Constructing and contesting the echo chamber: a study of print media discourse on the final year of the 1976-1983 dictatorship in Argentina

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. Findings suggest that representations of social actors and events that supported the dictatorship are closely linked to discourses on nationalism and, as a result, are unstable and shifting, reflecting the country’s period of socio-political crisis. Conversely, discourses that challenged the regime are shown to maintain their oppositional stance throughout the year, incorporating complex strategies of counter-journalism and a combination of communicative elements such as text, images and colour. In analysing the form and function of these different discourses while acknowledging the ideological role of media and its influence on dictatorship and post-dictatorship social, legal and political processes, this study reinforces the work of Zelizer (2014) to propose, in the Argentine context, a tangible if difficult relationship between the fields of journalism and memory.