The discursive construction of accountability for communicative action to citizens: A contrastive analysis across Israeli and British media discourse

Abstract

Abstract This paper sets up to show how accountability for communicative action is constructed in online journalism as an object of talk, comparing British English and Israeli Hebrew discourse communities. The analysis utilizes a discourse-pragmatic frame of reference supplemented by cognitive semantics and corpus-assisted tools. The discussion draws on data collected from the websites of The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, Ha’aretz and Ynet. Focusing on self- and other-positioning of commenters and columnists as citizens, we explore how the accountability of the elite for communicative action and the accountability of their actions to citizens are discursively constructed by ordinary persons (in their role as commenters) and by non-ordinary persons (in their role as columnists, including journalists, experts and authors). The analysis indicates conceptual similarities coupled with discursive differences between the discourse communities under study.