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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 18:2 (2019) ► pp.231–251

Economic crisis and Greek crisis discourse

A discourse analysis of articles from The Economist referring to Greece (2009–2011)

ORCID logo | Dublin City University, Ireland

The 2008 economic crisis signalled a new era for European and global politics and introduced a new ‘economic crisis discourse’, which has emerged as an attempt to explain, justify, criticize and interpret economic crisis. It has introduced new terms and constructed new meanings to political life. Media economic crisis discourse has been a decisive factor in peoples’ understanding of economic crisis. The paper studies the construction and media narratives of economic crisis discourse through an analysis of articles published by The Economist during the ‘peak years’ of the early Greek economic crisis (2009–2011). The analysis follows Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) discourse theory and reveals the ‘nodal points’ of Greek crisis discourse as they are presented in the articles of The Economist. The paper underlines the importance of media discourse during crisis periods, in which information dissemination and news framing may crucially affect citizens, policies and societies in general.

Keywords: economic crisis, Greek crisis, discourse analysis, discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe, media discourse
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical positioning: The Discourse Theory of Laclau and Mouffe
  • 3.The discursive context of economic crisis discourse
  • 4.Discursive construction of the Greek crisis
  • 5.Methodology
  • 6a.A few (quantitative) remarks on the data
  • 6b.Discourse analysis
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17056.del
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