A Study of Strategies for the Legitimation of News Discourse Based on the Perspective of Convergence Theory: ——Take the Washington Post’s news coverage of the Federal Reserve’s bailout policies during the subprime crisis as an example

Abstract

In news reporting, legitimising discourse is usually present in subtle and implicit ways, potentially influencing people’s social cognition and decision making. Based on Cap’s convergence theory, this paper examines the legitimising discourse strategies in the Washington Post’s coverage of the Federal Reserve’s bailout policy. Through the integration and analysis of the three dimensions of the corpus, it is found that temporal convergence aims to link future presuppositions with present events, highlighting the Federal Reserve’s large role in solving the subprime mortgage crisis, in order to construct the legitimacy of the act. Spatial convergence, on the other hand, highlights the negative impact of the external entity represented by the NFIs on the internal entity represented by the US and the positive impact of the measures taken by the internal entity, thus paving the way for arguing the legitimacy of one’s own discourses and behaviours. Value convergence, on the other hand, demonstrates the potential for ideological conflict to be transformed into actual conflict by showing the clash of values and ideologies between external and internal entities in the discursive space. The study of convergence theory in this paper contributes to the construction and interpretation of the legitimation of political discourse and, at the same time, to some extent provides a reference for subsequent research on convergence and legitimation theory.