Framing the Alitalia crisis in the Italian, British and American Press: Evidence from two small corpora

This paper describes a corpus study of the discourse of the Alitalia crisis as represented in a number of Italian (Repubblica, Corriere della Sera), British (Guardian, Times, Financial Times) and American (New York Times, Washington Post) newspapers. The corpora contain all the articles published in the on-line versions of the selected newspapers about the Alitalia crisis in the identified period (August 2008-January 2009), which coincides with Alitalia’s bankruptcy and acquisition by CAI, a new consortium of Italian investors. Firstly, we illustrate and compare the keyword lists of the two corpora, and we select 5 lexical items (Alitalia, airline, unions, pilots, government) whose translation equivalents (Alitalia, compagnia [aerea], sindacati, piloti, governo) also appear in the Italian keyword list with a comparably high keyness value. Subsequently, we analyze concordances, collocates, and clusters related to the identified keywords. In Italian, the CAI consortium (described as “cordata”) is represented as a “new” initiative to preserve “italianità” (“Italianness”), and as a “partita” (game), or even a “battaglia” (battle) to be won; from the English corpus, Alitalia emerges as being “rescued”/ “saved”/ “salvaged from the wreckage”/“kept flying/ afloat”, “still flying because of capital injection” (described in Italian as “prestito ponte”). Other expressions represent the Italian government as being intent on saving a “bankrupt”/ “ailing” airline with a “sweetheart deal” whereby the “[potentially] profitable parts/ assets/ rump” of the company (described in the Italian corpus with the Anglicism “good company”) will be “hived off” into CAI. In both corpora, pilot unions are generally represented as “refusing the deal”, especially those described as “irriducibili” in the Italian corpus (“hardcore” in the English one). Our conclusions show that the representation of the Alitalia crisis is less than neutral in all the analyzed corpora, but with some differences that reflect the stance taken by the English, American and Italian newspapers.