In April 2002, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez Frías, was removed from power for approximately forty-eight hours and replacing by an acting president, Pedro Carmona Estanga, who disbanded all of the public authorities. In spite of its brevity, this episode marked the history of Venezuela and testifies acutely to the social and political antagonisms experienced by this country. This research aims to analyse the discursive construction of this event within a corpus of three national daily newspapers, by observing how its meaning takes shape during the moment the events took place. Firstly, I present the historical and political context in which these events occurred and media’s situation in Venezuela, before exploring the notion of the event in general terms. As a result, I show that the event is not a reality that can be captured as such, but is in fact a signified reality, in which language plays a fundamental role. Secondly, I examine in what ways the event is materialised in the dailies’ structure, while according particular attention to the various hierarchical levels of the headlines. The third part of the thesis is dedicated to the study of the event naming act, firstly in the headlines and front pages, then within articles. The corpus analyses show that the discourse of the newspapers in front of this event are characterised by a certain vagueness, by abundant usage of implicit modes of address and by the journalists’ tendency to hide behind facts that seem to impose themselves naturally.
