Politics and journalism: «the debate about the debate». Lexical strategies of the notes published in newspapers of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires on the presidential debate of the 2023 runoff in Argentina

Abstract

In the last general elections in Argentina, three presidential debates were organized: the first round (five candidates), the second round (the same five candidates) and the runoff debate (two candidates). In this work, we are interested in reviewing the lexical strategies chosen by political journalism to comment on the runoff debate the next day. The main objective is to show that, in the selection of the lexicon used, the tendency to consider the debate as an instance of struggle (and not dialogue) is evident. The selected corpus is made up of digital journalistic texts from newspapers in the City of Buenos Aires and with influence throughout the country. These are the newspapers Página 12, La Nación, Clarín, Infobae and El Destapeweb. The methodology used is the content analysis of the selected journalistic notes. The focus is on three grammatical categories of the lexicon: nouns, adjectives and verbs. A complementary analysis is deserved by the detection of idioms of recurrent use in journalism in general. Some of the results found were: the presence of two vast lexical areas: the families of metaphors (Casillo, 2022) and the idioms. Regarding the families of metaphors, these cover two sub-areas: the field of sport and the field of war. Regarding the set phrases, it should be noted that many of these sentences are repeated from journalist to journalist and from text to text. In conclusion, based on the results, Argentine political journalism contributed, with or without manifest intention, to deepening political and electoral polarization.