“I’ll never say I’m sorry”: A former Italian Prime Minister in a corpus of English online newspapers

The rise of online newspapers has enormously enhanced access to different versions of news, thus enabling the general public to compare and contrast the representation of the same event on a global scale. The entire process of producing, accessing, and perceiving news is undergoing fundamental changes that have raised many issues as regards the activities of representing, construing and experiencing news. Representation is central to the process of meaning construction and language plays a decisive role in the creation of what Stuart Hall defines the “circuit of culture”. The selection of linguistic and visual events to represent specific news may be considered an act of selective abstraction (Kress, 2010). If so, what role does linguistic and visual representation play in the process of meaning-making in online newspapers? In this paper a multimodal corpus-assisted approach (Baldry and Thibault, 2006a) is adopted to analyse the main semantic fields used in the construal of the public persona of Silvio Berlusconi, a former Italian Prime Minister, in English language newspaper discourse in a corpus of articles published in www.guardian.co.uk and www.timesonline.co.uk. The paper investigates the presence of the main semantic fields/domains related to Berlusconi in the corpus and the connections between visual and linguistic elements in framing news. The findings offer useful insights for the analysis of web genres and contribute to the exploration of new concordancing tools.