The private space is mixed with the public space by the means of the mass media. The newspapers, the radio, the television, the internet, are the ways by which the world invades the intimacy of the private home. I have chosen for analysis, from the totality of speeches delivered by the mass media, the news, because they are the most complex messages, due to the amount of meanings that they transmit to the receiver. Being conceived with the purpose of informing people about what is happening in many places of the world, by their force of argument, of each speech and of the whole message, as a sum of all the sequences, the news have also other influential effects that the receiver is not aware of, most of the times.

After 1989 the news became a centre of attraction, as never before. The well known queues were forming, in the days following the December events, for newspapers. Time, however, has reduced the curiosity for information, but the radio shows and the televised news remained at the top of public preferences. The news is made of speeches in which a general system of signs is linked to a social structure. The modality of both encoding and decoding will be influenced by the social structure. For example, the information about the disaster of Cernobîl was very well filtered by the communist censorship from Romania of that moment. Even in times of democracy, news about a situation from a company that provides publicity payment to a station or any means of mass media, will receive a special treatment. Besides the ideology practiced by society, each individual has his own ideology and his own way of encoding and decoding a speech, depending on the ideological competence of the author and the receiver. In a first phase, the receiver establishes a relationship of identity between the world that the speech presents and his life experience. Our own experiences represent the prototype to which reference is made. Our entire experience is organized in the form of social representations. These representations have, for each of us, the role of criteria of interpreting the world around. It is the individual’s system of reference and it determines his behavior.