Ethos and pathos - the mise en scène on the cover of the magazine IstoÉ at the service of the spectacular

Abstract

This paper, having as its main theoretical scope the Semiolinguistics of Discourse Analysis, created by Patrick Charaudeau, analyses a cover of IstoÉ magazine, in order to verify the way the “communicating self” constructs the semiotized political person, articulating both verbal and nonverbal texts. The magazine cover analysed is that of the 30th August 2019 edition, which associates President Bolsonaro with a former emperor of Rome, Nero. The objective is to identify the construction that the “communicating self” makes of the semiotized political person on the cover. Thus, it is observed whether the “communication self”, as representative of the magazine, reinforces or refutes the image (ethos) normally constructed by the political person portrayed. Moreover, in order to have the interlocutor not only as a newsstand reader, but an effective buyer and assiduous readerof the issue as well, IstoÉ, among various strategies, can appeal to the emotional state (pathos effects), using three attitudes – polemic, seduction and dramatization. In this sense, we intend to analyse, through Discourse Analysis bias, the emotion from the intended effects. The initial analysis reveals that there is no impartiality in transforming a gross event into a semiotized one and, therefore, already interpreted from the speaker’s point of view.