Discourse of solidarity. Analysis of the short messages sent to the TV3 Telethon in favour of people affected by infrequent diseases

Abstract

Discourse of solidarity. Analysis of the short messages sent to the TV3 Telethon in favour of people affected by infrequent diseases. The social debate on health and illness has an important presence in mass media. In this debate it is normal to find diverse discourse types from the point of view of valuation. Discourses may offer a positive, negative, non-positive or non-negative valuation of the topic concerning or of the actors involved. One of these types of discourse is that of engagement or the discourse of solidarity. In the present article, we analyse how spectators of the so famous Catalonian Telethon, called La Marató and that took place on the 13th December 2009, express their solidarity. That year the telethon was addressed to the medical investigation of rare diseases (RD), which are those that affect less than 5 for 10.000 inhabitants. Many of them are genetic and scarcely 10 per cent have treatment. 422 short messages (SMS) were sent to the programme. We will analyse all the messages ordered in the following way: those sent by people affected by a RD (28 in total), by relatives of these people (21 in total), by persons without any relation with these types of pathologies (30 from the beginning of the telethon, 30 from the central part and 30 from the end of the programme). In total, 139 SMS will be our last selection. Following the orientations of Critical Discourse Analysis, we will pay particular attention to the discursive materialization of two main dimensions: implication (that includes acts of awareness, of request or offer, of gratefulness or of recognition) and information (that comprises, fundamentally, acts of identification, of location, of greeting and of farewell).