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Crisis and the Media: Narratives of crisis across cultural settings and media genres
Edited by Marianna Patrona
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 76] 2018
► pp. 127–150

Chapter 6
The image of the empty hands

Politics and journalism in neoliberal times

This article examines the relationship between media and politics by focusing on the question of political responsibility and public accountability, and how this is negotiated in news journalism during an industrial crisis. The empirical analysis focuses on two dimensions of the news report: (1) the political performances and argument strategies; how leading politicians introduce, explain or defend their decisions, actions and points of view, and (2) how the dominant discourses of politics are reproduced, negotiated or opposed, in the journalistic recontextualization. The study suggests that news journalism reproduces and strengthens the neoliberal logic when it adapts to hegemonic problem descriptions and the dominant political frame of the crisis, in terms of what caused it, as well as how it should be solved and by whom. This analysis of the dynamics between political performance and how the question of political responsibility and accountability is represented by journalism provides knowledge of discourses regarding crisis in a specific political regime, and also contributes to the discussion about the relationship between journalistic space and political power within the hegemonic frame of neoliberalism.

Keywords: news journalism, industrial crisis, political accountability, argumentative strategies, journalistic recontextualization, neoliberalism
Article outline
  • Introducing the problem
  • The vulnerability of journalism
  • Political responsibility and journalistic space in the neoliberal regime
  • Case and data
  • Method and focus
  • The journalistic representation of the crisis in 2011
  • Back in time
  • Derision, destruction and distortion
  • How journalism relates to the political message
  • Concluding discussion
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.76.07jac
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