Ethnic Construction and Journalistic Narrative

Minority issues play a distinctive and decisive role in Hungarian and Romanian politics. The combination of political power and ethnicity is used and abused as an electoral tool for gaining political influence. The press plays a significant role in these public discourses, since it is in the position of power to influence opinions and votes. This book is a discourse analysis of newspaper articles from Hungary and Romania concerning the Hungarian Status Law. Through this law Hungary granted ethnic Hungarians outside Hungary certain benefits and has caused serious political tensions with Romania and Slovakia. The diachronic and synchronic analyses applied take an insight into the abundant ethnic denotations concerning ethnic Hungarians in general and Hungarians from Romania in particular. Furthermore, the journalistic narratives' analysis reveals each newspaper's positioning in the respective public discourse. Although written from an anthropological perspective, this book is an instrument for further investigation into trans-national discourse analyses of ethnicity and politics.