same ideological formation throughout different linguistic strategies (Pechêux-Fuchs, 1975).