Media events, speech events and propagandistic techniques of legitimation: a multimodal analysis of the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ public addresses on the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic

The increased information need after the outburst of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to the enhanced role of public addresses and press conferences that can broadcast important information simultaneously to a large number of people through a number of different media outlets (TV, radio, internet). Thus, government leaders worldwide have opted for the frequent broadcast of public addresses, reviving the rationale of media events as a way to disseminate their messages concerning the pandemic as widely as possible. The current paper focuses on the Greek case, scrutinizing the public addresses of the Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis in terms of both structural and content characteristics. Through the use of multimodal analysis, we figure out the visual and linguistic characteristics in K. Mitsotakis public addresses. At the same time, we setup a research framework for the qualitative and quantitative examination of similar public addresses in various countries, by combining the theories of media events, propaganda, and linguistic techniques of political legitimization. Our main findings suggest that K. Mitsotakis in his public addresses has made use of direct visual and verbal connections to aspects of “Greekness” in a nation-centric rationale. He relies predominantly on the evocation of positive sentiments and rationalization (as a means of legitimization), in order to achieve political benefits by incorporating the management of the pandemic into the Greek government’s nationalist agenda.

Performing Early Christian Literature

Scholars of early Christian literature acknowledge that oral traditions lie behind the New Testament gospels. While the concept of orality is widely accepted, it has not resulted in a corresponding effort to understand the reception of the gospels within their oral milieu. In this book, Kelly Iverson reconsiders the experiential context in which early Christian literature was received and interpreted. He argues that reading and performance are distinguishable media events, and, significantly, that they produce distinctive interpretive experiences for readers and audiences alike. Iverson marshals an array of methodological perspectives demonstrating how performance generates a unique experiential context that shapes and informs the interpretive process. Iverson's study explores the dynamic oral environment in which ancient audiences experienced the gospel stories. He shows why an understanding of oral performance has important implications for the study of the NT, as well as for several issues that are largely unquestioned by biblical scholars.

Right-wing populist media events in schengen Europe

Leaders of European right-wing populism (RWP) have developed speeches about the state border control required to protect the “people” electing them. Nevertheless, are these RWP narratives necessarily circulated during populist media events that take place in the symbolic locations of European integration? It is argued that border control discourse in these EU places can be mitigated by RWP actors, but also emphasized by the media depending on the separated predispositions of politicians and reporters to address the border issue in a given context. Bourdieusian “field theory” is used in this article to grasp the potential differentiated discursive positioning. Based on a comparative analysis of RWP media events organized in the town of Schengen in Luxembourg, the investigation allows us to shed new light on the specificities of populism in the media.

WITNESSING LIKE A USER: MOBILE NOTIFICATIONS AND THE LAYERED CONSTRUCTION OF MEDIATIZED TERRORISM

This paper study the imbrication of data-driven devices and platform infrastructures and the mediatized construction of terrorist attacks. It analyzes the role of smartphone push notifications and technical affordances of “layering” media across diverse media devices and platforms in users’ mediatized life (e.g. screenshotting a tweet, posting it to Facebook, and users’ commenting on the post), and these platform and device features role in co-constructing terrorist attacks as datafied media events along with mobile media posts and reactions by users and formal news accounts and aggregations by media outlets. Using a data collection framework that logs screenshots of participants’ mobile media devices every five seconds over the course of longitudinal studies, I qualitatively observe screenshots capturing the mobile media usage of 16 subjects from late May to late June 2017, including media relating to two terrorist attacks in the UK. This paper illustrates the role of mobile device and datafied platform features in the sparking of mediatized microrituals and the broader construction of terrorist attacks as datafied media events. It also highlights the layering of mediatization, wherein the above-mentioned interface elements often migrate with a given media object across platforms within a single mobile environment on the user-end, and as it is layered with the users’ in-person contexts beyond the screen. The study of mediatized terrorism, therefore, must be understood across these layers, necessitating further empirical exploration and conceptual development.

Communicative and Pragmatic Features of Everyday Media Discourse in French Linguistic Culture

The article studies the communicative and pragmatic features of everyday media discourse based on the material of French mass-media, particularly, on the Internet commentary as one of the genres in the field of the most important French media events. Based on the empirical material, the following communicative and pragmatic characteristics of Internet comments are identified: interactivity, creativity, authenticity, emotional intensity, brevity. The results of the study underline the importance of further studying the everyday French media discourse, its linguistic and cultural features, and the importance of making a contrastive-comparative analysis of the Internet comments to the same events by different linguistic cultures (French, Russian, English, etc.), in order to highlight ethnospecific and universal methods of social interaction in everyday virtual discourse and in everyday media discourse in particular.

Resonant Moments in Media Events:

Live-tweeting has emerged as a popular hybrid media activity during broadcasted media events. Through second screens, users are able to engage with one another and react in real time to the broadcasted content. These reactions are dynamic: they ebb and flow throughout the media event as users respond to and converse about different memorable moments. Using the first 2016 U.S. presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as a case, this paper employs a temporal method for identifying resonant moments on social media during televised events by combining time series analysis, qualitative (human-in-the-loop) evaluation, and a novel natural language processing tool to identify discursive shifts before and after resonant moments. This analysis finds key differences in social media discourse about the two candidates. Notably, Trump received substantially more coverage than Clinton throughout the debate. However, a more in-depth analysis of these candidates’ resonant moments reveals that discourse about Trump tended to be more critical compared to discourse associated with Clinton’s resonant moments.

Epistemic modes in news production: How journalists manage ways of knowing in hybrid media events involving terrorist violence

In this article, we investigate the challenge of hybrid media events of terrorist violence for journalism and analyse how news organizations manage epistemic modes in such events. Epistemic modes refer to different ways of knowing, which are managed by newsrooms through journalistic and editorial practices. We draw from an empirical study of terrorism-related news production in the Finnish Broadcasting Company (Yle). Our data consist of thematic interviews ( N = 33) with Yle journalists, producers, and content managers and newsroom observations (14 days) conducted at Yle. The study investigates the data through a grounded theory approach with the aim of creating a theoretical understanding of knowledge production in hybrid media events. The results are drawn from a qualitative content analysis and close reading of the interview data, with the other data sets informing the core analysis. The article identifies seven epistemic modes of relevance to news production in hybrid media events: not-knowing, description, rumoring, witnessing, emotion, analysing and perpetrating. The modes are analysed in relation to three dimensions of crisis reporting: immediate sense-making, ritualizing and transformation back to normalcy. The article finds that although particular epistemic modes are typical to certain dimensions of reporting hybrid, disruptive media events, both the modes and the dimensions also are also merged and intermixed. This condition together with growing amounts of problematic epistemic modes of rumoring, emotion and perpetrating challenge journalists’ epistemic authority in reporting hybrid media events involving terrorist violence.