Un hecho; dos versiones. Análisis semiolingüístico de la construcción de un mismo acontecimiento en dos diarios venezolanos

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to analyze the news that the Venezuelan newspapers Panorama and El Nacional published to cover the same event: the results of a demonstration that took place in Caracas; on January 3rd; 2003. The verbal domain of the news is studied in a semantic-pragmatic analysis and it is compared with the visual resources next to it. We conclude that both newspapers present biased information in favor of a political group; one of them is pro government; the other one is pro opposition. We evidenced the legitimating; illegitimating and concealing functions in the journalistic messages; which transmit dissimilar and contradictory para-realities; because in each media the victims and the aggressors are completely different. Through the selection of the informative sources; the topics; the headlines and the selective presentation of photographs; these news only give the readers one version of the fact; that inhibits their possibility of reconstructing the reality based upon the presented data.