Full Description
Riots, strikes and protests are heavily mediatised events. Media representations thus play a crucial role in narrating instances of civil disorder for the public where they define the issues at stake, delimit frames of reference and debate, and ultimately legitimise or delegitimise the actors, actions and causes involved. From a critical semiotic perspective, drawing on insights from linguistics, multimodality and media studies, this book explores the ideological dimensions of media representation and its function in discursively constructing public understandings of, and attitudes toward, civil disorder. A range of case studies are presented which cut across time, communicative modality and genre, and geo-political context.
Contents
Introduction
PART I: LANGUAGE
1. Political spin in early newspapers: Comparing narratives of the Baltimore Riots in June and July 1812
Juhani Rudanko
2. Moral storytelling during the 2011 England Riots: Mythology, metaphor and ideology
Darren Kelsey
3. Why do they protest? The discursive construction of 'motives' of the Chilean student movement (2011-2013) in the alternative press
Carolina Pérez-Arredondo
4. Crying children and bleeding pensioners against Rambo's troop: Perspectivization in German newspaper reports on Stuttgart 21 Protests
Gerrit Kotzur
5. Taking a stance through the voice of 'others': Attribution in news coverage of a public sector workers' strike in two Botswana newspapers
Boitshwarelo Rantsudu
6. Media 'militant' tendencies: How strike action in the news press is discursively constructed as inherently violent
Matt Davies and Rotsukhon Nophakhun
PART II: MULTIMODALITY
7. Metaphor and the Miners' Strike: A multimodal analysis
Christopher Hart
8. Strategic manoeuvring in Arab Spring political cartoons
Rania El Nakkouzi
9. 'Eu não mereço morrer assassinado': On- and off-line protest by favela residents in Rio de Janeiro and mainstream media reactions to it: A multimodal approach
Andrea Mayr
10. Rioting and disorderly behaviour as political media practice
Serjoscha Ostermeyer and David Sittler
