The fuzzy line between media and judicial discourse: insights from the Pinto-López Madrid case

The present chapter aims at exploring the multifaceted relationship between law, language and the media through the lens of a Spanish judicial case (Pinto vs. López Madrid). The focus relies on the media depiction of the ‘characters’ of a prototypical case with a view to studying how identity – understood here both as the personal and social role played by each social actor in the case – and ideology (Fairclough 2013: 56-68) – strictly connected with the notion of power and manipulation (see Orts Llopis, Breeze and Gotti, 2017) – interact with the legal/judicial environment. The results of the corpus-based analysis conducted in the study will shed light on the reasons why the case under investigation has attracted media attention and contribute to providing a picture of how lawyers, judges, prosecutors and defendants are portrayed in the press. As will be demonstrated in the analysis, cultural representations and non-legal factors (such as gender) do play a role in shaping and perpetuating our view of the world.