Search

During crises, news headlines not only communicate objective information but also express attitudes and emotions towards the reported events through different linguistic markers of evaluation. By analysing Finnish headlines from digital news sources on 16–17 March 2020, in this article we unravel how evaluative parameters, themes, and actors construct evaluative images of Covid-19 in Finnish news media. The results show how themes such as daily lives, health, and restrictive measures are evaluated, for example, through emotivity, mental state, evidentiality, and style. Findings also highlight the variety of different actors, from authorities to ordinary citizens, involved in the headlines. Consequently, three evaluative images emerge: 1) the pandemic that evokes concern and solidarity in the everyday lives of citizens; 2) the pandemic as a challenging health crisis, with the authorities as responsible decision-makers; and 3) the pandemic as a crisis that creates concern and negatively impacts the different functions of society.

How do states "save face" following a cyber intrusion directed at them? Recent scholarship demonstrates that the covert nature of cyber intrusions allows states to respond with restraint, avoiding escalation. But what happens when cyber intrusions become public and are highly visible? This article examines the rhetorical strategies employed by authoritarian Gulf states to mitigate the image-related costs associated with a public cyber intrusion. Drawing on the conceptual language of image-repair and crisis communication theories and employing discourse analysis of original data in Arabic, we identify three types of face-saving strategies: diminishing, self-complimenting, and accusing. Our findings indicate that intrusions involving leaking or faking information bring about unique "face-saving" strategies that do not only deal with the intrusion itself but also with the subsequent information crisis. Overall, the article identifies how states employ diverse rhetorical strategies—beyond attribution—to narrate cyber intrusions and keep cyber conflict contained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the pandemic emergency, several communicative artifacts have been produced. These language practices adhered to the crisis risk communication strategies. Within the COVID-19 pandemic to date, the discourse analysis is limited to media (e.g. Jo e Chang 2020; Poirier et al. 2020; Altheide 2002; Nicolosi 2021; Malecki et al. 2021; Boccia Artieri e Farci 2021; Barile e Pananari 2020), or leaders' language (e.g. Bernard et al. 2021; Warren e Lofstedt 2022) with little analysis of institutional crisis communication. This contribution aims to fill this gap by presenting a documentary analysis of the Italian official documents produced between the declaration of the state of emergency (January 31, 2020) and its cessation (March 31, 2022). Results shed light on the technocratic approach the Italian crisis discourse laid on, in which the nature of risk was objective and knowable. This epistemological approach brought the foundations of an emergency architecture in which the Scientific Technical Committee (CTS) played a strategic role and the authorities' decisions progressed at the same pace as the evolving epidemiological scenario. The work poses possible future developments as regards other global risks crisis communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study aims to monitor the most prominent theses of the Saudi Press discourse regarding the Turkish intervention in Libya, by analyzing the qualitative discourse of opinion materials in the newspaper "Al-Sharq AlAwsat" during the period from December 30, 2019 AD to June 30, 2020 AD, in order to identify the dimensions of these discourse in terms of the reasons behind the Turkish intervention in Libya and its repercussions at the regional and international levels, and the most prominent solutions proposed by the Saudi Press discourse to address the Libyan crisis and developments in the Libyan scene in the future, The media survey methodology and the use of the discourse analysis tool were employed for opinion materials in Al-Sharq AlAwsat newspaper during the time period of the study, which amounted to (45) articles . The most important results of the study are the following : -The theses of the desire for Turkish expansion and the fulfillment of the Turkish president's dreams of restoring the Ottoman caliphate, covering up the Turkish failure in the east of the Euphrates and northern Syria, as well as Turkey's economic ambitions and greed for Libya's oil and natural gas wealth, were the reasons for the Turkish intervention in Libya . -The Saudi Press discourse highlighted theses about transforming Libya into an incubator for the second edition of the terrorist organization "ISIS", as well as the military confrontation with Russia, Egypt, the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean Forum and Israel, due to the dispute over natural gas resources in the Mediterranean as repercussions of this intervention. - While the proposals for solutions presented by the Saudi journalistic discourse varied between military decisiveness on the one hand, and a political solution between the conflicting factions in Libya on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Herald of Journalism / Habaršy Žurnalistika Seriâsy is the property of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper examines China's international communication strategy during the initial phase of the global COVID-19 pandemic. In the spring of 2020, Western governments and media began criticising the systematic lack of transparency and accountability in the Chinese political system in relation to the failed containment of the Wuhan outbreak. Facing an unprecedented reputational crisis, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mobilised its foreign-language media in an attempt to influence the international discourse on COVID-19. Surveying the English and Chinese editions of the People's Daily, this study identifies CCP discourses aimed at foreign audiences and traces their evolution during the early stages of the pandemic. Overall, the study provides a comprehensive map of Chinese narratives on COVID-19 and generates fresh insights into CCP crisis communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares Australian and New Zealand Prime Ministers' crisis response communication about COVID-19. We examine how gender performativity and contextual factors contribute to each leader's discursive 'style' at the lexical level, and explore micro-diachronic changes as the pandemic unfolded. Informed by corpus linguistics approaches, we analysed written texts published on each leader's website between January and December 2020, using Scattertext to visualise lexical differences between each leader's corpus, and mapping frequencies against coronavirus case numbers in each country. Guided by these results, closer qualitative analysis reveals that whereas Jacinda Ardern quickly established and maintained a consistent and highly personalised style in guiding New Zealanders through the pandemic, Scott Morrison's messaging was both less personal and more reactive to the epidemic curve. However, despite some traces of stereotypically gendered language, neither leader made gender salient in their COVID-19 crisis response communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the following text is to analyze the changes in television advertising in the banking and automobile sectors, according to the social context. The hypothesis is that communication is significantly influenced by the situational context, causing differences between the advertising of the two sectors. A multimodal discourse analysis is used, comparing twenty commercials from the banking and automobile sectors in 2019 and 2020, the period during which the lockdown due to COVID-19 took place. Based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis tables were developed with which to analyze general data such as the value proposition or target audience of the advert, or other special data like the text (verb tenses, rhetorical figures...), the image and the sound used. The fact that context is decisive in communication is made evident, and since this is different in every sector, the communication strategy is clearly different as well. However, the points that the two sectors have in common are remarkable: these range from talking about brands and products, to speaking for and about people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of the following text is to analyze the changes in television advertising in the banking and automobile sectors, according to the social context. The hypothesis is that communication is significantly influenced by the situational context, causing differences between the advertising of the two sectors. A multimodal discourse analysis is used, comparing twenty commercials from the banking and automobile sectors in 2019 and 2020, the period during which the lockdown due to COVID-19 took place. Based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis tables were developed with which to analyze general data such as the value proposition or target audience of the advert, or other special data like the text (verb tenses, rhetorical figures…), the image and the sound used. The fact that context is decisive in communication is made evident, and since this is different in every sector, the communication strategy is clearly different as well. However, the points that the two sectors have in common are remarkable: these range from talking about brands and products, to speaking for and about people.

The economic, financial and environmental crises that have involved many international companies over the past twenty years have been the concern of various disciplines, e.g. Genre Studies (Rutherford 2005; Zanola 2010), Critical Discourse Analysis (Howcroft 2012) and Crisis Communication (Coombs and Holladay 2012). Interestingly, the number of studies carried out in these academic areas have paid attention to the linguistic and discursive strategies adopted by managers to persuade their audience to trust them. In particular, they have focused on apologia and apology as activities of trust-building, while neglecting the audience's actual reactions to corporations' suasive attempts. These responses are remarkable in blogs, social networks, and other forms of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) genres (Puschmann 2010). Adopting an approach which integrates Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis (Herring 2001; Androutsopoulos, Beißwenger 2008), Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 2003; van Dijk 2006) and Pragmatics (Austin 1962; Searle 1975), the paper focuses on the perlocutionary acts enacted in blogs, tweets and user-generated articles that respond to corporate apologies. In particular, it investigates how corporate scandals and wrongdoings are experienced by readers. To achieve this goal, the paper is carried out on a corpus consisting of tweets disputing the Volkswagen (VW) diesel scandal over the period 2015 to 2017. Findings show that customers tend to react with anger, disappointment and irony to the crisis communicative stances enacted by the VW management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The paper explores university leaders' employee-focused sensegiving discourse during the COVID-19 health crisis. The aim is to reveal how leadership sensegiving narratives construct emotion in the rhetor-audience relationship. Design/methodology/approach: A social constructionist, sensemaking approach centres on the meaning-making discourse of university leaders. Using rhetorical discourse analysis (RDA), the study analysed 67 emails sent to staff during a three-month period at the start of the global pandemic. RDA helps to reveal how university leaders help employees make sense of changing realities. Findings: Three core narratives: organisational competence and resilience; empathy, reassurance and recognition; and community and location reveal a multi-layered understanding of leadership sensegiving discourse in which emotion intersects with material and temporal sensemaking dimensions. In supporting a process of organisational identification and belonging, these core narratives help to mitigate audience dissonance driven by the antenarrative of uncertainty. Research limitations/implications: An interpretivist approach was used to analyse qualitative data from two UK universities. While focused on internal communication, the employee perspective was not examined. Nevertheless, this paper extends the human dimension of internal crisis communication, building on constructionist approaches that are concerned with emotion and sensegiving. Originality/value: This paper expands the domain of internal crisis communication. It integrates the social construction of emotion and sensemaking with the underexplored material and temporal dimensions in internal crisis communication and applies RDA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study assesses how firms deployed language tactically to cope with crisis events. By applying the Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) approach, we identify linguistic characteristics of Google and Apple's crisis communication in China and note that different discursive strategies were adopted to manage their organizational legitimacy. When facing a major constitutional crisis that threatens the organization's cognitive and moral legitimacy, the linguistic components consist of words and grammars with associative relationship, strong rhetoric, and inclusion of audience views to secure a wide range of support. When a legitimacy crisis is instrumental, the wording and grammars used are more with realistic relationships and technical rhetoric, with different expected outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous evaluation methods are used as effective indicators for the cross-cultural communication of a regional image. However, because these indicators are primarily in a foreign cultural situation, it is challenging to measure their attitudes and cognitions across geographic distances and cultural differences. This challenge motivated us to combine cultural communication methods and modern location service technology to carry out regional image communication research. First, this article examines the basic process of cross-cultural communication and the generation of regional images from an information transmission and network security perspective. It combines multimodal discourse to analyze influencing factors and establishes a hierarchical model of the cross-cultural communication indicator system. Secondly, based on the location-based service (LBS), this article adds scene information to develop a user tendency model. This model effectively handles the conversion between two-dimensional scoring space and three-dimensional tendency space and can adapt to the short-term changes of users' tendency. The experimental results verify that the location-based e-commerce recommendation algorithm proposed in this paper can better solve information overload and obtain a significant recommendation effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has reached most countries in the world. In the field of political communication, it is an unprecedented challenge for world political leaders. The aim of this research is to analyze the war rhetoric of Pedro Sánchez, President of Spain, one of the countries most affected by the pandemic. It takes his official speeches delivered from March 10 to April 22 as a reference. Content analysis is used with a procedure created for this case, under the approach of the Critical Discourse Analysis and combining a quantitative and qualitative perspective. After a thorough bibliographical review on the use of war rhetoric in public discourse, a corpus of lexical units w identified and interpreted in context: 101 lexical units and 359 phrases or metaphors with war or military reminiscences are detected in the 13 discourses of the corpus. The greatest "warlike weight" concentrates on the most serious moments and on the victims and those infected during the crisis. The war is the transmission vehicle used by the President of the Spanish Government to convey, in a simple, visual, and moving way, a government decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 was declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on 11th March, 2020. Scientists and researchers immediately took interests to find a vaccine. While researchers in various discipline, particularly in medicine, began to study about the virus to help us understand the situation from various perspectives, there is limited research on linguistics analysis to date about Covid-19. Therefore, the present study aims to contribute to research in linguistics about Covid-19, by employing corpus-driven approach for data analysis. Online newspaper reports about Covid-19 were downloaded from the Star online from March 1st to March 31st, 2020. A total of 1018 news reports were processed and analysed, with 140 themes being identified.100 top collocates with the MI score set at a minimum of 5, using AntConc software revealed that verb and noun collocates co-occurred frequently with the node word Covid-19. Generally, thecollocates reflect fear, anxiety and uncertainty that majority of Malaysians feel. have. It also shows how the virus is taking a toll on Malaysia and Malaysians with regards to economy and social life. On the other hand, some of the collocates portrayed the government to be in total control of the situation, despite the threat to health and economic situations in the country. Suggestions for future research about Covid-19 include comparison of several newspaper reports from English newspapers in Malaysia, analysis of news report during extended movement control order (ECMO) in Malaysia or discourse analysis of crisis communication by political leaders in ASEAN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Female leaders face numerous challenges and barriers beyond the scope of their position, including biases about their leadership style and personal characteristics, isolation and exclusion, and lack of mentoring, among others. The position of university president has typically been held by White males. The numbers of female university presidents remains disproportionately low, with an even wider gap for Black women and women of color, especially at research-intensive universities. This exploratory study examined statements about key instructional decisions in response to the COVID-19 pandemic from 9 female presidents of research-intensive universities (Carnegie classification R1 and R2). An emergent methodology incorporating elements of dialogic discourse analysis and comparative case study was used to examine the crisis and emergency risk communication styles of these female leaders in order to explore how they mitigated risk in their communications and the differences in decision-making agency exhibited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2017 Equifax data breach left 144.5 million users digitally vulnerable to identity theft and future hacks. The organization's failure to provide ongoing communication and information regarding the attack, motivated users to form crisis communities within the Twitter platform. This study examines the discourses present within the platform as users discussed the data breach. Digital crisis communities provide researchers opportunities to study how public users respond and react to a digital threat, particularly one that impacts online security and privacy. Through a qualitative analysis of tweets from the 3 weeks after the breach was announced, three discourses emerged that represented user frustrations and reactions to the security violation. These include breaking news, anger and outrage, and blame attribution. The findings of this study are relevant for those studying crisis communication, the Twitter platform, and online communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Sociohistórica: Cuadernos del CISH is the property of Universidad Nacional de La Plata and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper makes a case for a stronger cultural and narrative approach to economic history. It shows that an analysis of the discourse strategies used to construct and present the narratives of crises can be used to reach a better understanding of economic crises. Starting from the observation that economic crises are frequently portrayed as serious illnesses which undergo different courses and progressions, the author argues that crises should also be viewed as phenomena of communication and perception. These should be examined in order to reveal either repeatedly used or changing linguistic patterns, metaphors and abstract concepts. The analysis therefore focuses on the relationship between economic crises and crisis discourses. Whether the crisis is described as an "imbalance" (in an otherwise fundamentally stable system) or a multi-layered disease (that culminates in death) is not only based on different metaphors and interpretation patterns. It also has an effect on the assessment of the causes and the progression of the crises, and it presents different courses of possible action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world of communication has changed significantly in the last decade as a result of the evolution of social media. Food crisis managers and communicators should be cognizant of the messages presented to the public by all media channels during a crisis. Using the 2008 Irish dioxin contamination incident as an example, a quantitative content analysis was carried out to investigate the relationship between social and traditional media. Messages published in printed newspapers (n = 141), blogs and forums (n = 107), and Twitter (n = 68) were analysed to investigate sourcing practice, story topic and use of tone. Results revealed that traditional media relied on diverse offline sources in reporting a wide range of topics. In comparison, social media responded faster and diminished faster, using offline and online media news messages as the primary sources in reporting very limited topics. No significant difference was found in the presence of negative tone across media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article is about the popularizing science dimension of the journalistic text, its reformating character and didacticity. The analysis focuses on the treatment of economy information throughout the crisis, because of its specialized nature, requiring a discursive strategy to make the rigour of presentation compatible with the wide heterogeneous receiver that is typical of the media. This informative process requires a recontextualization of the specialized knowledge that is developed through three procedures: the reworking of the original conceptual networks, the retextualization of scientific discourse in the journalistic environment and reconceptualization affecting terminology and lexical referents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of corporate globalization and the discoursal integration of ecological issues by multinationals this paper examines how BP played down and took steps to minimize the effects of its Deep Horizon rig explosion in 2010. Using a combination of CDA methods and corpus linguistic techniques an empirical analysis is first given of a series of BP's press releases during the attempts to stop the oil spill. Various linguistic features, such as euphemisms and metaphors, are isolated. The manner in which BP presents issues of obligation and responsibility is discussed. A second empirical section considers how the aftermath of the spill, especially the 'restoration' of the Gulf, and BP's claims to be dealing with it is presented on BP's website. This can be seen as a case of how crisis communication is undertaken by corporations. A key feature that is illustrated is the role terminological control and word choice play in deflecting attention from real and potential troubles. A final generalizing discussion section provides a critical political-economic evaluation of the practices and media presentations that state and business corporate bodies engage in to conceal and obscure their real operations and intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The broad field of public relations is plagued by difficulties of definition, none more problematic than the definitional challenges facing issue management and crisis management. After considering the need for commonly understood language as a basis for meaningful discourse, the paper identifies the particular reasons for ongoing ambiguity in issue and crisis management and charts some distinct approaches which have developed within each discipline. It then analyzes how these evolutionary changes are creating further difficulties for defining the interplay between the two, and identifies a more integrated process approach focused on characterizing clusters of activities. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Integrated Internet trolling into crisis communication theories. • Understood specific purposes and behaviors of crisis influencers and followers. • Explored the interaction processes of publics through cultural discourse analysis. • Proposed a regenerative crisis model of publics to identify social media influencers and followers. Given that a regenerative crisis life cycle is no longer static, communication dynamics have extended beyond organization-receiver relationship to receiver-receiver relationship in the social media environment. This paper analyzes and explicates the socio-cultural meanings in the interaction processes of the crisis publics with a specific socio-political context by blending the concept of Internet trolling into predominant crisis communication theories (i.e. social-mediated crisis communication and regenerative crisis model). Using cultural discourse analysis (CuDA), we analyzed the top influential posts, comments and responses created by both influential social media users and general followers based on the five discourse hubs or radiants of identity, relation, action, dwelling, and emotion in the Lancôme case, which was regarded as the most heated crisis in Hong Kong after and influenced by the Umbrella Movement. The findings suggest that the motivations and behaviors found within each of the crisis publics––influencers and followers––are fundamentally different from each other by nature along the situated regenerative crisis. Two types of social media influencers (i.e. primary and secondary influencers) were identified. We propose a regenerative crisis model of publics to highlight their roles, purposes, behaviors, interaction processes, and emotions within a situated socio-political tension. This paper also discusses the theoretical implications for social-mediated crisis communication literature and the practical implications that take contextual factors into consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scientific objective: Reconstruction of the visual discourse of the categories of crisis, crisis management, and crisis communication in the context of the discursive field of modernism. Research methods: Semiotic analysis, and multimodal discourse analysis. Results and conclusions: Reconstructed basic semantics of crisis discourse (threat, uncertainty, catastrophe, helplessness, dehumanization), crisis management (control, process, knowledge, controlling reality), and crisis communication (human, interaction, chaos, spontaneity). Crisis is thus presented discursively in opposition to the dominant semantics of modernism, while crisis management is fully correlated with these semantics. Crisis communication updates both the elements present in the discursive field of modernism and those that are in opposition to it. Cognitive value: The presented paper is, on the one hand, an example of the use of multimodal discourse analysis and semiotic methods for visual communication, on the other it contains important explanations and suggestions for practical aspects of communication (also by specialists) of categories such as crisis, crisis management, and crisis communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]