Ice hockey and discourse on the other in the Romanian press

Abstract

In 2011 the world of ice hockey in Romania was hit by a scandal: during a match opposing Romania to Hungary, the players of the Romanian national team started singing the Hungarian national anthem and remained silent for the Romanian one. A few weeks later a player of the under-16 Romanian national team was beaten up by his young teammates because he, the sole Romanian ethnic of the team, asked his co-players, Hungarian ethnic Romanian citizens, to speak Romanian and not Hungarian. Some of the Romanian media in Bucharest rushed then on the scandal and the reactions were strong against what was considered an unacceptable evidence of Hungarian chauvinism. In this context the paper proposes a study of the reaction of the Romanian press to the events which launched the scandal. It shows how the inclusion and exclusion of the Hungarian minority is at stake in the discourse of the country's Romanian majority. Following a methodology inspired by Critical Discourse Analysis as proposed by Wodak (1999), the research takes into account articles in four Romanian daily newspapers dealing with the scandals. It demonstrates how an "other" is constructed in the press and how a latent exclusive discourse pervades into these newspapers.