In:Migration and Media: Discourses about identities in crisis
Edited by Lorella Viola and Andreas Musolff
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 81] 2019
► pp. 291–316
Get fulltext
Chapter 12Preaching from a distant pulpit
The European migrant crisis seen through a New York Times editorial and reader comments
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.
Published online: 7 March 2019
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.13boy
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.81.13boy
Abstract
On 18 September 2015, in the midst of the greatest movement of refugees and migrants that Europe has seen since the Second World War, The New York Times published an editorial entitled “Europe should see refugees as a Boon, not as a Burden.” Not surprisingly, the article received well over 450 comments from readers reflecting the myriad of opinions about the complex issue of (European) migration and refugees. This paper is interested in the discourses about (European) migration that emerge from both the editorial and reader comments. Partially inspired by Text World Theory (Werth 1995), the study attempts to determine readers’ varying opinions about the issue and how this reflects and/or diverges from the view(s) presented by the editorial.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1CDA and media discourse
- 2.2New(s) media and the editorial
- 2.3Text World Theory
- 3.Data and methodology
- 4.Data analysis
- 4.1Editorial analysis
- 4.2Comment analysis
- 4.3Comment analysis
- 5.Discussion and preliminary conclusions
References
References (46)
Baker, Paul, Hardie, A., and Toni McEnery. 2006. A Glossary of Corpus Lingusitics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press..
Bolívar, Adriana. 1994. “The Structure of Newspaper Editorials.” In Advances in Written Text Analysis, ed. by Malcolm Coulthard, 276–294. London: Routledge.
Bonyadi, Alireza. 2010. “The Rhetorical Properties of the Schematic Structures of Newspaper Editorials: A Comparative Study of English and Persian Editorials.” Discourse and Communication, 4 (4): 323–342.
Boyd, Michael S. 2014. “(New) Participatory Framework on YouTube? Commenter Interaction in US Political Speeches.” Journal of Pragmatics 72: 46–58.
2016. “From News to Comment: Tracing Text Trajectories in News Reporting about the Amanda Knox Trial.” In Transmedia Crime Stories: The Trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito in the Globalised Media Sphere, ed. by Gies, Lies, and Maria Bortoluzzi, 139–164. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
2018. "Critical Discourse Analysis and the Editorial 2.0: News Reception and User-Generated Comments in Discourses about (Im)migration." Altre Modernità / Other Modernities, 10/2018: 1–22.
Browse, Sam. 2016. “‘This is not the End of the World’: Situating Metaphor in the Text-Worlds of the 2008 British Financial Crisis.” In World building: Discourse in the mind, ed. by Joanna Gavins, and Ernestine Lahey, 183–201. London: Bloomsbury.
Editorial Board, The. 2015, September 18. Europe Should See Refugees as a Boon, Not a Burden. The
New York Times. Retrieved July 23, 2017, from [URL]
. 2010. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (2nd Edition ed.). Harlow: Longman.
Fairclough, Norman, and Ruth Wodak. 1997. “Critical Discourse Analysis.” In Discourse as social interaction (Vol. 2), ed. by Teun A. Van Dijk, 258–284. London: Sage.
Fetzer, Anita, and Marjut Johansson. 2008. “Hybridities in Political Media Discourse.” Politics and Culture, 4. Retrieved from Politics and Culture: [URL]
Filardo-Llamas, Laura. 2014. “Between the Union and a United Ireland: Shifting Positions in Northern Ireland’s Post-Agreement Political Discourse.” In From Text to Political Positions: Text Analysis Across Disciplines, ed. by Bertie Kaal, Isa Maks, and Annamarie van Elfrinkhof, 207–224. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Ford, Cecilia E., and Sandra A. Thompson. 1986. “Conditionals in Discourse: A Text-based Study from English.” In On conditionals, ed. by Cecilia E. Ford, Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Alice Ter Meulen, Judy Snitzer Reilly, and Charles A. Ferguson, 353–373. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gavins, Joanna, and Ernestine Lahey. 2016. “World Building in Discourse.” World Building: Discourse in the Mind, ed. by Joanna Gavins, and Ernestine Lahey, 1–13. London: Bloomsbury.
Henry, Frances, and Carol Tator. 2002. Discourses of Domination: Racial Bias in the Canadian English-language Press. Toronto: Toronto University Press.
Herring, Susan C. 2013. “Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, Reconfigured, and Emergent.” In Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media, ed. by Deborah Tannen, and Anna Marie Trester, 1–25. Washinton, D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
Hidalgo-Downing, Laura. 2000. “World Creation in Advertising Discourse.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 13: 67–88.
Ihlebæk, Karoline Andrea, and Arne H. Krumsvik. 2014. “Editorial Power and Public Participation in Online Newspapers.” Journalism 16 (4): 470–487.
Johansson, Marjut. 2014. “Reading Digital News: Participation Roles, Activities, and Positionings.” Journal of Pragmatics 72 (2014): 31–45.
KhosraviNik, Majid, and Johann Unger. 2016. “Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media: Power, Resistance and Critique in Changing Media Ecologies.” In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (3rd Edition), ed. by Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 206–233. London: Sage.
KhosraviNik, Majid, and Mahrou Zia. 2014. “Persian Nationalism, Identity and Anti-Arab Sentiments in Iranian Facebbok Discourse: Critical Discourse Analysis and Social Media Communication.” Journal of Language and Politics 13 (4): 755–780.
Kilgarriff, Adam, Vit Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Vit Suchomel. 2014. “The Sketch Engine: Ten Years on.” Lexicography, 1 (1): 7–36.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1988. “Putting Linguistics on a Proper Footing: Explorations in Goffman’s Concepts of Participations.” In Goffman: Exploring the Interaction Order, ed. by Paul Drew, and Anthony Wootton, 161–227. Oxford: Polity Press.
Moon, Rosamund. 1994. “The Analysis of Fixed Expressions in Text.” In Advances in Written Text Analysis, ed. by Malcolm Coulthard, 117–135. London: Routledge.
New York Times, The. 2017. What Kind of Comments are you Looking for. The New York
Times. Retrieved July 16 2017, from [URL]
Richardson, John E. 2007. Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Richardson, John E., and James Stanyer. 2011, “Reader Opinion in the Digital Age: Tabloid and Broadsheet Newspaper Websites and the Exercise of Political Voice.” Journalism 12 (8): 1–21.
Tardy, Christine M. 2009. “‘Press 1 for English’: Textual and Ideological Networks in a Newspaper Debate on US Language Policy.” Discourse and Society 20 (2): 265–286.
Van Der Bom, Isabelle. 2016. “Speaker Enactors in Oral Narrative.” In World Building: Discourse in the Mind, In Joanna Gavins, and Ernestine Lahey, 91–108. London: Bloomsbury.
2001. “Multidisciplinary CDA: A Plea for Diversity, Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis, ed. by.” In Ruth Wodak, and Michael Meyer, 95–120. London: Sage.
Wales, Katie. 1996. Personal Pronouns in Present-Day English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, Patrick. 2014. Discussions in the Comments Section: Factors Influencing Participation and Interactivity in Online Newspapers’ Reader Comments. New Media and Society 16 (9): 941–957.
Werth, Paul. 1995. “'World Enough, and Time': Deictic Space and the Interpretation of Prose.” In Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context, ed. Peter Verdonk, and Jean Jacques Weber, 181–206. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
. 1995a. “How to Build a World (in a Lot Less than Six Days and Using Only What’s in your Head).” In New Essays on Deixis: Discourse, Narrative, Literature, ed. by Keith Green, 49–80. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
. 1995b. “‘World Enough, and Time’: Deictic Space and the Interpretation of Prose.” In Twentieth Century Fiction: From Text to Context, ed. by Paul Verdonk, and Jean Jacques Weber, 181–206. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wodak, Ruth, and Paul Chilton. 2005. A New Agenda in (Critical) Discourse Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.
