FROM THE TOTALITARIAN LANGUAGE TO THE INFORMATIVE DISCOURSE. A ROMANIAN MEDIA DISCOURSE ANALYSIS DURING THE ’90s (English version)

This study aims at emphasizing the institutional transformations that occurred in the public environment following the events in December 1989 in Romania, focusing on the dismantling of mechanisms that marked the transition from the national-communist propaganda discourse to the informative discourse, which laid the foundation of the public sphere in post-totalitarian Romania. The hypothesis we start from is that Romanian media was slow in abandoning the communist press model, which explains the manichaeist discourse of nowadays media, the involvement of politics in media business and, last but not least, the extremely poor market - the poorest in Eastern Europe, as showed by the latest studies. The analysis has two components: the context analysis (historical, political, ideological) and the media discourse analysis (cf. P. Charaudeau, R. Fowler, John Hartley), in line with the view of certain authors (C. Sparks) with respect to the transitions in Eastern Europe and the role media played in these processes. Also, we permanently referred to the theories of the public sphere explained by J. Habermas. The discourse procedures of the totalitarian language were emphasized by investigating a corpus formed of the main publications of the printed press before and after 1989.