News Items in the Ivorian Press: From Anecdotal Accounts to the Pragmatic Construction of Social Facts

Abstract

Long relegated to a mere secondary category, the news item now occupies a central place in the Ivorian media landscape. It is no longer limited to reporting isolated events; rather, it plays a role in the symbolic regulation of collective tensions and actively participates in the construction of social representations. This article proposes a pragmatic and discursive approach to a corpus of news items published in the Ivorian press in 2026. By combining enunciative analysis, speech act theory, and media sociology, it highlights how the news item functions as a vector of implicit moralizing and normative dramatization of society. The singular event is interpreted as a collective symptom, contributing to shaping contemporary anxieties while symbolically reinforcing social norms.