Annals of the University of Craiova for Journalism, Communication and Management (Aug 2017)
CATHARSIS AND AND CREDIBILITY IN THE TODAY MEDIA SPACE
Abstract
In this study we aim to analyze how a story is built in today media space. Besides the linguistics norms concerning the meaning issues, the media story is a source of catharsis which can consume psychosocial energies. The public event becomes a media event and so it becomes an aesthetic event. The contemporary soul burns the pain and the anger watching TV, doing symbolic gestures, looking for uniformity. For our case study we chose to analyze the stories around the disaster from a Romanian nightclub; during a concert, a fire started and over 60 people died. We aim to describe the lexical ritual that we identified in the media discourse. We describe the patterns that generate meaning. We show how the subjectivity and the ideology bring closer the media discourse and the fictional one, and so we see that the report on such a tragedy means more empathy and less information, more emotional release and less storage of meanings. We can speak about the haste of a collective self to impose the ritual anger as a unique direction in front of a disaster.
