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In:Remedies against the Pandemic: How politicians communicate crisis management
Edited by Nadine Thielemann and Daniel Weiss
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 102] 2023
► pp. 196–227

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Top-down meets bottom-up

Governmental miscommunication through
the lens of quotations in above- and below-the-line Guardian online comments on Covid-19

 | University of Heidelberg
Published online: 24 July 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.102.07kle
Abstract
With their new patterns of participation and interaction in political discourse, Opinion sections of online newspapers played an important role in the dissemination and critical public discussion of governmental crisis communication during the pandemic. Scrutinizing above-the-line and below-the-line commenting in the Opinion section of The Guardian online, the current study focuses on the complexities of the mediation and reception of politicians’ Covid-19 communication at the interface of institutionalized political and participatory online discourses. It carves out different, but interwoven dimensions of this mediation to detail the specific framing conditions of the reception process. Focusing on quotations as an important connecting link between these different discourse domains, it examines firstly, how a(bove) t(he) l(ine)-commenters use quotations to position themselves critically vis-à-vis governmental discourses; secondly, which overall verbal strategies are evident in governmental discourses that address the public indicated/targeted in the atl-comments? and thirdly, whether and how users respond to atl-quotations of politicians in their respective b(elow)t(he)l(ine)-comments.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Atl- and btl-Guardian online comments at the interface of institutionalized and participatory political discourse
    • 2.2Quotations in the context of Guardian online commenting: Pragmatic structure, formal types, and macro-level functions
  • 3.Data and methodology
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Forms and functions of quotations in atl-comments
      • Negative evaluation of governmental discourse practices in comments
      • Lexical quotatives
    • 4.2A second life: Atl-quotations of governmental stances in btl-user comments
  • 5.Conclusions and outlook
  • Notes
  • References
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