Discursive strategies used in news headlines to guide the gaze of the readers

Abstract

The huge access to the information channels means that people receive daily information from multiple and different sources, as print, digital, social media or word of mouth. It has become common, just from reading news headlines, for people to relay information to other people without making a full reading of the informational text or checking the sources. Given this, the enunciators use discursive strategies to manipulate the reading of the audience from the elaboration of attractive titles that, in theory, should be impartial, however they are not due to the argumentative dimension that permeates all interaction involving language. In this way, this work aims to analyze how framing strategies by thematization and designation explore the short and long-term memories of individuals to guide their reading towards a certain bias. After a bibliographic review, the analysis of three titles on the same topic, the immigration of Venezuelans to Brazil, was proposed to allow the practical application of the theories. Through this analysis, it was possible to observe that, in fact, the enunciators use strategies to manipulate the reading of their audience and make them adhere to a certain ideology, which was evidenced by the discursive indices found in the analyzed titles.