The Narrative Bias: Political Marketing on the World Wide Web

The present research analyses the web sites of the most famous Italian political parties on two important occasions: during the campaign for the regional elections on April 2000 and for the political elections on May 2001. The focus is on the discursive strategies adopted by the parties to describe both themselves and the political competitors with particular reference to the linguistic bias model (LIB) elaborated by Maass, Salvi, Arcuri & Semin (1989). The results of critical textual analysis (van Dijk, 1993; 1998; Fairclough, 1993; Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) suggest that the web pages of Italian parties match self and collective narrative to advertising style. Despite the use of a common and simplistic ‘wooden language’ (Slama Cazacu, 1997) all the parties make explicit reference to the other parties, trying to display the best possible image of the self and the worst of the others, using specific linguistic indices as foreseen by the LIB model.