Critical Action-implicative Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Covid-19 Awareness Campaigns on Pakistani Media

Abstract

With the spread of Covid-19, many rumors, conspiracy theories, and discourse of fear came into existence. The mainstream media was one of the main sources to educate the masses against such idiosyncrasies and made them save themselves from the disease and its other harmful impacts. In line with this, the study aims at examining Covid-19 awareness campaigns on Pakistani TV channels critically. To evaluate the appropriateness of 24 campaigns/commercials, which were selected through a purposive sampling, a critical multimodal discourse analysis of the campaigns was carried out, using Systemic Functional Grammar proposed by Halliday (2013) (for linguistic resources) along with Kress and van Leeuwen’s Visual Grammar (for nonlinguistic resources). The analysis of campaigns revealed that a few campaigns (e.g., the campaigns of SAMAA TV, PTV, and ISPR) contain sociosemiotic resources (e.g., language, signs, sound, color, picture, animation, actions, etc.) that were more appropriate socio-psychically for Pakistani context, but most campaigns (e.g., the campaigns of Geo TV, ARY, etc.) lack the action-implicative discourse. The study suggests that TV campaigns be culturally and psychologically fit to the context and be action-implicative