Political Press Research Articles

Discursos periodísticos de la represión estatal en Colombia y México, 1968-1982. Un estudio comparativo

This article analyzes the role of the political press in the construction of public opinion during the processes of state repression in Mexico and Colombia between 1968 and 1982. Its objective is to analyze the types of discourses through which the major political press influenced the way in which readers interpreted the dynamics of state repression in both countries. A historical-comparative analysis of two cases is carried out to review the journalistic positions of the primary sources, in this case, the newspapers Excélsior, El Sol de México, El Informador, El Tiempo, El Siglo, El Espectador and La República. The results reveal that the press promoted seven main discourses on state repression: 1) youth and university co-optation, 2) public order violated, 3) subversion and terrorism, 4) institutions, security and the state, 5) the external enemy, 6) human rights as a violation of national sovereignty and 7) the press as a guarantor of public opinion. These discourses positioned newspapers as actors in the political contest and in the construction of public opinion in the context of recent history.

Interpreter-mediated political communication N-Grammed: a corpus-driven discourse analysis of government interpreters’ (ideological) use of formulaic language

ABSTRACT Formulaic expressions/prefabricated chunks are established as crucial in fluent speech production in psycholinguistics and language acquisition/learning yet have been largely underexplored in interpreting studies, barring a few experimental studies. Formulaic expressions are particularly underexplored from a discursive perspective in interpreting, that is, how interpreters might employ formulaic expressions for discursive mediation. Drawing on 20 years of China’s political press conferences data, this study conducts a corpus-driven critical discourse analysis to explore the ideological/discursive properties of the linguistic category using the N-Gram function. The findings reveal that the interpreters’ formulaic language use manifests at multiple levels: Instead of being seemingly routine and innocuous, formulaic expressions used in interpreting can be ideologically salient in (re)constructing versions of truth, fact, and reality, discursively further strengthening China’s stance in the global lingua franca English. Contextualised bilingual examples are provided to demonstrate interpreters’ mediation. This interdisciplinary study contributes to current understanding of government interpreters’ agency in a changing sociocultural and geopolitical context.

«Философия беспорядка»: рецепция работ Н.А. Бердяева в арабской печати середины ХХ в.

The article is devoted to the Arabic reception of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev works in the mid-twentieth century. The author demonstrates the influence of Berdyaev’s theories on a number of Arab intellectuals (e.g. ʻAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī (1917–2002), ʻAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʻAqqād (1889–1964) and Anṭūn Saʻādah (1904–1949)), and also reveals the influence of the work “Slavery and Freedom” on the political press of the 1940s. The popularity of Berdyaev’s existentialism in the intellectual circles of Lebanon and Egypt is explained as a natural consequence of its manifestative nature and terminological simplicity. The study is preceded by a brief summary of the translations of Berdyaev’s works into Arabic, completed in 1960–2019.

«Философия беспорядка»: рецепция работ Н.А. Бердяева в арабской печати середины ХХ в.

The article is devoted to the Arabic reception of Nikolai Aleksandrovich Berdyaev works in the mid-twentieth century. The author demonstrates the influence of Berdyaev’s theories on a number of Arab intellectuals (e.g. ʻAbd al-Raḥmān Badawī (1917–2002), ʻAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʻAqqād (1889–1964) and Anṭūn Saʻādah (1904–1949)), and also reveals the influence of the work “Slavery and Freedom” on the political press of the 1940s. The popularity of Berdyaev’s existentialism in the intellectual circles of Lebanon and Egypt is explained as a natural consequence of its manifestative nature and terminological simplicity. The study is preceded by a brief summary of the translations of Berdyaev’s works into Arabic, completed in 1960–2019.

A Study of Intertextuality in Political Press Samples

يدرس هذا البحث ظاهرة التداخل النصي intertextuality على وجه العموم وفي الكتابات الصحفية بصورة خاصة. تحاول هذه الدراسة أن تبين طبيعة هذه الظاهرة والسر وراء الاهتمام الواسع بها . تبدا الدراسة بمقدمة بسيطة كتمهيد للموضوع ثم بتقديم بعض التعاريف والآراء لمختلف اللغويين من اجل توضيح طبيعة الموضوع . تم ايضاً استعراض اهم انواع وابعاد التداخل النصي لينتهي الموضوع بتحليل نماذج صحفية محددة والخروج بمجموعة من الاستنتاجات المناسبة.

ЧОМУ КНИЖКИ ПЕРЕСІКАЮТЬ ОКЕАНИ? ДО ІСТОРІЇ КНИГИ АЛЕКСІЯ ПЕЛИПЕНКО «УКРАЇНА ПЛАЧЕ», 1937-2015

The aim of the research. The article deals with the paths of A. Pelypenko's book "Ukraine Cries" (1937) to readers, examines the issues of Bolshevism in the Slovenian cultural and political press at the end of the 1930s, finds out the awareness of Slovenians about the events in Ukraine and the Bolshevist terror against the Ukrainian population in the 1920s–30s, the impact of the content of this book on Slovenian society through clarifying the details of the biography of Father A. Pelypenko, expanding knowledge about the fate of Ukrainian immigrants (using the example of a Ukrainian clergyman’s biography) and the interaction of the Ukrainian and Slovenian diasporas in Argentina. Scientific novelty of the research. Neither Pelypenko's writing activities nor his biography have yet become the subject of research in Ukraine. Conclusions. At the end of the 1930s, the Bolshevist terror was the first topic of the cultural and political press in Slovenia. The book "Ukraine cries" by the Ukrainian clergyman Alexius Pelypenko (1893–1983), published first in Germamy in 1937, then in Slovenia in 1939–1940, gained the greatest resonance. The book enriched Slovenes' awareness of events in Ukraine with new information and details. The content of the book was so significant that it crossed the Atlantic three times on its way to the people: it went from Germany to Slovenia, then to the USA, and again to Slovenia, and from there to Argentina, and again to Slovenia. This is an eyewitness account of real events in the village of Volovodivka during the famine artificially created by the Bolsheviks in Ukraine in 1921–1923, and it describes part of the author's biography in a slightly modified form. Fate took Father Pelypenko first to the fronts of the First World War, then to his native Podillia, and from there – to the West of Ukraine, Poland, Germany, and Argentina. The familiarity of Slovenes with this book may have helped Pelipenko in Argentina, where he received the support of the Slovene priest in emigration, Jozef Kastelic (1888–1940). The reciprocity of Slovenian and Ukrainian diasporas in Argentina can be traced through their neighboring settlements in Buenos Aires. There was much in common in the spiritual life of immigrants to Argentina as well. Pelypenko is the author of 26 books and numerous articles, all of which affect Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the yoke of communism to some extent. Interest in the events and Bolshevist terror in Ukraine in the world did not weaken during the Cold War and later, especially after the beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, which in February 2022 resulted in a full-scale war. Pelypenko's book shows that Russia's policy towards Ukraine has not changed in the 21st century.

Parliament and Revolution: Poland, Finland, and the End of Empire in the Early Twentieth Century

AbstractThis article explores the political trajectories of the early twentieth-century Grand Duchy of Finland and the Kingdom of Poland in the context of the “global parliamentary moment,” when the constitutional script of revolution competed with the more daring script of social revolution. We scrutinize contrastive political choices of socialist parties in these two western borderlands of the Russian Empire. Finland and Poland emerged as independent parliamentary states in 1917–1918 but under manifestly different circumstances. The Finnish socialist party had enjoyed a stable foothold in the formally democratic but practically impotent national parliament since 1907, whereas the Polish socialists boycotted the Russian Duma and envisioned a democratic legislature as a guaranty of a Poland with true people’s power. The Finnish socialists later abandoned parliamentarism in favor of an armed revolution, in 1918, whereas most of their Polish counterparts used the parliamentary ideal of popular sovereignty to restrain the revolutionary upsurge. We argue that the socialist understandings of parliamentarism and revolution were of crucial importance at this juncture. We draw from a broad corpora of political press reports, handwritten newspapers, and leaflets to show how the diachronic sequence of events and synchronic power relations inside the Russian Empire made certain stances toward parliamentarism and revolution more likely at different points in time.

Powerful in pearls and Willie Brown’s mistress: a computational analysis of gendered news coverage of Kamala Harris on the partisan extremes

ABSTRACT This study uses a mix of traditional and computational content analysis to track digital news coverage of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris during and immediately after the 2020 general elections. It’s well documented that female politicians, especially women of color, face biased coverage in the political press. In this paper, we explore how these dynamics play out in the modern hyper-polarized digital media landscape. Our corpus includes roughly 17,000 stories published online between August 2020 and April 2021 by news organizations we categorized along a binary axis of partisanship between Republican and Democrat. Our findings show that sexist, racialized coverage of Harris is most prevalent in news sources shared by mostly Republican voters. Coverage in news sources shared by registered Democratic voters, meanwhile, tended to treat Harris as a celebrity, often fixating on her wardrobe and personal life. We ponder implications for both gender equity in civic life and future feminist media scholarship.

Interpreters as Spin Doctors: The Interactional Role of Interpreters in China’s Political Press Conferences

China’s political press conferences have received increasing academic attention as they provide a revealing window into the workings of the political communication system in the authoritarian context. However, the interactional role that interpreters play in these cross-linguistic press conferences remains underexamined. Taking a conversational analytic approach, this qualitative study empirically examines the interactional import of government interpreters’ practices at the Chinese Premier’s Press Conferences (CPPCs) from 2007 to 2023. The analysis reveals that interpreters consistently transform journalists’ questions with respect to (1) word choices, (2) contextual backgrounds, and (3) question forms. These transformative practices work to soften the critical messages that these questions would otherwise convey while also enabling politicians to more easily address these questions without having to deal with the negative consequences that might otherwise follow. I argue that government interpreters in CPPCs actively intervene in substantive ways consistent with a spin doctor role within press conference exchanges.

Responding to Omicron: Speaker Commitment and Legitimisation in COVID-related Press Conferences

This paper examines the ways in which New Zealand and Polish government officials communicated the easing of COVID restrictions to the general public. The study aimed to identify legitimising strategies used to justify the lifting of restrictions and related measures, and to establish how agency and responsibility were discursively constructed in the subgenre of political press conference in two different socio-political settings. Informed by the notions of legitimisation (Chilton 2004), speaker commitment and stance (Marín Arrese 2011, 2015, 2021), the research looked into the linguistic marking of effective stance (deonticity, assessments, attitudinals and directives) and epistemic stance (epistemic modality, truth-factual validity as well as experiential, cognitive and communicative stance), considering both the subjectivity/intersubjectivity dimension and the explicitness/implicitness of the speaker’s role. In addition, the study considered the key discursive strategies used to (de)construct agency in the discourses of NZ and Polish policymakers seen as proponents of divergent public health policies. As the findings indicate, the Polish officials conveyed chiefly experiential stance and projected less involvement, whereas the NZ Prime Minister favoured cognitive stance and deonticity as well as direct appeals to the audience. The analysis shows that the speaker’s (dis)identification with the respective policy finds reflection in the varying degrees of speaker commitment and the (de)construction of agency.

Echoes of the News About the Attempted Assassination of Sultan Abdul Hamid II Among the Muslim Intelligentsia from Bosnia and Herzegovina Gathered Around the Bošnjak Gazette

In the second half of July 1905, the Belgian anarchist Edward Joris and members of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation attempted to assassinate the Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II in Istanbul. The Sultan survived, but the lives of numerous civilians were lost. The first part of this paper reviews the assassination attempt, its participants, and its political background, whereas the second part analyzes how this event was presented to Muslims from Bosnia and Herzegovina in the political press at the time, with a special review of the echoes it had among the Muslim intelligentsia gathered around the Bošnjak gazette.

Belt and Road Initiative in View of the Polish Press

This study analysed how the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is presented in the Polish press through language use in media discourse based on Jef Verschueren’s Language Adaptation Theory and corpus analysis. Antconc software has been used to distinguish the frequency of lexemes and expressions. The complexity of the Polish language and contexts require manual verification of the results. The number of writings about Belt and Road projects is fairly small. The sample consists of 103 articles categorised into four groups: general press, political press, education institution press, and business press. Articles refer to the period of 2015–2019, as the recent three years of the COVID-19 and war in Ukraine took the press’ focus away from the BRI. Corpus analysis shows a positive approach to the Best and Road Initiative dominates all press groups. Most lexemes are equally dispersed among all press categories with a slight predominance of caution suggested by authors in education institution press. The hypothesis was further confirmed in the light of Verschueren’s Theory, where the study presents examples of press language as a dynamic process of mutual adaptation between linguistic structure and context, at different levels of salience.

THE ROLE OF THE CITY OF SHUMEN IN THE POLITICAL LIFE OF BULGARIA IN THE FIRST DECADE AFTER THE LIBERATION (1878)

This article traces the role of the city of Shumen and its region in the political life of Bulgaria from the Liberation (1878) to the rule of St. Stambolov (1887). The analysis is based on information about the formation of regional political forces and their influence on public life. In addition, the influence of the central government on the political views of the people of Shumen and the administrative status of the city are discussed. The article also focuses on the importance of the army and the political press in the formation of public attitudes.

A Contrastive Corpus-Based Approach to the Expression of Adversarialness across English and Persian: A Case Study of Political Press Conferences

With the point of departure in discourse analysis (DA), this corpus comparative study concentrated on sequences with adversarial questions in political press conferences to investigate the differences in the use of adversarial questioning between two contexts, namely, English and Persian political press conferences, and particularly highlight the strategies which were used by journalists in such sequences of talk journalists and politicians so as to show the importance of improving linguistic proficiency in EFL context. For this reason, this study analyzed a corpus of data from some political press conferences with American and Iranian Government which is randomly selected from appropriate websites between 2007 and 2021. The study applied Clayman, Heritage, and McDonald (2006) for quantifying adversarial questions as exhibited by the press to the questions addressed the Presidents of Iran and the United States. Questions from selected conferences were coded according to adversarialness. Frequency and chi-square tests were used for analysis. The results showed significant difference across the 2 corpora in some journalists’ questions. In terms of question design, accountability questions in Iranian journalists’ questions as Persian corpus indicated higher frequency. In addition, in referencing frames, higher frequency was observed in declarative questions in Persian corpus. However, English corpus displayed higher frequency in other-referencing frames. Finally, in content adversarialness, global adversarialness indicated higher frequency in Persian corpus. Consequently, the results showed that adversarial questions were used in Persian corpus more significantly than English corpus. The results of the study not only will help the students gain linguistic competence, but it will also improve their overall language proficiency.

Keila Grinberg. A Black Jurist in a Slave Society: Antonio Pereira Rebouças and the Trials of Brazilian Citizenship.

The English translation of Keila Grinberg’s O fiador dos Brasileiros as A Black Jurist in a Slave Society could not be more timely. As scholars engage with increased urgency in analyses of the structural, cultural, and historical underpinnings of racism, Grinberg’s analysis of race, citizenship, property rights, slavery, and civil law during the Brazilian Empire (1822–1889) remains fresh and relevant. Originally published in 2002, the author has incorporated recent scholarship into her historiographical framing for this new edition. The work is based on extensive archival research in Rio de Janeiro’s juridical archives and also incorporates legal treatises, government documents, and Brazil’s rich and voluminous political press. Grinberg uses Antonio Pereira Rebouças, a mulatto jurist and statesman, as a vehicle to explore the evolution of ideas about race, freedom, property, and personhood in post-independence Brazil. The son of a Portuguese tailor and a free woman of color, Rebouças experienced racial discrimination politically and socially despite being elected to provincial and national office and being granted the right to argue cases in Rio de Janeiro’s court of appeals even though he lacked a formal law degree. Rebouças was not an advocate for the oppressed and owned captives himself. Grinberg argues convincingly that his personal experience of racism led him to adopt positions about race and citizenship based on individual merit rather than critiquing the structures that undergirded discrimination. In so doing, he pursued strategies of upward mobility based on personal advancement rather than collective racial uplift, a pattern common to people of color that has been well documented by scholars of race in Brazil.

The Many Faces of Performative Politics: Satires of Statesman Bernhard von Bülow in Wilhelmine Germany

ABSTRACT While historical and contemporary thinkers have described politics as theater, this article moves beyond this representation of politics to understand how performance was central to politics around the turn of the twentieth century. It does so through an analysis of a large volume of hitherto unstudied caricatures of the German statesman Bernhard von Bülow. While historians usually describe satire merely in a complementary or illustrative manner, this article analyzes it in a structural manner. This analysis does not serve to understand Bülow personally nor his politics, but constitutes a case study that demonstrates broader changes in the nature of politics. The article argues that caricaturists used metaphors of different types of performances, which built on tradition and played into new lifestyles, to reflect on how mass communication became constitutive of modern politics. Moreover, this metaphorical stage on which politicians performed represented the platform of the mass press in politics itself.

Publicystyka Heleny Lemańskiej ‒ przypadek Polskiej Kroniki Filmowej w latach 1949‒1967

The Polish Film Chronicle in the times of mass information falling in the years after the end of World War II gave the opportunity to formulate a message addressed to specific groups of recipients. Its reception was one of the components of the life of social groups and individual recipients who could become addicted to watching the message formulated by the aforementioned medium. The chronicle, which was part of the mass media system, had a direct impact on its recipients in the processes of socialization of education and self-education. PKF became and remains an interesting source of knowledge about the functioning of the People’s Republic of Poland. It is also an extremely valuable film document reflecting the style of the political discourse of the time, moreover, it is a historical document that allows to reproduce the features of the then styles of political press journalism.

Political press of Polish women’s youth of the interwar 20th anniversary in Lviv

Political press of Polish women’s youth of the interwar 20th anniversary in Lviv

David Starčević u raskolu Stranke prava 1895.

The fracturing of the Party of Right in October 1895 into the Frankist (frankovac) and Homeland (domovinaš) political factions indubitably constituted one of the key events in modern Croatian political history with regard to the proposed modes for resolving the Croatian question adopted by the political forces that grew out of these factions. Besides a complete shift at the platform level, the complex transformation of the Rightist movement into a modern political party that accepted resolution of the Croatian statehood right question within the framework of the Dual Monarchy also created specific political casualties in a handful of old-school Rightists carried over from the golden age of Rightism in the 1880s, such as Erazmo Barčić, Juraj Rukavina and, finally, David Starčević. The author analyses the dramatic case of David Starčević, which entails deeper insight into the gradual fraying of the party, on the basis of original archival materials, the relevant political press and other published sources and literature. David Starčević, the elder nephew of Ante Starčević, earned the status of people’s tribune with his rhetorical skill and talent for agitation, and as a victim of prosecution by Khuen-Héderváry’s regime he had the halo of a Rightist martyr. Even though he was once his uncle’s ‘right-hand man’, he was expelled from the Zagreb club of the Party of Right due to an ultimatum put forth by Ante Starčević himself, as demonstrated by a defamatory letter sent by the latter to David, preserved in the bequest of Dalmatian Rightist Ante Trumbić. In the struggle of two different factions for Ante Starčević’s favour, David was unanimously expelled from the club, even though all of its members were entirely aware that they were perpetrating an injustice against him. The removal of David Starčević, who had enjoyed a considerable reputation among the Rightists and threatened their notions most suited Josip Frank and Fran Folnegović by all indications. To affirm himself in Ante Starčević’s eyes, Frank successfully exploited David’s younger brother, Mile, who had lived with the ‘Old Man’ for the preceding ten years and had the latter’s complete confidence. David’s expulsion, with the intent of compromising his reputation, served as a significant step in the outcome in which Ante Starčević would bequeath his political legacy to Mile – not just his blessing, but also his property, including the newly-constructed Starčević Hall, which gave the entire dispute a crucial financial aspect. As the long-time leader of the Pure Party of Right, Frank would thereby also gain political legitimacy thanks to Mile’s intercession.

Journalists’ moves in political press conferences and their implications for accountability

Abstract Political press conferences are important spaces for public accountability because they give journalists the opportunity to scrutinize politicians’ decisions. However, the structure of press conferences poses specific constraints to journalists because their role is limited to ask questions. This situation is not problematic if their goal is to ask informative or critical questions, but it becomes problematic if journalists want to advance standpoints, arguments, or criticisms. In the latter case, journalists have to perform their argumentative moves through façade questions in order to comply with the protocol of press conferences. For this reason, it is not easy to distinguish the argumentative function of journalists’ questions, and consequently, their value for accountability. This paper draws on the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation to give an argumentative account of political press conferences. Furthermore, the implications of journalists’ questions for accountability purposes are discussed.