Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics: Online-First ArticlesNegotiating trust through COVID-19 press briefings
A multimodal analysis
Drawing from televised COVID-19 press briefings, this study explicates how the interplay between verbal and visual
resources help policy makers restore public trust following organization-level failures by neutralizing unfavorable discourses
that threaten the public’s perceptions of their competence, integrity and benevolence and by emphasizing positive aspects
associated with these factors. The findings reveal that these mediated multimodal speeches not only prioritize the political
interests of the government by apportioning blame for the surveillance failures, while aggrandizing their ad hoc responses without
addressing the causes. This trust repair practice serves to frame the pandemic – initially as an external biosecurity threat and
subsequently as a natural and expectable characteristic of an infectious disease that can be handled – hinging largely on the
creation of “us-them,” which undermines equitable public health objectives and transmission mitigation in the long run.
Keywords: COVID-19, press briefing, trust repair, multimodal analysis, visuals
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 3.Framework: Trust negotiation in discourse
- 4.Data and methodology
- 5.Findings
- 5.1Quantitative findings
- 5.2Qualitative findings
- 5.2.1Repairing ability
- 5.2.2Repairing integrity
- 5.2.3Repairing benevolence
- 6.Discussion and conclusion
- Acknowledgements
-
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