A Socio-Cultural Analysis of Romanian News from the 18th Century to Digital Era

Abstract

When Marshall McLuhan wrote in his 1964 book Understanding the Media: The Extensions of Man that ‘the medium is the message’, the Canadian communication theorist described the role that the new technologies of the time – radio and television – played in shaping social interactions, communication, and the media itself. For decades, scholars have researched how radio and television have influenced news content. However, in the early 2000s their attention shifted towards another medium: the digital environment. From blogs to digital media outlets or social media platforms – and more recently, artificial intelligence – the role of the digital environment as ‘the medium’ that shapes information has become the focus of contemporary inquiry in both the social sciences and communication research. In this paper, we conduct a socio-cultural analysis of Romanian news coverage from a reader’s perspective, investigating news discourse as the convergence of cultural trends, societal shifts, and economic and technological developments. This inquiry is grounded on the premise that a diachronic examination of news coverage can reveal how media discourse has evolved over years, reflecting underlying socio-cultural dynamics as well as economic and technological transformations. To explore this, the study analyses a corpus of news articles published in Adevărul, one of Romania’s oldest newspapers.