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- Title
Who's "Essential"?: A Media Discourse Study.
- Authors
Drake, Derek; Drake, Veronika
- Abstract
Informational media "curate[s], package[s], and deliver[s] specific representations of the world we live in" (Queen, 2015, p. 5). The way we come to see the world and groups of people within it heavily depends on the language used to describe groups of people. This pilot study combines critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2001; Wodak, 2011) with a corpus approach (e.g., Baker & Levon, 2015) in addressing the question of how essential workers are represented in US media. We used the NOW corpus to trace its frequency over time, and to get an initial handle on how essential workers are portrayed over time by looking at adjectives used in conjunction with the term "essential workers." Initial results show that early coverage (March-May 2020) of essential workers used adjectives such as 'low-wage,' 'underpaid,' 'lowly' and 'undervalued.' In January 2021, the coverage has shifted with adjectives such as 'frontline,' 'vaccinated' and 'prioritized' being more frequent. We complement this quantitative approach with a qualitative analysis of portrayals of essential works in CNN and Fox News articles. This addition allows us to arrive at a more complete picture of how essential workers are discursively constructed via the specific qualities associated with them. e
- Subjects
CABLE News Network; FOX News; CRITICAL discourse analysis; MEDIA studies
- Publication
Michigan Academician, 2021, Vol 48, Issue 1, p79
- ISSN
0026-2005
- Publication type
Article