Journal of Language and Politics - Volume 22, Issue 1, 2023

Abstract

This article presents a qualitative study of media discourses around fake news, examining 288 news articles from two national elections in Denmark in 2019. It explores how news media construct fake news as a national security threat and how journalists articulate their own role in relation to this threat. The study draws on discourse theory and the concept of logics to critically map how particular meaning ascriptions and subject positions come to dominate over others, finding five logics undergirding media discourses: (1) a logic of anticipation; (2) a logic of exteriorisation; (3) a logic of technologisation; (4) a logic of securitisation; and (5) a logic of pre-legitimation. The article concludes that fake news is constructed as an ‘ultimate other’ in Danish media discourses, potentially contributing to blind spots in both public perception and political solutions. This resonates with previous studies from other geo-political contexts, calling for further cross-national research.

Abstract

Studies of institutional change identify critical junctures from the position of hindsight. But this perspective prioritises antecedent factors that downplay the role of agency around moments of potential change. This article looks at changes in the ways in which agents use temporal language to identify events or periods as moments of (possible) juncture. It combines quantitative and qualitative methods of text analysis, drawing on a corpus of British parliamentary speeches from 1811–2019. The article first analyses changes in the strategic use of the term crisis over time, paying particular attention to significant shifts in its politicisation and temporalisation. It then identifies three distinct components to the contestation of crises: over their identification, evaluation and proposed prescriptions. We suggest that studies of critical juncture ought to focus more on the use of temporal language around possible junctures to better understand the political dynamics at moments of heightened uncertainty.

Abstract

In the English worldview, “not all immigrants are created equal” (Henderson and Wyn Jones 2021: 91). This paper provides support for the above statement by employing key semantic domain analysis (Rayson 2008) and CDA to answer the research question: How are EU and extra-EU migrants constructed in Brexit-related UK Government documents published between 2016 and 2019? The analysis demonstrates that extra-EU migrants are constructed as a threat that requires UK-EU unity. At the same time, the government’s grammatical and linguistic strategies discursively exclude EU migrants from the British public. The study argues that a neoliberal construction of the acceptable EU migrant erases the identities of migrant workers in so-called “unskilled” roles and foreshadows the social exclusion of these groups brought about by the UK’s post-Brexit immigration system. The paper concludes that the documents problematise Britain’s “tolerant nation” rhetoric and threaten to weaken feelings of belonging to the UK among migrants.

Abstract

This paper analyzes the legitimation strategies used by Jerry John Rawlings, a Ghanaian revolutionary leader, to license his revolutionary actions, including political enemy executions and a crackdown on corrupt practices. It adapts and extends van Leeuwen’s legitimation framework by demonstrating how Rawlings exploited historical memory and the notion of sacrifice in conjunction with the strategies of authorization, rationalization and moralization to formulate his revolutionary rhetoric. The analysis reveals that the legitimation strategies enabled Rawlings to project a patriot-cum-nationalist identity as well as construct himself as a noble revolutionary mandated by the people of Ghana to represent their interests, protect them from evildoers and lead the process of social transformation. The study illustrates the persuasive power of revolutionary discourses in terms of how they function ideologically in the message they communicate (or exaggerate) and conceal.

Abstract

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a well-acknowledged central economic and diplomatic policy of the Chinese government, which was proposed by President Xi Jinping in 2013. By using content analysis and interviews, this paper analyzes Chinese President Xi’s speeches from 2013 to 2020 about the BRI, as well as official statements of the Chinese central government. It identifies at least five competing diplomatic narratives of the BRI. Different from repetitive literature that explores either the economic or political implications of the BRI, this paper contributes by exploring the original story that the Chinese government tries to tell the world. It concludes that initially, the narrative of the BRI has not been portrayed well from the Chinese side.

Abstract

In October 2018, a collaboration between young rap artists in Thailand’s Indy rap scene, Rap Against Dictatorship (RAD), launched a video criticizing the ruling Junta that went viral within days of publication. The Junta soon after released its own video as a response to RAD. The production and publication of both videos are what Scollon (2001) calls social actions mediated by a distinct cultural toolkit. This study analyzed how modes such as music, text, color, camera angle, gestures, voice, image and iconicity emerged in both videos to realize scalar differences in civic participation. The Junta’s video represents a high sociolinguistic scale, whereas RAD realizes a lower scale. In a time of political unrest in Thailand, sociolinguistic scale and the semiotic resources that people employ to realize scales are a lens to analyze how different stakeholders address various perspectives of the political situation and appeal to different levels of civic participation.

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