Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/31.86

AUTHOR: Paul Baker
AUTHOR: Costas Gabrielatos
AUTHOR: Tony McEnery
TITLE: Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes
SUBTITLE: The Representation of Islam in the British Press
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Dimitris Serafis

SUMMARY

In their book “Discourse analysis and media attitudes: The representation of Islam in the British press”, Paul Baker, Costas Gabrielatos and Tony McEnery provide us with an integration of principles and tools from the framework of Corpus Linguistics under the premises of the scholarly agenda of Critical Discourse Analysis. Through that prism, the authors analyze the ways Islam is represented in the mainstream British press. The book includes ten chapters: an introductory chapter, eight chapters of data analysis, and a final chapter which includes a summary of the main findings. The book is easy to read and enables the reader to cross-check the validity of the posed research questions in light of in-depth and rigorous data analysis.

More specifically, Chapter 1 introduces the main premises of the book. In doing so, the authors pinpoint the significance of mainstream newspapers in constructing audience perspectives regarding specific topics and groups. Then, the authors distinguish between different types of newspapers in the UK and discuss previous findings of scholarly research on the representation of Islam and Muslims in the British press (see, e.g., Richardson 2004). They outline a framework for a synthesis of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics (see p. 27), before describing how the book will be organized.

In Chapter 2 the authors present and explain the main tools used in their approach to Corpus Linguistics. More specifically, they explain the main function and use of “SketchEngine” (www.sketchengine.co.uk), that is, the corpus analysis platform through which the authors analyze their data. They then proceed to a comparison of their corpus with a more general corpus to secure their findings. Among the major findings of the chapter, the authors show that “the presentation of Islam and Muslims in UK newspapers […] was predominantly carried out in a context of conflict, and the religion and its faithful were frequently portrayed as causes for concern, if not sources of threat” (p. 65).

In Chapter 3, keyword frequencies are analyzed to facilitate a cross-examination of broadsheet vis-à-vis tabloid newspapers in the UK. The findings suggest that “when it comes to reporting on Islam and Muslims, the British press is not monolithic” (p. 92) and, more specifically, that “although the broadsheets write about Islam in the context of culture and politics, the tabloids seems to focus more on terrorism and extremism” (p. 93).

In Chapter 4, the authors examine their corpus from the perspective of change over time. In this way, they reveal that Islam and Muslims are marked by significant social events such as the 9/11 attacks in the US. In doing so, we witness in the chapter an increase in the use of the relevant articles in specific time spans.

Chapter 5 encompasses an analysis of collocations and concordances, which demonstrates that “highly frequent terms [such as] “Muslim community” and “Muslim world” tend to be used uncritically, to signify a mainly homogeneous group of Muslims […] represented as separate, and in tension with, the rest of the United Kingdom or ‘the West’” (p. 146).

In Chapter 6, drawing on previous research on “belief terms” that shape particular stereotypes (see, e.g., Partington 1998), the authors show the various ways in which Muslims and Islam are frequently associated with extremism, strengthening the conceptual basis for their ‘othering’. In the same chapter, the authors delve into specific extracts from the newspapers under analysis in order to secure the findings of their quantitative endeavor.

Moving towards the last part of their book, Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery associate their research questions and analysis to strategies that have been previously unveiled by critical discourse analysts in relation to the representation of the relevant groups in the press. In particular, Chapter 7 discusses the ways Muslims are represented as being a burden (e.g. ‘scroungers’) for the welfare system in the UK, while Chapter 8 focuses particularly on the ways in which Muslim women wearing the veil are portrayed.

Finally, in Chapter 9, the authors provide news representations of Muslims over a time span of two centuries (19th to 21st century). In this way, we see in this chapter lexical changes in the use of specific words under scrutiny.

EVALUATION

The book at hand is an essential reading that I would recommend unreservedly to scholars working at the intersection of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics (see also Baker et al. 2008). Scholars who follow the main assumptions of the research agenda that Critical Discourse Analysis outlines, mainly aim to examine the ways ideological perspectives permeate public texts (such as news articles) with a view to unveiling the ways power inequalities are sustained in these ideologically loaded texts (see Wodak and Meyer 2016; Flowerdew and Richardson 2018, among others). However, a long standing criticism raised against critical discourse-analytical perspectives is that practitioners in the field are cherry picking texts from a vast amount of available data to prove their hypotheses and facilitate their agenda. The present book addresses aspects of the aforementioned criticism while opening new research avenues in the relevant field. The synthesis of Corpus Linguistics tools and methods can enable critical discourse analysts to examine the main meaningful attitudes emerging in large datasets, build balanced corpora that could facilitate comparative studies of data, for example, from same genres across different societal contexts (see e.g. Serafis et al. 2023), all the while setting solid criteria on the basis of which the collected data will be examined (see also Rheindorf 2019).

More specifically, scholars exploiting techniques offered by relevant corpus linguistics software (such as the Sketchengine that the authors use in this publication project) can identify the most frequent attitudes (through, for example, “frequency” analysis), and/or compare the most significant patterns that appear in their datasets in comparison to other corpora automatically generated by relevant software tools (see “keywords” analysis), and maybe even showcase how certain frequent words are used in context through a “concordances” analysis, among others. This set of techniques could prepare the ground for a subsequent, more fine-grained analysis, while the extensive examination of large corpora through this lens can enable scholars to avoid possible research bias (see also Baker 2012) when examining linguistic data pertinent to concepts such as racism, xenophobia and other forms of discrimination, which are among the main topics examined from a critical discourse-analytical perspective. Through that prism, the proposed synthesis of principles from Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics enables the authors to sketch a rigorous micro-textual analytical apparatus and offer solid findings while they clearly (re-)define the critical questions posed throughout their socially motivated enquiry into the ways Muslims and Islam are portrayed in the British mainstream press.

That said, the quantitative examination of large corpora unavoidably entails limitations in relation to more qualitative analysis, which is equally important for a critical discourse-analytical approach. This would include, for instance, a more fine-grained analysis of discursive strategies such as “argumentation strategies” (technically defined as “topoi”), meaning the logical schemes or, better, the reasoning lines that permeate certain discourses and along which specific standpoint-arguments pairs can emerge (see e.g. Reisigl and Wodak 2016); in their turn, these pairs, which (often) implicitly stem from discursive construction, may end up effectively justifying exclusion of the relevant groups in the British context, or in different European contexts (see e.g. Serafis et al. 2021). In a similar vein, an in-depth analysis of the positive representations (re)produced by the British press would be equally interesting to show if subtle discriminatory attitudes (such as assimilationist ones) are favored even in these cases. Future studies that employ a cross-fertilization of quantitative and qualitative methods would adequately address such questions, but there is no doubt that this book paves the way and sets the agenda for research in the area to be extended in multiple directions.

REFERENCES

Baker, P. (2012) Acceptable bias? Using corpus linguistics methods with critical discourse analysis. “Critical Discourse Studies” 9(3): 247-256.

Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krżyzanowski, M., McEnery, T. and Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. “Discourse & Society” 19: 273-306.

Flowerdew, J. and Richardson, J. E. (Eds.). (2018). “The Routledge Handbook of Critical Discourse Studies”. London: Routledge.

Partington, A. (1998). “Patterns and meanings: Using corpora for English language research and teaching”. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2016). The discourse-historical approach (DHA). In R. Wodak, & M. Meyer (Eds.), “Methods of critical discourse studies” (3rd ed., pp. 23–61). London: Sage.

Richardson, J. E. (2004). “(Mis)Representing Islam: The racism and rhetoric of British broadsheet newspapers”. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Serafis, D., Raimondo, C., Assimakopoulos, S., Greco, S. and Rocci, A. (2021). Argumentative dynamics in representations of migrants and refugees: Evidence from the Italian press during the ‘refugee crisis’. “Discourse & Communication” 15: 559-581.

Serafis, D., Zappettini, F. and Assimakopoulos, S. (2023).The institutionalization of hatred politics in the Mediterranean: Studying corpora of online news portals during the European ‘refugee crisis’. “Topoi” 42: 651-670.

Wodak, R. and Meyer, M. (Eds.). (2016). “Methods of critical discourse studies” (3rd ed.). London: Sage.

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