Epidemic press conferences in Serbia: Between the structural and semantic

Abstract

The subject of the paper is the identification and analysis of meaningful constructions, which had some characteristics of the rhetorical figures, on the so-called epidemic press conferences in Serbia. The theoretical part starts from the sociological approach to the mass media, which is based on the interaction between the media and the context in which they are situated, which follows the consideration of the relationship between structure and meaning. Epidemic conferences were recognized as a media phenomenon that could serve to shed some light on this relationship, because on the one hand they represented a certain emanation of the political subsystem, while on the other hand their content had a strong symbolic character that included figures. The methodological part is dedicated to the definition of figures and the time framing of the analysis. The results of the analysis showed the presence of several figures that differed in their character and users, and whose common characteristic was that they significantly varied from the health and informational function of conferences. In a broader sense, the aim is to show the way in which certain cultural phenomena, such as the mass media, can generate different sets of meanings, which are the product of certain structural characteristics of society itself.