Media Discourses on Societal Crises.

Current society faces multiple challenges that are perceived as crises. Recent examples include the COVID-19 health crisis, the climate change crisis, the global energy crisis and the 'trust crisis', eroding trust in government, science, etc. They constitute complex, 'wicked problems', which are hard to resolve, and are the object of divergent views. What becomes increasingly apparent is that knowledge of the facts does not suffice to understand discussions of these complex events and evolutions. The ways these challenges are spoken about, how they are represented and conceptualized, is what we understand here as crisis discourse. Rather than simply capturing reality, discourses give meaning, attribute causes and consequences, and express moral views. Consequently, discussions on societal challenges can be viewed as a discursive struggle where different views of reality compete for dominance. For example, in discussions on climate change, ecological discourses compete with economical and social ones. Media play a crucial role in this discursive struggle to make sense of these societal challenges and construct them as crises. Media act as meaning-making devices, giving sense to the complex reality that surrounds us. Social media immediately come to mind, as highly influential platforms spreading ideas. However, 'legacy' media, such as newspapers and TV, also continue to play a key role in broadcasting and legitimizing certain worldviews and discourses. All these media are strongly intertwined in our current digitized and 'mediatized' society, where media both reflect and impact societal events on an everyday basis. The aim of the challenge we propose is to better understand the workings of competing mediated discourses on current societal crises. Drawing on Harold Lasswell's classic definition of communication, we ask the question: Who says what, in which channel, to whom, and with what effect? The focus is on 'what': the way a certain topic is talked about and made sense of. Here, the candidate uses one or more of the methods the PI's are specialized in to analyze media content on a topic of their choice: quantitative and qualitative content analysis, framing analysis, discourse analysis and digital ethnography (see further 2.2). The aim is to chart the competing discourses on a particular societal challenge that is perceived as a crisis, and to get a grasp on the discursive landscape, which includes attention to 'who' (the actors uttering certain discourse, such as journalists, politicians, experts) and 'in which channel' (TV, newspapers, social media, ...). Optionally, the candidate may also investigate the audience side ('to whom'), aiming to understand how media users deal with competing media discourses, and how these affect them ('with what effect'). Contrary to the linear nature of Lasswell's communication model, the research will also acknowledge the complex interaction between these different aspects of the communication process (for instance, audience members also producing discourse by commenting on social media).

Keywords:DISCOURSE

Disciplines:Media discourse reception