'The Pearly Gates have opened and shut': Alitalia’s privatization in the US American press

This study utilizes electronic language corpora to analyze the way in which the same news event (the financial crisis and privatization of the Italian flag carrier, Alitalia) was represented in some of the main Italian, British, and US American newspapers during the six months (August 2008-January 2009) that led to the privatization of Alitalia and its acquisition by CAI, a consortium of entrepreneurs coming from different fields of the Italian business community. The corpora contain all the articles that were published on this news event by Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, The Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. After a brief introduction to the use of electronic corpora in discourse analysis, we focus on the characteristics of the American corpus in comparison with its Italian and British counterparts, especially as concerns the keywords, the reference to the sources of information that the journalists relied on for their reports, and the framing of the newspapers’ narratives. The results show that the American corpus has the strongest tendency to frame Alitalia’s privatization as a purely economic issue, with many more business and finance terms among the most frequent keywords. All the corpora give much relevance to the role of labor unions in this privatization process, but the American corpus tends to represent them as more united in their struggle to keep jobs and obtain new contracts with favorable working conditions. Finally, the American newspapers represented in the corpus are the least inclined to provide editorial comments on this news event; comment, sometimes characterized by the use of creative metaphors, is typically embedded in quotations from the journalists’ sources, who are quite often described as “speaking on condition of anonymity”.