Edited by Massimiliano Demata, Virginia Zorzi and Angela Zottola
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 98] 2022
► pp. 343–364
The present chapter analyses a corpus of newspaper articles published in national UK broadsheets and tabloids dealing with the controversy surrounding the safety of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. By adopting a corpus-assisted critical discourse studies approach, the chapter seeks to highlight how writers variably use language to legitimise or delegitimise their own, as well as their opponents’, claims and identities. The results show that there has been an increasing tendency in recent years among writers in the traditional, mainstream press to oppose anti-vaccination conspiracy theories by identifying and criticising “typical” anti-vaccinators conspiracy theorists, thus undermining their identities rather than their claims. However, these strategies risk to backfire if they push believers in anti-vaccination conspiracy theories towards online, fringe environments like internet fora and social media.