Greek Press Research Articles

Legitimation Mechanisms in the Bailout Discourse

This study examines how the discursive struggles over the constituents of the financial crisis in Greece are policed by mainstream domestic media, in favour of the hegemonic interpretations of the crisis. The study focuses in particular on the discursive mechanisms the Greek press employed to legitimate the bailout agreements Greece signed with the troika. The analysis points to the discursive mechanisms of naturalisation and objectivation that empower the reconstruction of the hegemonic neoliberal rhetoric. The media studied actively participate in the discursive struggle over the crisis, exercising political agency by legitimating the bailout policies as the single course of action for the financial recovery of the country, while selectively omitting or discrediting alternative voices and interpretations.

‘’ Conflict Nato– Serbia (1999) and the Issue of Kosovo through the Greek Press and the Fable of the Greek-Serbian Friendship ‘’

‘’ Conflict Nato– Serbia (1999) and the Issue of Kosovo through the Greek Press and the Fable of the Greek-Serbian Friendship ‘’

Metaphorical conceptualizations of vertical and horizontal space in English press articles and their Greek translations

The paper examines variation in the way the conceptualization of the vertical and the horizontal dimension is registered in original English and translated Greek press reports. It highlights intercultural variation which gives rise to different collocations across English source and Greek target press items. This intercultural variation may be one of the reasons why Greek learners’ EFL production is hard to reach near-native command of the counterpart English collocation system. A number of preferred image schemata emerge, which show that the English source text seems to favour vertical spatial relations, as opposed to the Greek target version, which seems to favour horizontal spatial relations. The Greek version of the data tends to blur the vertical, occasionally in favour of the horizontal. The findings raise awareness of spatial reasoning modifications in translation and shed light on intercultural awareness in interlingual mediation situations, such as EFL, ESP or translation settings. Parallel data (source and target versions of texts) can highlight aspects of shifts in translation situations, with far-reaching consequences in different areas of application.

De-Judaizing a Class, Hellenizing a City: Jewish Merchants and the Future of Salonica in Greek Public Discourse, 1913–1914

Current historiography approaches the passage of Salonican Jewry from the Ottoman Empire to the Greek nation-state from a macroscopic perspective. Concentrating on state-minority relations, it focuses exclusively on external forces, treating Salonican Jews as a homogenized community and ignoring the role of the city’s non-Jews. To reassess the importance of the local dynamic, this article examines processes within Salonica itself. Through a close reading of a debate over the city’s commercial future, it considers the shifts in Greco-Jewish relations and the swift reversal of ethnic hierarchies within the city’s entrepreneurial elite that took place at a time when Greek government circles still included the Jews in their vision of a commercially prosperous Greek Salonica. In 1913–14, the Salonican Chamber of Commerce’s proposal to establish a free port generated a heated discussion that transcended the boundaries of professional deliberations and entered the local public sphere. The Greek New Club, an organization whose members were drawn from Salonica’s still small and economically weak Greek entrepreneurial class, became heavily involved in the debate, broadening the field of entrepreneurial politics, marginalizing the existing multiethnic Ottoman commercial institutions, and ultimately elevating itself as the rightful representative of a class and a city’s broader interests. At the same time, the Greek press identified the proposal’s advocates as Jewish businessmen and discursively constructed them as un-Greek. Before the aggressive policies of a nationalizing state led to the complete marginalization of Salonica’s Jews during the interwar period, this historically particular local interplay of class and ethnicity was instrumental in laying the groundwork for the de-Judaization of the city.

Conceptualisations across English–Greek parallel press data: a foreign language teaching perspective

Translation studies can lend valuable insights to foreign language (FL) teaching, in that contrastive analyses of parallel data can enhance intercultural competence in the FL classroom. The paper focuses on variation in metaphorical conceptualisation to raise intercultural awareness between the English and Greek languages. The data comprise a sample set of eight press article pairs from a wider 2011–2012 parallel press corpus (English>Greek). Findings suggest that translation practice may reveal a rich set of varied conceptualisations across versions which may improve learners’ intercultural competence, including illocutionary and strategic competences. This is because collocational shifts traced in parallel data can indeed be sites where intercultural conceptual variation is effectively manifested, while the collocational shifts identified in a parallel corpus can be creatively exploited by FL instructors and material designers to raise learners’ metaphorical and collocational intercultural awareness. The approach also fosters critical thinking in that the varied conceptualisations focused upon across versions may convey more than language/culture-specific awareness, allowing access to the public and political spheres as well as the ethical dimensions of experience.

The Influence of Language on the Collective Perception of Alterity: A Study on the Image of Turks in the Greek Media and the Potential for Education

‘Eat your food, child, or else the Turk will come and take you away’. This is a common Greek stereotype about the Turks, illustrating them as bogeyman. But why Greeks have a bad image of their eastern neighbors? The present study has its source of inspiration in a wider research we are currently undergoing, related to the Greek-Turkish relations in the second half of the 20th century and the stereotypes about the Turkish people, promoted by the Greek media. In this paper we aim at remonstrating that the Greek press reinforces ethnic categorization and stereotypes during the bilateral crises, thus cultivating a negative image of the neighbor.

Representations of Turks in the Greek Press During the Aegean Crises of 1976 and 1987. Reinforcing History Textbooks Stereotypes

The present study focuses on the main characteristics of the language used to depict the Turks in the Greek press during the bilateral crises in the Aegean Sea. Our purpose is to remonstrate that after 1974, the Greek daily newspapers displayed and promoted nationalist attitudes and stereotypes on Turks through textual and visual messages by reinforcing national myths and stereotypes popularized in the Greek history textbooks of primary and secondary education.

Timing ‘dangerousness’: football crowd disorder in the Italian and Greek press

This article seeks to shed light on the reasons beneath the emergence of football hooliganism-related media-orchestrated moral panics. Comparative analysis of the upmarket press coverage of the issue in Italy and Greece from the 1970s onwards reveals that the transforming of football hooliganism into a security threat was to a great extent dissociated from the scale and seriousness of the phenomenon. In both case studies, the change in the way journalists perceived football hooligans was closely associated with an array of social and political factors that were unrelated to football crowd violence. Contextualization of these findings suggests that the gradual replacement of the political origins of this threat-focused perception by apparently depoliticized risk-oriented security threat assessments has played an important role in legitimating liberty-restricting counter-hooliganism policies.

The Past in Peril&mbash;Greek History Textbook Controversy and the Macedonian Crisis

The conflict between Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia over the name and historical heritage of Macedonia, which in the early 1990s erupted in a diplomatic and political crisis, can in part be analysed as a “history war.” In this article, the Macedonian conflict’s roots in and impact on debates concerning the contents of history education in Greece, at the time of the crisis, are examined, along with the conditions of textbook production against the backdrop of the political conditions which gave rise to revision. Using samples from Greek press and educational journals, professional and identity political interests are analysed as boundary-work, brought about by the need for various advocates of “national values” in history education to demarcate themselves from extreme nationalism, in the name of science and patriotic duty.

THE MOHAMMED CARTOONS CRISIS IN THE BRITISH AND GREEK PRESS

The recent controversy (2006) over the depiction of Prophet Mohammed in cartoons published originally in the Danish press and later re-published in several European dailies offers a suitable opportunity to study the emergence of a European public sphere. Although the controversy started in Denmark, it soon acquired a transnational character. Editors and journalists throughout the EU mobilised, upholding or criticising their publication. The crisis was not only international in nature but also specifically European in that it called into question important political principles such as freedom of expression and respect for other religions, as well as the limits of implementing these principles in practice. This study offers a critical overview of the coverage of the Cartoons Crisis in the British and Greek press. More specifically, we check how the event has been framed in the British and Greek media discourse, paying particular attention to whether the overall crisis was linked to notions of Europe and European values or rather to national actors and values. We seek thus to assess whether themes and discursive topoi taken up by the press in the two countries analysed converge or diverge and whether they can be said to belong to a common European discursive space.

The spectacle of suffering and death: the photographic representation of war in Greek newspapers

This article analyses the visual construction of human suffering in war, with special reference to the signifying practices of the photographs published in Greek newspapers during the Second Iraq War. The author carries out a socio-semiotic analysis, arguing that the overall construction of the Second Iraq War in the Greek press — illustrated by two case studies which are examined in detail — combines contradictory elements and assumptions. Representations of the war are `framed' by the `overpoliticization' of the Greek public sphere and the dominant political culture synthesizing themes of `anti-Americanism', `anti-globalization' and `pro-Third Worldism', but also a particular version of what Said called `Orientalism'. More specifically, the insistence on spectacular images of suffering, and the combination of a humanitarian discourse of compassion for the `innocent distant victims of war' with populist and Greek Christian Orthodox conceptualizations of the self are constitutive elements of the newspapers' signifying practices, which aid the Greek press to be critical of the hegemonic western discourse regarding the Second Iraq War without, however, slipping to the other side of `Orientalist binary oppositions'. On the contrary, this persistence on the humanitarian discourse of compassion towards victims is pivotal in identifying with the western moral virtues of `civilized' humanity.

Death, lamentation and the photographic representation of the Other during the Second Iraq War in Greek newspapers

• This article is part of a wider research project on the cultural and political significance of the photographic representations of suffering during the Second Iraq War (2003) in Greek newspapers. The paper examines in detail a particular case study — the `wailing father' photographs — carrying out a socio-semiotic analysis of the signifying practices of news reporting and exploring the visual construction of `death' and `lamentation', accounting for the complex articulation between the particular social/cultural context and the processes of meaning construction. More specifically, the aim of the article is to study the role of the representation of death and grief in war; firstly as a rhetorical tool wielded by the Greek press to support its political and moral stance against the Second Iraq War, and, secondly as a hegemonic device that creates an ambivalent divide between `us' (the `implied readers' identifying with the Western moral virtues of `civilised' humanity) and `them' (the social groups being represented, the `Non-Western World') along the lines of Orientalist bipolar oppositions. The article concludes that the `wailing father' photographs, as a deeply complex mixture of voyeurism, objectification, affective participation, human brotherhood, moral indifference, imaginative compassion, passivity and fatalism, seem to reproduce, in all their confusion, the Western superiority and the Orientalist imagery, but also the moral and political failure to react over suffering and war. •

Direct discourse in the Greek press: from evidentiality to subjectivity

Among the ways of discourse representation, direct quotation is the most explicit form of inclusion of a speech event in a discourse. Many researchers have reached the conclusion that Direct Discourse (DD) is the mode par excellence in news reports, and that its function is to ensure faithfulness to an original discourse. This article explores the validity of these claims by comparing the forms and functions of DD in two Greek newspapers, namely I Kathimerini and Ta Nea. Our account relies upon a corpus-based approach to the study of DD forms and a qualitative analysis of a) the speech reporting verbs and b) the functions of DD in the news reports. Statistical information from the corpus provided that the most of the DD forms appeared in very divergent frequencies in the two newspapers. Concerning the functions of DD, we distinguished argumentation, dialogue that sets the scene of a conflict, interview reconstruction, evidence presentation, and legitimization. Moreover, reporting verb selection and source indication brought out the reporter's manipulation of discourse representation. Depth analysis proved that DD's functions are not simply restricted to faithfulness but are further related to the reporter's personal involvement in selecting and processing what to report.

Greeklish and Greekness: Trends and Discourses of “Glocalness”

Within the context of the new communication ecosystem, attitudes towards computer-mediated discourse (CMD) practices have not been extensively investigated. This study explores social attitudes towards “Greeklish,” a specific discursive phenomenon of CMD, which involves the use of the Latin alphabet in Greek online communication. It approaches Greeklish as a glocal social practice, and investigates attitudes towards Greeklish as they are represented in the Greek press. Three main trends are identified in the corpus. The first, a retrospective trend, views Greeklish as a serious threat to the Greek language; the second, prospective trend, approaches Greeklish as a transitory phenomenon which will soon become negligible due to technological advances; the third, resistive trend, points to the negative effects of globalization and relates Greeklish to other communication and sociocultural practices. Adopting a critical discourse-analytic perspective, this study attempts to map the discourses which permeate each one of these trends in order to reveal different, often heterogeneous and conflicting representations of Greeklish in Greek society at a specific historical moment.

Untying the Gordian knot of creation: metaphors for the Human Genome Project in Greek newspapers

This article studies the metaphorical expressions used by newspapers to present the near completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP) to the Greek public in the year 2000. The analysis, based on cognitive metaphor theory, deals with the most frequent or captivating metaphors used to refer to the human genome, which give rise to both conventional and novel expressions. The majority of creative metaphorical expressions participate in the discourse of hope and promise propagated by the Greek media in an attempt to present the HGP and its outcome in a favorable light. Instances of the competing discourse of fear and danger are much rarer but can also be found in creative metaphorical expressions. Metaphors pertaining to the Greek culture or to ancient Greek mythology tend to carry a special rhetorical force. However, it will be shown that the Greek press strategically used most of the metaphors that circulated globally at the time, not only culture specific ones.

The Anonymous Rome 1522 Chrysoloras: A Newly Discovered Greek Press

The Anonymous Rome 1522 Chrysoloras: A Newly Discovered Greek Press

Minorities and crime in the Greek press: Employing content and discourse analytic approaches

The paper examined Greek newspapers' representation of crime where members of minority groups were involved. It focused on period of one month (April, 1996) wherein crime committed by minority groups attracted considerable attention in the Greek media. A content analysis, on the one hand, revealed the dominant newsworthy topics (e. g., politics, economic, international, social affairs news) and, on the other hand, did not show any difference in the attention drawn towards crimes committed by members of the general population ('general' crime) and those committed by members of minority groups (ethnic or racial, 'other' crime). A discourse analysis, however, employing Van Dijk's (1984, 1987) sociocognitive model, brought to light certain prejudiced discursive practices in the newspapers representation that may develop and reinforce xenophobic frameworks of understanding

The socio-epistemic constitution of science and technology in the Greek press: an analysis of its presentation

This paper aims to analyze the way in which the Greek press treats the socio-epistemic constitution of science and technology. By “socio-epistemic constitution” we mean the following dimensions: (a) techno-scientific methodology, (b) the social organization of the techno-scientific endeavor, and (c) the interactions of science and technology with other public spheres. Our methodology is based on a content analysis of a sample consisting of 1,867 relevant articles from four national Greek newspapers. The analysis showed that although there is a constant flow of techno-scientific articles, the internal aspects (methodology and internal organization) of science and technology become apparent in only a small minority of these articles. By contrast, external relationships, mainly with politics and economics, are emphasized by focusing on the positive social impact of the techno-scientific endeavor. In general, the Greek press makes a positive contribution to the advancement of the public understanding of science and technology, as the prominent presentation of some of their socio-epistemological components forms a realistic “post-academic” image of these two areas.

The Decline of Newspapers: the case of the Greek press

The Decline of Newspapers: the case of the Greek press

The Decline of Newspapers: the case of the Greek press

This study provides an account of the recent decline of the Greek press - one of the most seriously hit media industries in Europe. It argues that the crisis of the Greek press is the result of a combination of factors and not simply the consequence of the deregulation of the broadcasting system.