‘The wolf wakes up inside them, grows werewolf hair and reveals all their bullying’: The representation of parliamentary discourse in Greek newspapers

Abstract

The present paper investigates how journalists create dialogical networks involving parliamentary discourse and newspaper articles via the reproduction of extracts coming from MPs’ speeches. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and assuming that news is a value-laden construction of facts through language, a comparative analysis of parliamentary proceedings and related newspaper articles is conducted. The articles collected cover a specific parliamentary debate on a particularly ‘hot’ issue in Greek society, namely a new bill introducing the interview as part of the procedure for the selection and recruitment of civil servants. The analysis shows that the facts reported seem to be selected not on the basis of their political or legal significance, but on the basis of their unusual consequences on parliamentary procedures. Special emphasis is given to the reconstruction of direct speech in newspaper narratives and to the use of metaphor as a conversational resource employed by MPs and reproduced by journalists in an attempt to attract their readers’ interest and arouse their emotions. Rather than informing the public on the actual parliamentary work, journalists mostly aim at creating and/or maintaining solidarity between readers and newspapers of the same political and ideological orientation.