Warning, or Manipulating in Pandemic Times? A Critical and Contrastive Analysis of Official Discourse Through the English and Spanish News

Abstract

Focusing on media discourse and adopting a Critical Discourse Analysis—linguistic and rhetorical—perspective, this paper explores the role of the media in influencing citizens’ behaviour towards the COVID-19 crisis. The paper evaluates the set of potentially persuasive lexical items and emotional implicatures used by two quality newspapers, i.e. The Guardian (UK edition) and El País (Spain edition), to report on the pandemic during the three waves—the periods between the onset and trough of virus contamination—that occurred until March 2021. A representative, ad-hoc, comparable corpus (COVIDWave_EN and COVIDWave_ES) was compiled in English and Spanish comprising the news on the pandemic that appeared in the aforementioned newspapers during the three established time periods. The corpora were uploaded to Sketch Engine, which was used to first detect and analyse different categories (nouns, verbs, and adjectives) of word frequency, and then assign negative or positive polarity. Lexical keyness was secondly analysed to categorize emotional implicatures of control, metaphors, signals of epistemic asymmetry and positive implicatures in order to discern how they become weapons of negative or positive persuasion. The ultimate end of the study was to critically analyse and contrast the lexicon and rhetoric used by these two newspapers during this time period so as to unveil the stance taken by governments and health institutions—voices of authority—to disseminate words of control and persuasion with the aim of exerting influence on the behaviour of citizens in UK and Spain.

Knowledge and belief in the times of COVID-19: A comparative analysis of epistemicity in English newspaper discourse of two stages of the pandemic

“…The role of mass media during the pandemic has been (and still is) crucial, since they are in charge of communicating the news of all kinds, for instance those concerning progress and scientific knowledge, government policies and financial consequences, among others. Not surprisingly, research on newspaper discourse in the pandemic soon started to appear: some examples are Andreouli and Brice (2021) , Tejedor et al (2020) , Orts and Vargas-Sierra (2022) , Rovino et al (2021) or the collection of papers compiled by Arriaga et al (2021) . This study adds to existing knowledge on newspaper discourse about the pandemic, by setting forth a quantitative analysis of expressions of epistemicity (i.e.…”