Cultural memory of historic events and children journalism: a multimodal critical discourse analysis

Abstract

As education and literacy agents, media outlets play a crucial role on constructing how one grasp a given country’s history, including children journalism. The 25 April 1974 was the kick-off event to trace the roots of Portugal’s liberation from an autocratic regime that lasted more than 40 years. Using Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, it was possible to go beyond content and their linguistic resources, within Multimodality, Social Semiotics, and Critical Discourse Studies, in order to depict multimodal semiotic resources (e.g., colour, salience, discursive strategies) under intertextual, media, sociocultural, and historical contexts. This has allowed to better perceive meaning and discourse the cover of April 2024’s edition of Visão Júnior magazine and its respective three issue articles produce about the also called 25th April Revolution. Thus, the following research question was designed: what does April 2024’s Visão Júnior magazine multimodally and discursively represent about the 25th April Revolution? The carnation and red colour as revolution icons, storytelling, informal, and conversational styles of the issue articles, dichotomies past/present, old/new, worse/better, oppression/freedom, and dictatorship/democracy, photo and illustration recurrence, or participatory forms are among the findings. These expose how Visão Júnior’s children journalism warns its readers about pre-April 1974’s practices in order to avoid them in the present and future, while intersecting different childhood generations.