One text, two readings: cases of reframing the Popes’ words in the Portuguese press

Until today, the Popes have spoken in the United Nations General Assembly in five occasions. There, they manifested their concerns about issues which somehow were disturbing peace: for instance, the nuclear arms race (in Paul VI’s pontificate), violations of human rights and of the rights of nations (in John Paul II’s), the failure of governments to protect their peoples (in Benedict XVI’s) and the environmental crisis together with social exclusion (in Pope Francis’). Although all these topics have been generally broadcasted, since they were crucial in the international agenda at each time, it is curious to realize that two of the most influent newspapers in Portugal – Diário de Notícias (DN) e Jornal de Notícias (JN) – did not entirely coincide in the rewriting (Lefevere, 1992) of these papal speeches for the Portuguese public. Not only did they present a particular selection of the subjects mentioned by the pontiffs before the UN representatives, so attributing more importance to some arguments than others; but they also rearranged the selected contents in a particular order, therefore reflecting (and promoting) a specific interpretation of the papal messages and of the events themselves. The aim of this paper is to present the contours of the reframing processes pursued by DN and JN of these official texts, looking for differences and similarities, changes and regularities – both synchronically and diachronically. The research will focus on the selection and the reordering of the source contents, as presented in the first news piece they published about each of the five Popes’ speeches. The inverted pyramid will serve as basis for the analysis and concepts such as “agenda-setting” (McCombs and Shaw, 1972), “frame” (Lakoff and Wehling, 2012), “ideology” (Lefevere, 1987, 1992) and “agency” (Kinnunen and Koskinen, 2010) will be crucial as theoretical framework.