Les stratégies linguistiques à l’œuvre dans le discours de presse: le cas d’etude de l’affaire Aldo Moro

News discourse is a privileged place for identifying discourse strategies used to orient cultural representation or influence the perception of communities. The possibility of understanding the discursive strategies implemented in this kind of discourse finds a coherent methodological framework in the practice of corpus-assisted discourse analysis. In this paper, we focus on a case study: the analysis of the discourse that the French press, namely the dailies Le Monde, Le Figaro and Libération, produced on the “Moro affair”, the president of the Christian Democracy who was kidnapped and killed in 1978 by the Red Brigades, an armed group of the extreme left. Our analysis shows how the linguistic strategies used to describe the protagonists of the case, the Red Brigades, Aldo Moro and Italy differ according to the semantic fields evoked. In the case of the Red Brigades, it is the paradoxical and violent dimension of their identity that is emphasized, which leads them to resort to institutionalized procedures (such as a trial) while they are outside of any institutional (and legal) space, while in the case of the politician Aldo Moro, it is the human dimension that is emphasized, through an important recourse to pathos. Finally, Italy is presented in a caricatured and sometimes grotesque way, which is probably a sign of a difficulty to understand some of its features.