Misogyny in media courts

an analysis of headline construction from the perspective of critical discourse studies

Abstract

The media plays a fundamental role in society, acting not only in the dissemination of information or the formation of public opinion, but above all in the creation of new forms of interaction and relationship of the individual with himself and with others (Thompson, 1998). These interactions produce ways of exercising power through language in which ideological representations are materialized in texts (Fairclough, 2003). Journalistic practices are not a static or fixed phenomenon. On the contrary, through them meanings and senses are disseminated, reworked or maintained (Thompson, 2011). To reflect on these issues, this work proposes, based on the case of homicide committed by Thales Naves Alves Machado, a critical analysis of the discourses materialized in the headlines produced and disseminated by the following newspapers: Fórum, Metrópole and Terra. For the analysis of the corpus, we chose Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), specifically the contributions of Norman Fairclough (2003) and Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), and the systemic-functional theory (Halliday, 2004; Fuzer, Cabral, 2014) incorporated by CDA. Through the analysis of the lexico-grammatical structure of the headlines, we found the reproduction of misogynistic and sexist discourses directed against the ex-wife of the murderer.