Discursive illusions and manipulations in legal blogs on medically assisted procreation: the case Parrillo v. Italy

This chapter sets to overview the European Court of Human Rights’ judgment Parrillo v. Italy and its representation in blogs to analyse the phenomena of discursive alterations in legal blogs covering the controversial issue of embryo donation. The study applies the popularisation framework to the transfer of information from the institutionalised context of the court, represented by its final judgment, to the less regulated web-domain of legal blogs, or blawgs. The general methodological framework is Critical Discourse Analysis. Specifically, the study applies van Dijk’s triangulation approach and the notion of discursive manipulations or illusions, created by subjective reconceptualisation of the perceptions of objective realities. The aim is to identify the complex mechanisms that shape the discursive illusion and that could lead to readership manipulation in the popularised context of blogs as compared to the institutional settings of judgments. This aim is verified on a small ad hoc created corpus of ten blog posts and the final judgment on the case accompanied by six concurring and dissenting judicial opinions. The study also uses the legal summary of the judgment and the Court’s press release for consultative purposes. The findings show that blogs employ a vast array of techniques that could be defined as ideological manipulations or discursive illusions in that bloggers use legitimate information in a selective manner, leading to a one-sided representation of the case. In addition, the blogs provide subjective interpretations, both textual and paratextual, attempting to pass them as objective, and trigger selective appraisal patterns, including through the use of evaluative language, specifically in regard of responsibility attribution.