35.1965, Review: Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery (2019)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-35-1965. Fri Jul 05 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.1965, Review: Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery (2019)

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Date: 05-Jul-2024
From: Dimitris Serafis [Serafisdimitris at gmail.com]
Subject: Discourse Analysis: Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery (2019)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/31.86

AUTHOR: Paul Baker
AUTHOR: Costas Gabrielatos
AUTHOR: Tony McEnery
TITLE: Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes
SUBTITLE: The Representation of Islam in the British Press
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Dimitris Serafis

SUMMARY

In their book “Discourse analysis and media attitudes: The
representation of Islam in the British press”, Paul Baker, Costas
Gabrielatos and Tony McEnery provide us with an integration of
principles and tools from the framework of Corpus Linguistics under
the premises of the scholarly agenda of Critical Discourse Analysis.
Through that prism, the authors analyze the ways Islam is represented
in the mainstream British press. The book includes ten chapters: an
introductory chapter, eight chapters of data analysis, and a final
chapter which includes a summary of the main findings. The book is
easy to read and enables the reader to cross-check the validity of the
posed research questions in light of in-depth and rigorous data
analysis.

More specifically, Chapter 1 introduces the main premises of the book.
In doing so, the authors pinpoint the significance of mainstream
newspapers in constructing audience perspectives regarding specific
topics and groups. Then, the authors distinguish between different
types of newspapers in the UK and discuss previous findings of
scholarly research on the representation of Islam and Muslims in the
British press (see, e.g., Richardson 2004). They outline a framework
for a synthesis of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics
(see p. 27), before describing how the book will be organized.

In Chapter 2 the authors present and explain the main tools used in
their approach to Corpus Linguistics. More specifically, they explain
the main function and use of “SketchEngine” (www.sketchengine.co.uk),
that is, the corpus analysis platform through which the authors
analyze their data. They then proceed to a comparison of their corpus
with a more general corpus to secure their findings. Among the major
findings of the chapter, the authors show that “the presentation of
Islam and Muslims in UK newspapers […] was predominantly carried out
in a context of conflict, and the religion and its faithful were
frequently portrayed as causes for concern, if not sources of threat”
(p. 65).

In Chapter 3, keyword frequencies are analyzed to facilitate a
cross-examination of broadsheet vis-à-vis tabloid newspapers in the
UK. The findings suggest that “when it comes to reporting on Islam and
Muslims, the British press is not monolithic” (p. 92) and, more
specifically, that “although the broadsheets write about Islam in the
context of culture and politics, the tabloids seems to focus more on
terrorism and extremism” (p. 93).

In Chapter 4, the authors examine their corpus from the perspective of
change over time. In this way, they reveal that Islam and Muslims are
marked by significant social events such as the 9/11 attacks in the
US. In doing so, we witness in the chapter an increase in the use of
the relevant articles in specific time spans.

Chapter 5 encompasses an analysis of collocations and concordances,
which demonstrates that “highly frequent terms [such as] “Muslim
community” and “Muslim world” tend to be used uncritically, to signify
a mainly homogeneous group of Muslims […] represented as separate, and
in tension with, the rest of the United Kingdom or ‘the West’” (p.
146).

In Chapter 6, drawing on previous research on “belief terms” that
shape particular stereotypes (see, e.g., Partington 1998), the authors
show the various ways in which Muslims and Islam are frequently
associated with extremism, strengthening the conceptual basis for
their ‘othering’. In the same chapter, the authors delve into specific
extracts from the newspapers under analysis in order to secure the
findings of their quantitative endeavor.

Moving towards the last part of their book, Baker, Gabrielatos, and
McEnery associate their research questions and analysis to strategies
that have been previously unveiled by critical discourse analysts in
relation to the representation of the relevant groups in the press. In
particular, Chapter 7 discusses the ways Muslims are represented as
being a burden (e.g. ‘scroungers’) for the welfare system in the UK,
while Chapter 8 focuses particularly on the ways in which Muslim women
wearing the veil are portrayed.

Finally, in Chapter 9, the authors provide news representations of
Muslims over a time span of two centuries (19th to 21st century). In
this way, we see in this chapter lexical changes in the use of
specific words under scrutiny.

EVALUATION

The book at hand is an essential reading that I would recommend
unreservedly to scholars working at the intersection of Critical
Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics (see also Baker et al.
2008). Scholars who follow the main assumptions of the research agenda
that Critical Discourse Analysis outlines, mainly aim to examine the
ways ideological perspectives permeate public texts (such as news
articles) with a view to unveiling the ways power inequalities are
sustained in these ideologically loaded texts (see Wodak and Meyer
2016; Flowerdew and Richardson 2018, among others). However, a long
standing criticism raised against critical discourse-analytical
perspectives is that practitioners in the field are cherry picking
texts from a vast amount of available data to prove their hypotheses
and facilitate their agenda. The present book addresses aspects of the
aforementioned criticism while opening new research avenues in the
relevant field. The synthesis of Corpus Linguistics tools and methods
can enable critical discourse analysts to examine the main meaningful
attitudes emerging in large datasets, build balanced corpora that
could facilitate comparative studies of data, for example, from same
genres across different societal contexts (see e.g. Serafis et al.
2023), all the while setting solid criteria on the basis of which the
collected data will be examined (see also Rheindorf 2019).

More specifically, scholars exploiting techniques offered by relevant
corpus linguistics software (such as the Sketchengine that the authors
use in this publication project) can identify the most frequent
attitudes (through, for example, “frequency” analysis), and/or compare
the most significant patterns that appear in their datasets in
comparison to other corpora automatically generated by relevant
software tools (see “keywords” analysis), and maybe even showcase how
certain frequent words are used in context through a “concordances”
analysis, among others. This set of techniques could prepare the
ground for a subsequent, more fine-grained analysis, while the
extensive examination of large corpora through this lens can enable
scholars to avoid possible research bias (see also Baker 2012) when
examining linguistic data pertinent to concepts such as racism,
xenophobia and other forms of discrimination, which are among the main
topics examined from a critical discourse-analytical perspective.
Through that prism, the proposed synthesis of principles from Critical
Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics enables the authors to
sketch a rigorous micro-textual analytical apparatus and offer solid
findings while they clearly (re-)define the critical questions posed
throughout their socially motivated enquiry into the ways Muslims and
Islam are portrayed in the British mainstream press.

That said, the quantitative examination of large corpora unavoidably
entails limitations in relation to more qualitative analysis, which is
equally important for a critical discourse-analytical approach. This
would include, for instance, a more fine-grained analysis of
discursive strategies such as “argumentation strategies” (technically
defined as “topoi”), meaning the logical schemes or, better, the
reasoning lines that permeate certain discourses and along which
specific standpoint-arguments pairs can emerge (see e.g. Reisigl and
Wodak 2016); in their turn, these pairs, which (often) implicitly stem
from discursive construction, may end up effectively justifying
exclusion of the relevant groups in the British context, or in
different European contexts (see e.g. Serafis et al. 2021). In a
similar vein, an in-depth analysis of the positive representations
(re)produced by the British press would be equally interesting to show
if subtle discriminatory attitudes (such as assimilationist ones) are
favored even in these cases. Future studies that employ a
cross-fertilization of quantitative and qualitative methods would
adequately address such questions, but there is no doubt that this
book paves the way and sets the agenda for research in the area to be
extended in multiple directions.

REFERENCES

Baker, P. (2012) Acceptable bias? Using corpus linguistics methods
with critical discourse analysis. “Critical Discourse Studies” 9(3):
247-256.

Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krżyzanowski, M.,
McEnery, T. and Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy?
Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to
examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press.
“Discourse & Society” 19: 273-306.

Flowerdew, J. and Richardson, J. E. (Eds.). (2018). “The Routledge
Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies”. London: Routledge.

Partington, A. (1998). “Patterns and meanings: Using corpora for
English language research and teaching”. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2016). The discourse-historical approach
(DHA). In R. Wodak, & M. Meyer (Eds.), “Methods of critical discourse
studies” (3rd ed., pp. 23–61). London: Sage.

Richardson, J. E. (2004). “(Mis)Representing Islam: The racism and
rhetoric of British broadsheet newspapers”. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.

Serafis, D., Raimondo, C., Assimakopoulos, S., Greco, S. and Rocci, A.
(2021). Argumentative dynamics in representations of migrants and
refugees: Evidence from the Italian press during the ‘refugee crisis’.
“Discourse & Communication” 15: 559-581.

Serafis, D., Zappettini, F. and Assimakopoulos, S. (2023).The
institutionalization of hatred politics in the Mediterranean: Studying
corpora of online news portals during the European ‘refugee crisis’.
“Topoi” 42: 651-670.

Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (Eds.). (2016). “Methods of critical discourse
studies” (3rd ed.). London: Sage.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

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