The right-wing vs left-wing ideological images construction of ‘press freedom’: a longitudinal study in the Discursive Social Psychology perspective.

The Discursive Social Psychology perspective (DSP; Potter 1996; Potter & Edwards 2001; Potter 2010) is taken as the main theoretical framework to deepen the ideological and narrative styles through which the daily press communicates the construction (and reconstruction) of socially relevant ‘objects’. The object we focused on has been the ‘press freedom’. We have analyzed the ways in which the issue of press freedom is socially constructed and therefore represented within the ‘media discourse’ in newspapers and magazines differentiated according to their political orientation (center/left-wing versus center/right-wing). These ‘texts’ have the peculiar characteristics to generate discursive, more or less shared, Images conveying Social Representations (SR; Moscovici 1961/76, 1981, 1984) of socially significant “objects of knowledge” (Moscovici 1983). Specifically, the press freedom became a crucial object characterizing a specific debate into the Italian mass media system. To deepen the analysis on the discursive representations in textual data (collected in order to compare the 2009 and 2015 years), we recurred to the perspective of Discursive Analysis (DA; Billig 1985, 1987; Aiello & Bonaiuto, 2003).