Abstract
Realism has predominated in discussions about the coronavirus pandemic where politicians, authorities, and commentators debate over the substance and consequence of scientific facts. But while biology played a crucial role in triggering the pandemic, the resulting crisis developed through a social process. In this paper, I argue that the coronavirus pandemic in Britain was successfully framed as a crisis, but that the ritualization of solidarity normally generated by this meaning was compromised. Through an analysis of media coverage and official statements from the government, I trace the discursive construction of the crisis through the deployment of battle metaphors. Building on this discourse analysis, I show how the symbolic alignment of the pandemic and the Second World War revived symbols and tropes that informed the cultural construction of pandemic heroes. To explain why the intensity of the crisis framing was not matched in ritual performance, I consider how the government’s ambiguous policies and erratic social performance produced a state of indefinite liminality, subverting solidarity processes in lockdown. The paper offers insight into the experience of anomie during the pandemic and contributes to the strong program in cultural sociology by incorporating the crisis approach in disaster studies into the social drama framework.
Highlights
On 30 January 2020, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, declared a public health emergency of international concern over the global outbreak of novel coronavirus
I argue that the coronavirus pandemic in Britain was successfully framed as a crisis, but that the ritualization of solidarity normally generated by this meaning was compromised
This discussion sets up my analysis of pandemic discourse in the British context, where I trace how the crisis was framed through battle metaphors (e.g. “fight the virus”) which were introduced by government officials and elaborated in the mainstream news media
Summary
The Times of London, The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, The Sun, the Independent, the Financial Times, the Daily Mail, and the Mirror. My analysis of the coronavirus pandemic in the UK reveals that the ritual-like process has not achieved this sense of closure, but I draw from Cottle to show how the news media entered into the crisis by participating in the discursive construction of the threat, evaluating the effectiveness of political performances, celebrating heroic figures and civic-mindedness, and drawing attention to government failures. In the early months of the global pandemic, battle metaphors were employed by the British press in coverage of the outbreak in Wuhan, but they were conspicuously absent when the first confirmed cases of coronavirus in England were reported on 31 January 2020 Even though this news arrived the day after the WHO had declared a global emergency, government officials downplayed the threat; the Chief Medical Officer for England, Professor Chris Whitty, struck a reassuring note, insisting that the National Health Service (NHS) was “extremely well prepared and used to managing infections”.6. The NHS, founded in 1948, “appears as the rewarding culmination
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