This study draws on a synergy of Corpus Linguistics and Critical Discourse Studies to scrutinize the portrayal of hackers in China Daily and The New York Times in the 21st century, primarily revolving around the main social actors and targets in hacking. This study demonstrates that both media share a positive transformation of the image-building of hackers in the 21st century. Besides, countries are salient social actors in hacker media discourse and the two media differ in their ways of constructing (...) them. The New York Times tends to have a negative other-representation and categorical otherness of specific countries through such discursive strategies as negative other-representation and group categorization, whereas China Daily is prone to insist on opposing the US hacking allegations in a defensive manner. Regarding major targets, China Daily highlights government websites whereas The New York Times emphasizes government websites, officials’ emails, large technology companies, and election infrastructure. The analysis shows that the two media’s different ways of framing hackers are underpinned by the ideologies behind them and the Chinese and US socio-political landscapes. This study can provide insights into how hacker discourse in media is represented in the 21st century and how national identities are constructed in the media representations of hackers. (shrink)

This paper explores the discursive processes of legitimizing leadership claims in the context of the nuclear proliferation crisis. Three complementary analyses of texts are carried out: discourse analyses of United Nations Security Council resolutions and relevant speeches by members of the US administration, as well as a corpus analysis of news media accounts of nuclear proliferation published in prominent US and UK broadsheets. Findings suggest that leadership claims are legitimized through a range of discursive strategies, which are echoed across the (...) different text types. However, a combination and comparison of the different datasets puts these findings into perspective and reveals that the various contexts and text types in which these leadership claims are made differ remarkably in terms of their use of relevant terms relating to leadership and crisis. We argue that this dynamic is best captured by the notion of an discursive chain of legitimization. (shrink)

The world financial crisis of 2008 reached a head in the Eurozone in 2012, when major problems became apparent affecting several countries in Southern Europe. During this time, the British press focused particularly on Spain, watching the potentially volatile political situation with interest, and documenting the negotiations between Spanish and European leaders. This article considers how this situation was reported in two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Independent, applying corpus linguistics techniques to identify salient aspects of the crisis and (...) to detect patterns in language use that had an ideological dimension. The 2012 crisis emerges mainly as a political issue, and the reporting focuses on solutions rather than causes or effects. However, even though these two publications are not noted for Euroscepticism, they both show a strong tendency to group South European countries together within a negative frame, collectivizing them and establishing a dichotomy with Northern Europe. (shrink)