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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. 205–230

Chapter 9
Civic voice in multimodal news narratives

In this chapter, we examine civic voice in visual news narratives about the economic crisis. We discuss how the possibility of voice may be linked to particular practices in multimodal news discourse. We analyze captioned stock photo galleries depicting anti-austerity protests in Greece, and demonstrate how these narratives create a simplified grouping of actors with narrative necessity and a loose connection to the “real”. Thus, they reproduce the dominant master narrative juxtaposing financial pragmatism with emotioned expressions of civic voice. We discuss how this kind of doing the crisis tends to muffle civic voice and naturalize the establishment story of the crisis. We conclude by proposing how multimodal online news narratives might better realize their potential in mediating civic voice.

Keywords: multimodal news narration, visual news, financial crisis discourse, binary constructions, civic voice, agency, critical multimodal narrative analysis, narrative structure, narrative necessity, editorial reality
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Theoretical framework
    • Binary master narratives in the neoliberal project
    • Civic voice and agency
  • Critical multimodal narrative analysis
  • Research material and the analytical process
  • Analysis of the two visual news narratives
    • “Clashes as Greek government passes austerity measures”, the New York Times
    • “Violence erupts as Greece strike begins – in pictures”, the Guardian
  • Discussion of key findings
    • Photographs as semiotic resources in constructing editorial reality
    • Simplified groupings, assimilation, and lack of identification
    • The fit between layout and narrative flow
    • Summary: Muted moments of civic culture
  • Conclusion: Space for voice
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.76.10tuu
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