The focus of the present article will be on the analysis of the influence exercised by media narratives on the Romanian audience’s reconstructions of social movements from January-February 2012. To be more precise, we are interested in the analysis of the aspects involved in the publicizing of this media event, by focusing on the event narrative built in such a way to transmit a particular significance related to the protest movements related to the crisis of the health public system in Romania.
As Couldry stated (2003, p. 59–69), we considered that in the case of the events of January-February 2012, the relation between the media and the community had as main characteristic the presentation and the manipulation of certain fundamental schemes and categories through images and written texts.
In the context of the mass media image all the three aspects of the sign according to Pierce (iconic, indexical, symbolical) function simultaneously in order to support the interpreting and framing of particular news. In the case of the image a number of factors functions in order to limit the polysemy. According to Goldman and Beeker’s analysis (1985, p. 351–361; Hall, 1973, p. 176–190), we perceive images on a daily basis and that is why we see them as “naturally produced artifacts”, whose significance is neither built nor contested. At the same time, visual symbolism is often based on metaphorical relations that are fundamental for our cognitive system, becoming thus invisible (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 115–123.). Moreover, the people producing and the people reading a newspaper can function, in Fowler’s terms (Fowler, 1991), on the basis of a “shared competence” of the interpretation which developed over the years and could make one’s favorite significance of a text inherent and much more automatized.