Email this article Anti-vaccination Conspiracy Theories and Theorists: Analysis of a Corpus of Offline and Online Argumentative Texts in the Guardian and the Daily Mail
Abstract
The present paper explores the discourses of and about anti-vaccination conspiracy theories in two national British newspapers, the Guardian and the Daily Mail, following a corpus-assisted Critical Discourse Studies approach. The analysis focuses on the frequency and usage of the lemma conspiracy in articles dealing with the controversy surrounding the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine in the UK; both traditional, printed genres like editorials and letters to the editor and newer, social media genres like comments posted on the two newspapers’ Facebook pages are investigated. The results show that conspiratorial beliefs concerning the science and politics of vaccination are widely discussed both offline and online; however, the noun phrases conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist have a marked negative connotation and are mainly used by their opponents as insults. Supporters may avoid or refute these labels and the stigma attached to them, or they may reclaim their use to underline their feeling of superior knowledge compared to the general population, who has allegedly been brainwashed by the establishment’s propaganda. Moreover, the analysis of conversations unfolding on Facebook confirms the antagonising quality of such interactions, where the interlocutors’ only aim is to defend their pre-existing point of view from the other side’s attacks. Discourses of and about anti-vaccination conspiracy theories thus deviate from scientific and health communication to express strong ideological positionings and ultimately to create and defend identities.
References
Baker P. 2006, Using Corpora in Critical Discourse Analysis, Bloomsbury, London. Bergmann E. 2018, Conspiracy and Populism: The Politics of Misinformation, Palgrave
Macmillan.
Biber, Douglas, Stieg Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan,
, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, Longman, London.
Boyce T. 2006, Health, Risk and News: The MMR Vaccine and the Media, Peter Lang,
New York.
Boyd M.S. 2018, Critical Discourse Analysis and the Editorial 2.0: News Reception and
User-generated Comments in Discourses about (Im)migration, in “Altre Modernità”
(2018), pp. 1-22.
Caldas-Coulthard C. 1994, On reporting reporting: The representation of speech in
factual and factional narratives, in Coulthard M. (ed.), Advances in Written Text
Analysis, Routledge, London, pp. 295-308.
D’Ancona M. 2017, Post Truth: The New War on Truth and How to Fight Back, Random
House.
Deer B. 2020, The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Science, Deception, and the War on
Vaccines, Scribe Publications.
Demata M., Heaney D. and Herring S.C. 2018, Language and Discourse in Social Media:
New Challenges, New Approaches, in “Altre Modernità” 10 (2018), pp. I-X. Fitzpatrick M. 2004, MMR and Autism: What Parents Need to Know, Routledge,
London/New York.
Herring S.C. 2013, Discourse in Web 2.0: Familiar, Reconfigured, and Emergent, in
Tannen D. and Tester M. (eds.), Discourse 2.0: Language and New Media,
Georgetown University Press, Washington, DC, pp. 1-25.
Jurgenson N. 2012, When atoms meet bits: social media, the mobile web and augmented
revolution, in “Future Internet” 4 [1], pp. 83–91. doi:10.3390/fi4010083.
Kata A. 2010, A post-modern Pandora’s box: Anti-vaccination misinformation on the
Internet, in “Vaccine” 28, pp. 1709-1716.
KhosraviNik M. and Unger J.W. 2016, Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media:
Power, Resistance and Critique in Changing Media Ecologies, in Wodak R. and Meyer M. (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Studies, 3rd Edition, Sage, London, pp. 206-233.
Kiesling S.F. 2009, Style as stance, in: Jaffe A. (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 171–194.
Kilgariff A., Rychly P., Smrz P. and Tugwell D. 2004, The Sketch Engine, in “Proceedings of the 11th EURALEX International Congress”, Lorient, France, pp. 105-116
Kilgariff A., Baisa V., Bušta J., Jakubiček M., Kovář V., Michelfeit J., Rychly P. and Suchomel V. 2014, The Sketch Engine: ten years on, in “Lexicography ASIALEX”, 1 [1], pp. 7-36.
Knoblock N. 2020, Negotiating Dominance on Facebook: Positioning of Self and Others in Pro- and Anti-Trump Comments on Immigration, in “Discourse & Society” 31 [5], pp. 520-539.
Nario-Redmond M.R. 2020, Ableism: The Causes and Consequences of Disability Prejudice, Wiley Blackwell.
Numerato D., Vochocova L., Vaclav S. and Mackova, A. 2019, The vaccination debate in the “post truth” era: social media as sites of multi-layered reflexivity, in “Sociology of Health & Illness” 41 [S1], pp. 82-97.
Richardson J.E. 2007, Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis, Palgrave Macmillan.
Rogers T. 2020, Differences Between Broadsheet and Tabloid Newspapers, in “ThoughtCo”. www.thoughtco.com/broadsheet-and-tabloid-newspapers-2074248 (28.09.2021).
Stöckl A. and Smajdor A. 2017, The MMR debate in the United Kingdom: vaccine scares, statemanship and the media, in Holomberg C., Blume S. and Greenough P., The Politics of Vaccination: A Global History, Manchester University Press, pp. 239- 259.
Sunstein C.R., & Vermeule A. 2009, Conspiracy theories: Causes and cures, in “Journal of Political Philosophy” 17, pp. 202–227.
Unger J.W., Wodak R. and KhosraviNik M. 2016, Critical Discourse Studies and Social Media Data, in Silverman D., Qualitative Research, Sage, chapter 17.
Wodak R. 2015, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean, Sage, London.
Zummo M.L. 2017, A Linguistic Analysis of the Online Debate on Vaccines and Use of Fora as Information Stations and Confirmation Niche, in “International Journal of Society, Culture & Language” 5 [1], pp. 44-57.
Zummo M.L. 2018a, Posting for Consensus, Sharing Consensus. The Case of Migrants on Facebook, Ideological Views and Echo Chambers, in “Textus” 31 [1], pp. 218-237
Zummo M.L. 2018b, The Linguistic Construction of Confirmation Niches in Online Comment Sequences, in “Altre Modernità”, 10 (2018), pp. 107-123.
Full Text: PDF
Refbacks
- There are currently no refbacks.
