Attacks on Politicians in Opinion Columns about Pandemic

This paper examines the opinion columns on the political management of the crisis that arose from the COVID-19 pandemic and finds out what differences are detected in the attacks on the ruling political class about the ideological orientation of the newspaper of origin. Starting from the theoretical-methodological framework of discourse analysis with a linguistic-pragmatic approach and through digital humanities, a qualitative analysis of forty opinion columns is carried out. These texts are useful for the analysis of the main linguistic, argumentative and discursive resources in use. Even though criticism of the government is present in all the articles in the corpus, the results show that the most violent and rude attacks come from newspapers of opposite political ideology and are aimed at delegitimizing the measures taken to deal with the situation.