La guerre dans les médias, les médias dans la guerre en Côte d’Ivoire

Abstract

This paper proposes a reflection on a particular type of informativemedia discourse: opinion journalism, which has been very prominent inCôte d’Ivoire since the war on September 2002 which split the countryinto two parts. The paper, therefore, uses a constructivist approachbased on the obvious fact that journalisitic information is the productof a created entity. The issue of “the media in the war, the war in themedia” is a major issue for public debate, for it is established as a newpublic space in the formation and expression of opinions. In the Ivoriancontext, information is the dominant paradigm and the informant is theactivist-journalist whose relationship to his/her audience is built on amode mostly based on membership, in the ideological meaning of theterm. The journalistic discourse adds to its traditional function, whichis to inform, new conditioning and mobilization functions that make itfully an ideological space of full membership.