CONSTRUCTING REALITIES ON WAR IN PRINT MEDIA DISCOURSE

The paper deals with an analysis of the reporting of two Montenegrin daily newspapers (Pobjeda and Dan) on NATO airstrikes on Yugoslavia in 1999, an event that still has a huge impact on the political scene of Montenegro. The analysis was based on van Dijk's theory on news schemata and Fairclough's and van Dijk's approaches to critical discourse analysis. The analysis has shown that the two analysed dailies, due to their different political and ideological orientations, created two different 'realities' of the same event, using different strategies in the text structure at the macro level, the selection of lexical and syntactic elements at the micro level and in the interpretation of events. This type of reporting has had a negative impact on the political scene of Montenegro on both the decisions made on the independence of the country in 2006 and the support for the NATO membership of Montenegro.