Information and Communication – The Limits of Media Discourse. Case Study – Romanian School in the News

Abstract

In this study we propose an analysis of the media discourse on education. This paper is based on questions such as: in what manner is the media an echo for the public policy authors, for the dominant ideology, and what are the stories featuring the school topic. Using the content analysis, we aimed to find the narrative frames, and a map of the most cited journalistic sources. We found that the media is a very important source for public agenda. In fact, the media is one of the most powerful public and social policy agents. Our analysis covers the journalistic discourse in Romania for a period of one year, from the moment of declaring the state of emergency. One of the hypotheses was that the type of journalistic discourse under analysis is specific to crisis communication. Regarding the corpus of texts, we selected a publication where there are published only features on education, edupedu.ro, a quality publication with stories from different fields, including education, libertatea.ro, and a soft publication, kanald.ro. The texts were analysed from a multidisciplinary perspective, in order to define and describe a narrative pattern. One of our main findings is this fear of contaminating the quality press with false information. And, as a consequence, we have found a journalistic conformism and a lake of creativity and new approaches, respectively assuming a role of facilitating the information, of carrier, rather than of a watchdog.