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Framing and blaming in times of economic crisis: The rise and fall of the "Rudd Recession"
Abstract
This article takes a critical approach to the language used by Australian politicians during the global financial crisis of 2007-8. Critical periods in history provide a rich substrate for the appearance of new expressions with the potential to frame the debate, influencing the ways events are interpreted and blame attributed. Passing unnoticed into usage, such memes have the potential to become part of unexamined background knowledge and covertly co-opt hearers and users into shared systems of value and belief. The study focusses on one specific neologism deployed by opposition politicians, firstly in an attempt to create the erroneous impression that a recession was occurring and secondly that it was the fault of the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Patterns of occurrence were tracked against local and international events, indicating a life cycle with several distinct phases: chance emergence, a strategic deployment, cross-genre diffusion, resistance and eventual rejection.
... On the one hand, the comparison aims at contributing to the literature on the crisis by identifying the common patterns in the justification of austerity measures in Southern European countries. So far, scholars have focused on discursive struggles within a specific national context or on the differences in the framing of the crisis from one national context to another (Bickes et al., 2014;Boukala, 2014;Fonseca and Ferreira, 2015;Kutter, 2014;Murray, 2014;Vaara, 2014). However, little attention has been paid to the significance of the discursive regularities in political discourse regardless of contextual (national, partisan or editorial) peculiarities. ...
The Eurozone crisis and the remarkable convergence of national governments towards austerity policies draw scholars’ attention to the discursive strategies that they have used in order to legitimate their economic decisions. This article studies the common features of austerity discourse beyond national and partisan boundaries. It relies on an in-depth analysis combining lexicography and the study of metaphors in speeches of the Italian and Spanish heads of government between 2011 and 2013. While drawing on recent work addressing the legitimation of economic policies, this research takes a step back in order to shed light on the broader discourse on which austerity policies rely and in order to explain the common patterns in various political actors’ discourse. Rooted in a post-foundational approach, it identifies several discursive strategies for depoliticising economic issues (e.g. the construction of an economic common sense, the appeal to external constraints and the metaphorical naturalisation of economics), thus unveiling their political nature. The ‘restructuring’ and ‘rescaling’ of social practices are identified as the main mechanisms pertaining to the articulation of such a broader hegemonic discourse.
Abstract
The role of Kurdish Media in solving economic crisis in Kurdistan Region
An explanatory study for Rudaw weekly From )2017/12/25-2017/1/2( By Dr. Sadiq
Hama Gharib Hama Salih – Salahadin University Asst: Jawad Mohammed Amin
Essa – Lebanese French University Summary" The origin of media is back to long
time ago and has witnessed massive trends over time in terms of roles and
impacts and type of media as well and the environment. The main role of media is
its impact during crisis and solving the crisis through (Media crisis management).
This is the main subject of this research where how Kurdish media role to solve
crisis in the Kurdistan region. For this study we have specified a weekly media for
knowing how they work to overcome economic crisis in Kurdistan region. The
study consists of three parts, in the first part it is about the methodology
including the research problem, objectives and significant. In the second part, has
three parts, type, specification and directions of media including role of media in
solving crisis, then principles of media during crisis. The research found that the
way Kurdish media tries to solve crisis is not based on scientific method, and the
sample of the research is for economic sectors and how to solve the economic
crisis
Blaming and denying constitute typical conversational patterns in conflict talk; such patterns are labeled ‘justification discourses’. The discourses of justification take place in public and private settings, in many written, oral, and visual genres. The explicitness of their linguistic realization depends on the formality of the conversation. Argumentation theory, speech act theory, and discourse analysis lend themselves best to analyze justification discourses. The German/Austrian debates on war crimes are used to illustrate strategies of blaming and denial.
Critical discourse analysis In recent decades critical discourse analysis (CDA) has become a well-established field in the social sciences. However, in contrast with some branches of linguistics, CDA is not a discrete academic discipline with a relatively fixed set of research methods. Instead, we might best see CDA as a problem-oriented interdisciplinary research movement, subsuming a variety of approaches, each with different theoretical models, research methods and agenda. What unites them is a shared interest in the semiotic dimensions of power, injustice, abuse, and political-economic or cultural change in society. CDA is distinctive in a) its view of the relationship between language and society, and b) its critical approach to methodology. Let us take these in turn by first exploring the notions of ‘discourse’ and ‘critical’. The term ‘discourse’ is used in various ways across the social sciences and within the field of CDA. In the most abstract sense, ‘discourse’ ...
Politics and media have become intertwined in unprecedented ways in recent years. Well-known politicians are often treated as celebrities in the media with their private lives subjected to the same prurient scrutiny as rock stars or actors; fictionalized versions of political life such as The West Wing or Yes Minister 1 often generate more public interest than real-life politics. Alongside this ‘‘fictionalization of politics,’’ disenchantment with the democratic process has steadily increased in Europe and elsewhere. Recent elections to the 736-seat European Parliament, for example, generated the lowest turnout in its electoral history. In her powerful new book about the discourse of politics, Ruth Wodak uses an interdisciplinary theoretical framework to address some of these issues. She explores the discursive and social practices of members of the European Parliament (EP) and contrasts their everyday lives with sensationalized representations of politicians in the media. Her purpose in writing the book, which draws from 15 years of ethnographic, policy, and discourse analysis of EU institutions, is to ‘‘throw light on the discursive construction and representation of politics in action’’ (p. 23). She sees this demystification as potentially serving as a first step in reducing the so-called ‘democratic deficit’ in Europe. In her first chapter, Wodak explains key theoretical constructs that guide her research. She uses Goffman (1959) to articulate how politicians construct and are constructed by backstage and frontstage identities. In other words, politicians need to transition frequently from a very carefully orchestrated use of setting, appearance, and discourse that realizes a particular dramatic and consistent effect in public
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) claim that metaphors play a crucial role in systematically structuring concepts, not just language. Probing the validity of this far-reaching claim requires investigating multimodal discourse. In this paper we analyse the 25 metaphors that structure a sample of 30 political cartoons pertaining to the global financial crisis hitting the world in 2008, finding that certain source domains systematically recur. We examine the role of the visual and verbal modalities and argue that the metaphors are manifestations of underlying conceptual ones. In the service of future research pertaining to multimodal metaphor and multimodal discourse, we moreover explicitly reflect on the methodological problems we encountered, and on the decisions we took to solve them.
Contents: 1. Acknowledgements; 2. Introduction; 3. Persuasion across genres: Emerging perspectives (by Virtanen, Tuija); 4. Focusing on private and semipublic discourse; 5. Persuasion in business negotiations (by Bulow-Moller, Anne Marie); 6. Persuasion in judicial argumentation: The Opinions of the Advocates General at the European Court of Justice (by Salmi-Tolonen, Tarja); 7. Focusing on public discourse; 8. In search of "successful" political persuasion: A comparison of the sytles of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan (by Halmari, Helena); 9. In a nutshell: Persuasion in the spatially constrained language of advertising (by Bruthiaux, Paul); 10. "Polls and surveys show": Public opinion as a persuasive device in editorial discourse (by Virtanen, Tuija); 11. Theoretical considerations; 12. Persuasion as implicit anchoring: The case of collocations (by Ostman, Jan-Ola); 13. Generic patterns in promotional discourse (by Bhatia, Vijay); 14. Concluding remarks; 15. Towards understanding modern persuasion (by Halmari, Helena and Virtanen, Tuija); 16. Author Index; 17. Subject Index. VIII, 257 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
This chapter looks at alliteration in one of the sub-genres of political speech, the inaugural addresses of the presidents of the United States. The data cover all the delivered inaugural addresses (56 altogether), from George Washington to Barack Obama, comprising over 130,000 words and over 3000 instances of alliteration. Based on quantitative analysis, careful comparisons are made between the amount of alliteration in various presidents’ speeches and the nature of their presidencies. Even though the most alliterating presidents come from recent years (George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton), the numbers do not strongly support the argument that alliteration has become more common during recent times.
However, alliteration does seem to be related to populism: many presidents with populist approaches resort more to its use. Most of the early presidents used it sparingly, but its use increased with Andrew Jackson, the first ‘populist’ president. With the era of ‘virtual presidency’ and broadcast inaugurals, alliteration has come to serve as a stock device of popular audience appeal. Yet, huge fluctuations in the amount of alliteration occur from president to president.
The study also suggests another connection: many presidents judged by their contemporaries as relatively successful seem to resort to alliteration in modesty. Their alliteration scores are average — not among the highest and not among the lowest. For example, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan belong to these ‘average alliterators’. Laudable political oratory does not, hence, encourage the overuse of any rhetorical device. Alliteration in political speeches may be seen as a double-edged sword: if overused, it may invite ridicule from the intellectual elite, but if used sparingly, it lends auditory power to one’s rhetorical appeal.
Although both academics and policy-makers still debate its exact causes and the extent of its consequences, the ongoing financial crisis is doubtlessly the most distinctive economic event of the late 2000s. But despite the importance of such large-scale economic phenomena, there has been little research on their discursive construction. This paper presents some empirical data to show how the crisis is identified and its boundaries construed in corporate communication, seeking to understand how economic actors selectively shape public perceptions of critical events by routinely emphasising the role of certain agents and stakeholders while ignoring others. Terms for the crisis, their collocates and their discourse preferences are drawn from a 1,500,000-word ad hoc corpus of annual reports.
The blame game, with its finger-pointing and mutual buck-passing, is a familiar feature of politics and organizational life, and blame avoidance pervades government and public organizations at every level. Political and bureaucratic blame games and blame avoidance are more often condemned than analyzed. InThe Blame Game, Christopher Hood takes a different approach by showing how blame avoidance shapes the workings of government and public services. Arguing that the blaming phenomenon is not all bad, Hood demonstrates that it can actually help to pin down responsibility, and he examines different kinds of blame avoidance, both positive and negative.Hood traces how the main forms of blame avoidance manifest themselves in presentational and "spin" activity, the architecture of organizations, and the shaping of standard operating routines. He analyzes the scope and limits of blame avoidance, and he considers how it plays out in old and new areas, such as those offered by the digital age of websites and e-mail. Hood assesses the effects of this behavior, from high-level problems of democratic accountability trails going cold to the frustrations of dealing with organizations whose procedures seem to ensure that no one is responsible for anything.Delving into the inner workings of complex institutions,The Blame Gameproves how a better understanding of blame avoidance can improve the quality of modern governance, management, and organizational design.
The aim of this article is to study the creation and use of noun-noun sequences with euphemistic purposes. A euphemism is traditionally regarded as the replacement of an unpleasant or offensive signifier by another that functions as a 'veil' thrown over the signified. To the extent that noun-noun sequences often require contextual hints or the activation of certain conceptual metaphors and/ or metonymies, they can be used as euphemistic resources to refer to specific unpleasant concepts. The study of the creation and use of noun-noun sequences will be focused on the specific context of the global financial crisis and related unpopular political facts.
Checks and Balances: How Corpus Linguistics can Contribute to CDA
- Gerlinde Mautner
Mautner, Gerlinde. 2009. "Checks and Balances: How Corpus Linguistics can Contribute to
CDA". In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer,
122-143. London: Sage.
Between Theory, Method, and Politics: Positioning of the Approaches to CDA
- Michael Meyer
Meyer, Michael. 2009. "Between Theory, Method, and Politics: Positioning of the Approaches
to CDA. " In Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. (2nd edition), ed. by Ruth Wodak, and
Michael Meyer, 14-31 London: Sage. DOI: 10.4135/9780857028020.d4
Recession Rudd had to have' The Australian Document
- John Black
Black, John 'Recession Rudd had to have' The Australian Document
(3 December 2008) AUSTLN0020081202e4c30002v http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/recession-rudd-had-to-have/story-e6frg7ef-1111118205961Retrieved 8 Sept 2009
) Who gets the credit for yesterday's growth number?
- Bernard Keane
Bernard Keane, Canberra correspondent, 4 June 2009 http://www.crikey.
com.au/author/bernardkeane/) Who gets the credit for yesterday's growth
number?