Power, Media and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Framing Public Discourse

Description

This edited collection provides an in-depth, interdisciplinary critique of the acts of public communication disseminated during a major global crisis. Encompassing contributions from academics working in the fields of politics, environmentalism, citizens’ rights, state theory, cultural studies, journalism, and discourse/rhetoric, the book offers an original insight into the relationship between the various social forces that contributed to the ‘Covid narrative’. The subjects analysed here include: the performance of the ‘mainstream’ media, the quality of political ‘messaging’ and argumentation, the securitised state and racism in Brazil, the growth of ‘catastrophic management’ in UK universities, emergent journalistic practices in South Africa, homelessness and punitive dispossession, the pandemic and the history of eugenics, and the Chinese media’s attempt to disguise discriminatory practices. This is one of the first comparative studies of the various rationales offered for state/corporate intervention in public life. Delving beneath established political tropes and state rhetoric, it identifies the power relations exposed by an event that was described as unprecedented and unique, but was in fact comparable to other major global disruptions. As governments insisted on distinguishing their own propaganda from unregulated disinformation, their increasingly sceptical ‘publics’ pursued their own idiosyncratic solutions to the crisis, while the apparent sacrifice of a host of citizens - from the most dedicated to the most vulnerable - suggested that inequality and exploitation remained at the heart of the social order. Power, Media, and the Covid-19 Pandemic is essential reading for students, researchers and academics in media, communication and journalism studies, politics, environmental sciences, critical discourse analysis, cultural studies, and the sociology of health. Cover Endorsement Page Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents List of figures List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Part I The Pandemic: historical, medical and racial configurations Chapter 1 Killing fields: Pandemics, geopolitics and environmental emergency Chapter 2 Biopolitics, eugenics and the new state racism Chapter 3 The subsumption of racial discrimination: The representation of Chinese mainstream media of the maltreatment of African nationals in Guangzhou during the Covid-19 pandemic Part II Power, Crisis and Repression Chapter 4 The cultural politics of crisis in the UK Chapter 5 UK universities during Covid-19: Catastrophic management, ‘business continuity’ and education workers Chapter 6 Covid-19, police brutality and the systematic targeting of the black and disadvantaged population in Brazil Part III Journalism, Information and Structures of Argument during Covid-19 Chapter 7 Just following the science: Fact-checking journalism and the Government’s lockdown argumentation Chapter 8 The burden of responsibility: Investigative journalism in South Africa during the Covid-19 crisis Chapter 9 “It’s just a little flu”: Covid, institutional crisis and information wars in Brazilian journalism – the Folha de São Paulo newspaper Part IV British Political Discourse during the Pandemic Chapter 10 The BBC and Covid-19: The politicisation of a pandemic? Chapter 11 How the UK Government ‘turned on a sixpence’ to change its story: A discourse analysis of the No.10 daily coronavirus news conferences Chapter 12 Mortality, blame avoidance and the state: Constructing Boris Johnson’s exit strategy Part V Homelessness and Dispossession during the Pandemic Chapter 13 Has homeless rough sleeping in the UK and Europe been solved in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic? Chapter 14 Leper Islands: Coronavirus and the homeless ‘other’ Index