Constructing and Contesting the Echo Chamber: a Study of Print Media Discourse on the Final Year of the 1976-1983 Dictatorship in Argentina
Constructing and contesting the echo chamber: A study of print media discourse on the final year of the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina Muireann Prendergast This thesis is submitted in part fulfilment of the academic requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Supervisors: Professor Helen Kelly-Holmes Dr. David Atkinson Submitted to the University of Limerick, September 2018 i External Examiner: Prof. Michał Krzyżanowski, University of Liverpool and University of Örebro Internal Examiner: Dr. Cinta Ramblado, University of Limerick ii ABSTRACT For post-dictatorship countries attempting to come to terms with and understand their past, historical media studies have a particularly important role to play. In identifying discursive strategies, objective and subjective versions of events, and key social actors, they not only contribute to the linguistic debate on how "meaning" is produced in media but can have wider implications at the societal level in the construction of "collective memory" and identity (Achugar, 2007). The 1982-1983 period marked the end of a brutal dictatorship, Argentina’s Proceso de Reorganización Nacional (National Reorganization Process) and a difficult period of transition to democracy for the country following defeat in the 1982 Falklands/Malvinas War. Using a Critical Discourse Analysis framework, this research project analyses the role of the print media in both sustaining and challenging the dictatorship in Argentina during its period of crisis. The methodological approach of this study is mixed, combining the qualitative principles of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Reisigl and Wodak, 2009) with a quantitative corpus-assisted discourse analysis of newspapers that supported the regime. Furthermore, a Synchronic-Diachronic method developed by Argentinean linguist Pardo (2008, 2010) for specific application to her country’s media is employed for qualitative study of newspaper discourse opposing the dictatorship, while a multimodal analytical framework is applied to the political cartoons of the period.
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