This paper adopts a critical discourse analysis approach in order to identify and contrast the representation of the Occupy Wall Street movement in the New York Post and the New York Times. Occupy Wall Street was a protest movement against greed and financial and social inequality that started in Zuccotti Park in New York City in 2011. News media and its institutional media discourse have a power to influence people in terms of what they talk about and how they talk about it. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to make it transparent on a linguistic level that newspapers have an ability to create different discursive realities of the Occupy Wall Street movement through their language use. This is done by analysing news articles written on the same dates about the Occupy Wall Street protest in the New York Times and the New York Post using the tools global coherence, transitivity, and lexical categorisation. Results showed that in the articles in the New York Post the city represents the in-group, ‘us’, while the protesters represent the out-group, ‘them’. The repression of ‘them’, the protesters, is desired by the city that represents ‘us’. In the articles in the New York Times, on the other hand, the group of protesters is the in-group that is polarised with the police. Both the New York Times and the New York Post produce discourses where the protesters are incapable of achieving any real political or social change.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-88181 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Renström, Caroline |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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