La place de la rhetorique dans le discours journalistique
The Place of Rhetoric in Journalistic Discourse

Summary/Abstract: Rhetoric aims to prepare rhetors and locutors for arguing, and its potential effectiveness no longer needs to be proven. It is employed not only in political discourse, but in advertisement and religious discourse as well ; that is, whenever the aim is to persuade, for electoral or commercial ends, or for religious reasons. But if rhetoric aims at persuading by attracting the attention of the interlocutor, it also has a negative side to it: the abusive exploitation it may give way to.The debate is now open on the abuse of rhetoric, on the power that speech exerts on public opinion and all sorts of audiences. We also see that rhetoric is about “recipes” or knowledge “transmitted,” a knowledge that can used and misused: to defend a just cause or to manipulate. Rhetoric is of interest to journalistic discourse because of its insights, the rules it utilizes to achieve persuasion, and its concern with the process of production of discourse. Indeed, journalistic discourse illustrates perfectly how rhetorical devices can be efficiently mobilised in argumentation, fakes, plays on images, metaphors, and use of polemics. From this perspective, it contributes to transmitting rhetorical devices and principles as a competence common to all human beings and citizens. I will investigate, in this paper, a corpus composed of editorials and news items so as to show how the discourse that circulates in national daily newspapers reinforces the diffusion of traditional rhetoric.

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