Symbol and Language in Action Public Discourse in Poland in the Context of Uncertainty and Unrest (original) (raw)
Polish Media About 9/11: The Rhetoric and Metaphors of the Discourse
plc.psychologia.pl
Media discourse functions in a dual system of reference: it describes events that have actually taken place, but at the same time creates them in a certain way, presenting them in accordance with the genre conventions of writing for the press. In media reports and political commentaries about 9/11, Polish media and the public figures appearing in them most often use a figure of speech that one could call the trick of forced rectification, as well as metaphors taken from the vocabulary of mass culture (film, television, press commentaries on recent history). These kinds of stylistic measures are a means of psychologically taming the unprecedented historic events of 9/11, making them more comprehensible in cognitive terms belonging to the common image of the world, preserved in language among other things.
CONTEMPORARY POLISH POLITICAL RHETORIC. RETÓRICA POLÍTICA POLACA CONTEMPORÁNEA
The article discusses three dimensions of political rhetoric in Poland. The language used by politicians is the first one. Social and historic factors which conditioned contemporary styles of political communication result in the fact that political rhetoric in Poland is typical of countries which experienced authoritarian or totalitarian regimes. The second dimension of political rhetoric is found in media discourse. Mediatization of politics, technological changes in the media created a new rhetorical situation, new strategies of the persuasion used by politicians and journalists. The third dimension of political rhetoric is found in the rhetorical research concerning the ways of expression of both politicians and journalists. The article discusses major tendencies in research: propaganda language analysis, research on the new media, visual persuasion as well as use of rhetoric as a tool of civic education.
Two narratives about Poland and society. Analysis of news programmes: Fakty TV and Wiadomości TVP
Władza Sądzenia
The media landscape in Poland is increasingly polarised, with broadcasters promoting biased narratives that conveniently omit certain issues that do not align with their agenda. These narratives use rhetorical devices and symbolism to manipulate people’s perception of social reality and cultivate a shared worldview that legitimises their stance. This polarisation is linked to political parallelism, where media outlets align themselves with specific political factions and abandon their impartiality. In Poland, identity media is prevalent, with broadcasters providing pre-packaged interpretations of news stories that further fuel the polarisation. It creates echo chambers, also known as epistemic bubbles. The study examined news coverage from Wiadomości TVP and Fakty TVN, analysing the narratives presented and the values and topics covered. Broadcasters promoted different narratives, contributing to social divisions and strengthening dichotomy, with fixed topics dominating the coverage...
Mediated Europes: Discourse and Power in Ukraine, Russia and Poland during Euromaidan
Södertörn University, 2017
This study focuses on mediated representations of Europe during Euromaidan and the subsequent Ukraine–Russia crisis, analysing empirical material from Ukraine, Poland and Russia. The material includes articles from nine newspapers, diverse in terms of political and journalistic orientation, as well as interviews with journalists, foreign policymakers and experts, drawing also on relevant policy documents as well as online and historical sources. The material is examined from the following vantage points: Michel Foucault’s discursive theory of power, postcolonial theory, Jürgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and Ernesto Laclau’s concept of the empty signifier. The methods of analysis include conceptual history (Reinhart Koselleck), critical linguistics and qualitative discourse analysis (a discourse-historical approach inspired by the Vienna school) and quantitative content analysis (in Klaus Krippendorff’s interpretation). Historically, the national narratives of Europe in the aforementioned three countries are characterised by dependence on the West that also sparks periods of its rejection. These narratives vacillate between three major poles: idealising admiration, materialist pragmatics and geopolitical demonising. They are not exclusively endemic to one country and have been present in each to some extent. However, weaker actors have tended to lean towards the idealist side because Europe is perceived as a source of important technological and social know-how. Authors in all three countries struggled with defining Europe’s limits, and whilst this problem be- came intertwined with their own identification, Europeanness is typically constructed as a shock wave fading as it travels eastward from an epicentre located somewhere in north-western Europe. These discourses were reactivated and developed in 2013–2014. In the analysed newspapers, Europe is often understood as a continent (most often in Poland) or identified with the EU (Russia and Ukraine), but there is also a strong pattern of using Europe in reference to values which is weakest in Poland and strongest in Ukraine. Ideologically, the liberal publications in all three countries focus on positive values, whereas the conservative and business newspapers are preoccupied with negative values. Among the posi- tive values, the humanistic ones dominate the Ukrainian newspapers, and the rationalist-technocratic are typical in the Russian sample. The Ukrainian press account for most of the positive coverage of a successful Europe, whereas the Russian press provide most of the negative coverage (Europe as a failing entity and an enemy). Ukrainian and Russian discourses differ sharply on whether the country should adopt European reforms (Ukraine) or not (Russia). The Polish coverage is polarised between positive and negative values. During and after Euromaidan, Ukrainian journalists used the powerful Europe-as-values concept to actively intervene in the political field and re- contextualise this narrative of Europe as the official foreign policy narrative. This was enabled, paradoxically, by weak professionalism that made a wavering from a neutral stance possible. Compared to this, in Russia the strong discourse on journalist objectivity constrained journalists in their social practice; rather, it is the official discourse that is recontextualised by the media. Polish journalists, ambiguous about their own influence, work in a loop that recontextualises discourses from the media sphere to the political field and vice versa.
2017
The present work presents the model of symbol analysis in media texts. The critical case of the Ukrainian protest movement Euromaidan is used to build up such a model and to link it with the phenomenological meanings. It relies on empirical data from the coverage by the tabloid and quality media of three countries: Ukraine, the country where the protest took place; Poland, its neighboring, geographically, culturally close country; and Germany, more geographically and historically distant country from Ukraine. Three different national perspectives are compared. The proposed model of analysis of every particular symbol includes the following stages: the identification of objects, signifier, subject, conception, concept in a symbol; interpretation of its denotation, connotation, and signification; identification of protest life-world structures in symbol's meanings; analysis of spatiality, temporality, numerality, and power relations in some symbols that display such qualities, and...
Polish Political Science Review
Th eir scientifi c specialization covers two research disciplines: political and administration sciences as well as media and social communication. It is a perfect combination, because political communication combines several epistemological and methodological perspectives, giving the authors an opportunity to demonstrate a high quality interdisciplinary approach. Th e structure of the monograph consists of an introduction, three substantive chapters and a conclusion. Th e volume has been supplemented with a list of fi gures, tables, abbreviations and an extensive bibliography. As a result, we are dealing with-from the editorial point of view-a carefully prepared work, with a very clear structure and an easily comprehensible presentation form of the research outcomes. Research on populism and populist political communication has been carried out mainly in Western Europe, due to the long tradition of the political activity of populist parties. Th e English-language scientifi c literature has covered, to a lesser extent, Central and Eastern Europe countries, including Poland. Populism as a subject of research in Polish literature, however, has been present since early 1990s, which the authors are well aware of. Th erefore they extensively recall previous studies on populist political communication (pp. 37-38), what leads them to a conclusion about scarcity of "systematic empirical approach". Th us, the authors locate their work in a signifi cant research gap, related to the defi cit of studies based on empirical results. An additional novelty and an essential objective of the book is to draw attention to the relationship between media content and populism, as well as to analyze the impact of populist communication on citizens. Two factors are important for the creation of the book. Th e reviewed book is related to the research project titled "Populist political communication: political messages, media coverage and audience feedback", fi nanced by the Polish National Science Centre. Additionally, the book draws on the interdisciplinary research network called COST Action "Populist Political Communication in Europe: Comprehending the Challenge of Mediat
Analysing Discourse, Analysing Poland: The Case of a Political Interview
2023
The authors of the twelve texts collected in this volume follow two paths. Firstly, there is a methodological path related to the discussion of the interdisciplinarity of discourse studies and the potential of qualitative research based on the study of a single case. Secondly, by taking as a case study the political interview by Tomasz Lis, a leading liberal journalist, with Jarosław Kaczyński, chairman of the right-wing Law and Justice party, they delineate possible avenues for an in-depth view of the mechanisms of Poland's highly polarised public debate.
Conceptualization of the “black protest” based on the two Polish weeklies wSieci and Newsweek
Conceptualization of the “black protest” based on the two Polish weeklies wSieci and Newsweek, 2018
Newspaper articles are a common form of written discourse. Owing to their public nature and availability for large numbers of people, press texts are one of the most widely-read types of written texts. Reading newspapers is a normal routine for many people. However, it is now trivial to say that the media use the art of manipulation and persuasion to attract a greater number of readers and convey opinions in accordance with the ideology they pro-pound. It is thus interesting to examine how the same events are related by ideologically dif-ferent media to identify potential areas of persuasion and manipulation. The purpose of this thesis is to conduct a textual analysis of two articles published in the weekly wSieci and on the official website of Newsweek. The articles report on the “black protest” that took place in October 2016 in Poland. Specifically, the analysis aims to recon-struct the textual pictures of the event related in each of the articles in order to address the general question of whether or not the same event may be profiled depending on the ideolog-ical views of the sender. The textual picture of the world is a structure created by means of linguistic and dis-cursive tools, such as the use of emotional vocabulary, presuppositions, and evaluations of a particular event, textual actors and other non-textual elements of reality. Moreover, not only do such tools influence the reception of a text, but also its structure (organization of text) plays a pivotal role in the interpretation of the meanings conveyed. Textual representations of the event of “czarny protest” (‘black protest’) are chosen as the object of study due to the recent socio-political tensions in Poland and constant dis-putes in the media, which have been triggered by politicians’ attempts to change legislation in such an ideologically sensitive issue as abortion. Because each article is excerpted from ideologically opposing weeklies that target different kinds of readership, it is assumed that the textual pictures of the event will differ from each other. The thesis is structured as follows. The first chapter, which is theoretical, consists of five sections. The first section focuses on the concept of discourse by providing its defini-tions as proposed by various scholars. Press discourse and its characteristic features are dis-cussed in the second section. The third section deals with the concept of textual worldview against the backdrop of press discourse. The last two sections present the structure of a press message and participants of press discourse. The second chapter introduces the socio-political background of the event called “black protest”. It supplements thesis on the socio-political and historical context, giving information about the history of abortion law in Poland, the cause of the protest, the main initiators, and opinions of various figures. The empirical part of the thesis includes Chapter 3, in which the theoretical back-ground shall be applied in practice. It concentrates on the reconstruction of the picture of the world embodied in each of them, which is reflected on both lexical and structural level. The choice of particular lexical items as well as highlighting specific facts will be analyzed. At-tention will be also drawn to the referencing to particular persons. In terms of the topic of this thesis, which is conceptualization of a specific social event by the chosen Polish weeklies, discourse will be understood as a dynamic process of communicating ideas, beliefs, intentions referring to a specific event (“black protest”), using specific type of texts (press texts), which is of social interest as it involves protesters and the readers who are interested in the topic. Moreover, the specificity of the discourse analyzed lies in its high ideological character as it concerns the issue of abortion, which evokes strong emotions in the society due to its religious, moral, ethical, and legal aspects. Furthermore, this type of discourse, which falls into the category of press discourse, political discourse, ideological discourse, legal discourse, abortion discourse, has the potential of creating the legal reality, as its objective is to affect Polish legislation.