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

Abstract

Purpose-Acknowledging the important role of the media in shaping a European public sphere, the purpose of this paper is to explore how the recent economic crisis is discursively construed in the context of the British media discourse. It investigates discursive constructions of the economic crisis in two political magazines of different ideological positioning by placing emphasis on the economic crisis in Greece, the "weak link" of the Eurozone. Design/methodology/approach-The study draws on systemic functional linguistics which views language as social semiotic and conducts a transitivity analysis of a corpus consisting of 59 articles (a total of 61,820 words) from two weekly British political magazines, one of conservative and one of centre-left political position. The analysis is assisted by Wordsmith 6.0 concordance corpus tool. Findings-It is argued that the articles of the conservative magazine construe the crisis as primarily local and financial, discussing its effects on the British economy. On the other hand, the articles of the centre-left magazine view the crisis as a systemic one derived from and, at the same time, affecting European Union policies and stress its political and economic implications in all of Eurozone. Originality/value-The findings of the study contribute to the body of studies which investigate the role of language in the construction of the economic crisis and also adds to the ongoing discussion regarding the development of a European public sphere as part of the wider European Project and the process of European integration.

The construction of the greek crisis in the public sphere

“…Not surprisingly, due to significant rearrangements in the Greek public sphere, the emergence of specific discourses and counter discourses in times of crisis (see De Rycker and Mohd Don 2013;Critical Discourse Studies 2016), and, more specifically, within the context of the Greek crisis has been of great interest in the field of Discourse Studies and in Critical Discourse Analysis (see among others, Discourse & Society 2014; Hatzidaki and Goutsos forthcoming). In fact, many authors have highlighted the importance of different discourse genres in the construction of the Greek crisis (see among others Bickes et al 2012;Boukala 2014;Lampropoulou 2014;Mitsikopoulou and Lykou 2015;Nikolopoulou and Cantera 2016).…”