Abstract
The increased information need after the outburst of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has led to the enhanced role of public addresses and press conferences that can broadcast important information simultaneously to a large number of people through a number of different media outlets (TV, radio, internet). Thus, government leaders worldwide have opted for the frequent broadcast of public addresses, reviving the rationale of media events as a way to disseminate their messages concerning the pandemic as widely as possible. The current paper focuses on the Greek case, scrutinizing the public addresses of the Greek PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis in terms of both structural and content characteristics. Through the use of multimodal analysis, we figure out the visual and linguistic characteristics in K. Mitsotakis public addresses. At the same time, we setup a research framework for the qualitative and quantitative examination of similar public addresses in various countries, by combining the theories of media events, propaganda, and linguistic techniques of political legitimization. Our main findings suggest that K. Mitsotakis in his public addresses has made use of direct visual and verbal connections to aspects of “Greekness” in a nation-centric rationale. He relies predominantly on the evocation of positive sentiments and rationalization (as a means of legitimization), in order to achieve political benefits by incorporating the management of the pandemic into the Greek government’s nationalist agenda.
Highlights
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic broke out as a “holistic event” affecting all socio-economic, political, and cultural institutions and almost every aspect of daily life on a local, national as well as international level (Demertzis, 2020)
In the case of Greece, this strong need for orientation is served by a media system that has as its dominant feature the “intense political parallelism” (Hallin and Mancini, 2004), resulting in the coverage of events through the intense reproduction of official sources (e.g., Minister of Health, Prime Minister)
Drawing on theories of media events, speech events and propaganda, the present research, focused on the televised addresses of the Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis regarding the SARS-CoV-2 with COVID pandemic and on their verbal and visual characteristics, in order to provide a coherent framework for the analysis of all similar public addresses either in or out of the pandemic context
Summary
The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic broke out as a “holistic event” affecting all socio-economic, political, and cultural institutions and almost every aspect of daily life on a local, national as well as international level (Demertzis, 2020). Mitsotakis’ televised public addresses: (a) examines the existence of visual and verbal semantic nation-centric elements according to the media events theory by Dayan and Katz (1992); (b) interrogates the general strategy for the creation of two sides, groups and perspectives that allows for the construction of ‘otherness’, of an “enemy” (Reyes, 2011; Poulakidakos, 2014); and (c) explores the content to identify the four different categories of propagandistic justification (authorization, moral evaluation, rationalization, mythopoesis), and the verbal evocation to feelings and/or to logic. Through our focus is on the Greek PM’s public addresses, we seek to stress out the fact that the pandemic has created the context for a revival of media events in their “original”, nationalist, propagandistic, and ritualistic form as they were described by Dayan and Katz back in the early 1990s, and urge towards a more systematic examination of these instances of public communication, especially in times of (health) crises. Mitsotakis, taking special advantage of the anniversary of March 25, the national celebration day for the
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