‘Greece will decide the future of Europe’: The recontextualisation of the Greek national elections in a British broadsheet newspaper

Abstract

This article explores the representation of the Greek national elections in a British broadsheet newspaper and their recontextualisation through the prism of crisis. I focus on speech representation as a recontextualisation device that serves as a bridge between speech production and text consumption. Specifically, the paper addresses the discursive framing of the crisis by focusing on the `speakers', namely the social actors who are represented as speaking, the actions in which they are involved and the power role relationships established between them. I argue that a polarised image of crisis is constructed and that the framing of the Greek elections in this particular broadsheet results in double-voicing that positions Greece as either dependent on or independent of Europe. This double-voicing seems to contribute to the maintenance of domination and social control and helps sustain dominant discourses circulating in the broader socio-cultural context.

The financial crisis in the German and English press: Metaphorical structures in the media coverage on Greece, Spain and Italy

“…SPIEGEL and TIME, however, also express their worries about the future of the monetary union (see also Lampropoulou, 2014, on the UK context). While the American magazine considers Greece to be the main catalyst of the shock waves sent through Europe, the metaphor is -surprisingly -most often applied to Spain by the magazine SPIEGEL.…”

The discursive construction of the recent European economic crisis in two political magazines

“…Overall, The Spectator adopts a "local" view of the crisis, in the sense that it views the European crisis in relation to the "local" economy, and to the problems and effects of the crisis on the domestic sphere, a finding which has also been reported by other studies exploring the European crisis in the UK press (Lampropoulou, 2014;Touri and Rogers, 2013). From this localized perspective, The Spectator texts view the European crisis as a threat to the British economy that can have multiple negative consequences.…”

Crisis discourses: Poland and Portugal in english language media

“…The current literature on English language media coverage of the European crisis has contemplated various approaches: i) focusing on single cases such as that of Greece (e.g., Lampropoulou 2014), ii) focusing on the whole bunch of Southern European countries (e.g., Bickens et al 2014), and iii) juxtaposing the crisis narrations in the English language press (and other national press concerning the countries of southern Europe) with those from the well-established and prosperous economies of the West and North of the EU (e.g., Arrese & Vara-Miguel 2016). However, to the best of our knowledge, there is a dearth of articles which compare the English language media crisis narrations about a country hit by crisis and austerity (Portugal) and a so-called new EU member state (Poland).…”