In the 1990’s, Brazil was going through changes in its development patterns due to the withdrawal of the State from economic issues. At that time, there were privatizations of companies, among which the telecommunications ones. We consider the discourse surrounding privatizations to be of relevance when observing recent Brazilian History. In this work, which has as its basis the theoretical-methodological principles of French Discourse Analysis, tradition started by Michel Pêcheux, we seek to understand the functioning of discourse about the privatizations of telecommunication companies in the press, having as corpus analysis texts from the newspapers O Estado de S. Paulo and Folha de S. Paulo. This way, with the objective of observing how discourse boundaries between “public” and “private” are established, we initially propose an analysis of the nominalization “privatization”, which concentrates historical features in order to signal a process and a modification towards another model – private –, as well as other designations – “unnationalization” and “sale” to the same event. We also analyze the memory moves including “state”/“public”/”nation”. If these identifications have been possible, that is because they have as a basis a memory which has formed them, defined them and stabilized them along History. The press discourse encourages the imagery of a past that had a negative outcome for the society and should, therefore, be rejected and neglected in its continuity. Consequently, an imagery of the future is produced, in which there are benefits for everyone and no attachment to the past, in a type of discourse that aims to have the privatization process as a symbol of a period of prosperity. This managing of historical time produces a line of continuity between the present and the future and a breakage between past and present. There is, as a result, a path in which changes in the relation State/public/nation take place, considering it old-fashioned, and points at a concentration of positive meanings in the “private”, related to the future, to modernity and to the construction of citizenship. This way, the taking of privatizing position of the newspapers analyzed attempts to crystallize the meaning of “private” as something beneficial, attracting to itself the previous meaning of “public”, which refers to the construction of welfare, and rejecting references that try to keep the relation State/public/nation. Thus, in this discourse, “private” is the basis for the construction of the “public”.