ABSTRACT

Legal and judicial cases reported in the media generally follow a script, in that specific and ‘traditional’ roles are assigned to participants, thus influencing or distorting the information conveyed to the audience. In addition to these stereotypical representations, which are determined by the cultural environment of the countries concerned, there is nowadays a growing tendency towards the mediatization of justice: judicial cases receive huge media attention and become the object of massive public interest or even social campaigns. The chapter aims to explore the multifaceted relationship between law, language, power and media by means of an investigation of the communicative and rhetorical strategies used by the media to represent the social actors of the judicial case. The legal aspects of the case and the description of the judicial procedure are not described in the articles composing the corpus, possibly due to the inner difficulty in grasping the technical aspects of the case.