Media reverberations on the ‘red line’: Syria,metaphor and narrative in news media

Abstract

This study uses a CADS (Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies) approach to identify a series of axes around which degrees of persuasion can be mapped in debates about international affairs. The author investigates how US and UK news media reported Obama’s use of the term ‘red line’ to describe the potential transgression if Syrian leader Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, which Assad then did. The article examines the connotational, argumentational and rhetorical behaviour of ‘red line’ across news media in the period 4–28 September 2013. In a corpus-assisted analysis of ‘red line’, six discoursal factors emerged as persuasive axes at work: (1) leader’s image; (2) ideological positioning, even in mutual intervention; (3) persuasion consistency; (4) factual investigation; (5) factual interpretation reporting; and (6) evaluated metaphor development. These axes proactively work at the crossroads of metaphor and narrative as transformative and mutually interactive agents in discoursal change. The analysis also identified other subcategories of research potential, plus correlated lexis and concepts such as ‘weakness’ vs ‘strength’. The study’s significance is to ground reflection on the function of metaphor and narrative in steering sense-making in diplomatic practice and to highlight their pragmatic force and dynamics – here in the news genre.

Keywords

CADS (Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies)ideology leader’s image metaphor narrative persuasion strategic communication Syria

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Atkins

Clear

(1992) Corpus design criteria. Literary and Linguistic Computing 7(1): 1–16.

Ferrari

(2011) Bush versus Blair: Keywords heading the nation. In: Obeng SG (ed.) Issues in Political Discourse Analysis. New York: Nova Publishers Inc., pp.149–176.

Ferrari

(2012) ‘Through a woman’s eyes’ narratives of the nation: Gender as and beyond a category of analysis. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 7(3): 243–262.

Ferrari

(2013) Non solo metafore. (De)costruzione della strategia persuasiva di G.W. Bush Jr. Padova: libreriauniversitaria.it edizioni.

Ferrari

(2018) Metaphor and Persuasion in Strategic Communication: Sustainable Perspectives. New York: Routledge.

Ferrari

O’Loughlin

(2018) Red lines and rush decisions: Syria, Metaphor and Narrative. In: Kranert

Horan

(eds) Doing Politics: Discursivity, performativity and Mediation in Political Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp.385–406.

Baker

, et al. (2008) A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse & Society 19(3): 273–306.

Bentley

(2014) Strategic taboos: Chemical weapons and US foreign policy. International Affairs 90(5): 1033–1048.

Bolter

Grusin

(2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Boston, MA: MIT Press.

10.

Burke

(1957) The Philosophy of Literary Form. New York, NY: Vintage.

11.

Buzan

Wæver

De Wilde

(1998) Security: A New Framework for Analysis. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

12.

Charteris-Black

(2005) Politics and Rhetoric: The Persuasive Power of Metaphor. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

13.

Chilton

(2004) Analysing Political Discourse. London: Routledge.

14.

Freeden

(1996) Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

15.

Germond

McEnery

Marchi

(2016) The EU’s comprehensive approach as the dominant discourse: A corpus-linguistics analysis of the EU’s counter-piracy narrative. European Foreign Affairs Review 21(1): 135–154.

16.

Gladstone

Chivers

(2013) Forensic details in U.N. report point to Assad’s use of gas. New York Times, 16 September. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/world/europe/syria-united-nations.html?_r=0 (accessed 1 July 2018).

17.

Goldberg

(2016) The Obama doctrine. The Atlantic, April. Available at: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/ (accessed 4 February 2022).

18.

Kövecses

(2002) Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

19.

Lakoff

(1993) The contemporary theory of metaphor. In: Ortony

(ed.) Metaphor and Thought, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 202–251.

20.

Lakoff

(1995) Metaphor, morality, and politics, or, why conservatives have left liberals in the dust. Social Research 62(2): 177–213.

21.

Lakoff

(2010) Why ‘rational reason’ doesn’t work in contemporary politics. Commentary for BuzzFlash, 21 February. Available at: www.truth-out.Org/buzzflash/commentary/george-lakoffwhy-rational-reason-doesnt-work-in-contemporary-politics (accessed 7 November 2017).

22.

Lakoff

Johnson

(2003[1980]) Metaphors we Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

23.

Levinger

Roselle

(2017) Narrating global order and disorder. Politics and Governance 5(3): 94–98.

24.

Lischinky

(2011) In times of crisis: A corpus approach to the construction of the global financial crisis in annual reports. Critical Discourse Studies 8(3): 153–168.

25.

Milne

(2015) Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

26.

Miskimmon

O’Loughlin

Roselle

(2017) Forging the World: Strategic Narratives and International Relations. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

27.

Mitzen

(2013) Power in Concert: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of Global Governance. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

28.

Nabers

(2009) Filling the void of meaning: Identity construction in U.S. foreign policy after September 11, 2001. Foreign Policy Analysis 5(2): 191–214.

29.

Norval

(2000) Review article: The things we do with words: Contemporary approaches to the analysis of ideology. British Journal of Political Science 30(2): 313–346.

30.

O’Loughlin

(2014) Religion, conflict resolution and digital media in the greater Muslim world: Dialogue among policymakers and researchers. Funded project in the Bridging Voices program, British Council USA, 1 September 2013–1 September 2014. Final report, private, obtained through personal correspondence.

31.

Obama

(2012) Remarks by the President to the White House Press Corps. The White House, 20 August. Available at: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.Gov/the-press-office/2012/08/20/remarks-president-white-house-press-corps (accessed 2 February 2018).

32.

Partington

(2003) The Linguistics of Political Argument: The Spin-Doctor and the Wolf-Pack at the White House. London: Routledge.

33.

Partington

(2008) The armchair and the machine: Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. In: Taylor Torsello

, et al. (eds) Corpora for University Language Teachers. Bern: Peter Lang, 189–213.

34.

Partington

(2017) Varieties of non-obvious meaning in CL and CADS: From ‘hindsight post-dictability’ to sweet serendipity. Corpora 12(3): 339–367.

35.

Rogers

(1979) The foundations of the person-centered approach. Education 100(2): 98–108.

36.

Shenhav

(2006) Political narratives and political reality. International Political Science Review 27(3): 245–262

37.

Simpson

(2012) War from the Ground Up: Twenty-First Century Combat as Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

38.

Steen

(1999) From linguistic to conceptual metaphor in five steps. In: Gibbs

Steen

(eds) Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 55–77.

39.

Stubbs

(2001) Words and Phrases. Oxford: Blackwell.

40.

Suskind

(2004) Without a doubt. New York Times Magazine, 17 October: 44–51.

41.

Tversky

Kahneman

(1974) Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science 185: 1124–1135.

42.

United Nations (2013) Secretary-General’s remarks to the Security Council on the report of the United Nations Missions to Investigate Allegations of the Use of Chemical Weapons on the incident that occurred on 21 August 2013 in the Ghouta area of Damascus, New York, 16 September. Available at: http://www.un.org/sg/statements/index.asp?nid=7083#bannernav (accessed 18 November 2018).

43.

Williams

(2003) Words, images and enemies: Securitization and international politics. International Studies Quarterly 47: 511–531.