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Article published In: International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 29:4 (2024) ► pp.447–471

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“People should get their booster”

Stance towards Covid vaccination in news and academic blogs

 | East China Normal University
 | University of East Anglia
Published online: 13 February 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22110.zou
Abstract
Debates around the efficacy and dangers of vaccination have taken on critical importance with the Covid pandemic and WHO naming vaccine hesitancy as a major global health threat. We explore how writers use two types of blog, academic and journalistic, to promote key public health messages around the effectiveness and necessity of Covid-19 vaccinations to a broad, heterogeneous audience. Examining 120 Covid-19 vaccination themed posts from reputable news and academic blog sites, we compare the different ways writers present a stance and take a position towards vaccines and vaccinations in these different interactional contexts. Findings show that both types of bloggers are clearly aware of the need to convey a stance towards their topic and audiences feel entitled to position themselves in relation to vaccination issues, but with different emphases. The study has important implications for how healthcare information is disseminated and persuasion accomplished in these public arenas of discourse.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Journalistic and academic blogs
  • 3.Blogs, Covid and stance
  • 4.Methods and procedures
    • 4.1Covac blog corpus
    • 4.2Annotation and analysis
  • 5.Stance: Results and discussion
    • 5.1Hedges
    • 5.2Boosters
    • 5.3Attitude markers
    • 5.4Self-mention
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
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