Exploring diversity and journalistic discourse in the pandemic: a corpus based study

Recent socio-political events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, are changing our lives, our connections, our emotions but also journalistic discourse and the way it represents society. In a conference dedicated to Diversity and Emotions, my purpose is to outline a link between the two words in journalistic discourse exploiting a corpus of newspapers articles collected in the last year, namely from March 1 2020 to February 28 2021. The basic assumption is that among the persuasive strategies adopted by political and journalistic discourse is the use of lexical patterns in specific contexts. Words - like Muslims, immigrants, asylum seekers, refugees (Baker et al., 2013) or Roma (Erjavec, 2001) - within co-textual or contextual frameworks can be a way to suggest either a positive or a negative evaluation of the associated socio-cultural groups and consequently signal different emotions. Accordingly, the reiteration of such associations or, on the other side, the ‘ageing’ and reduced use of some words or patterns in specific contexts, can indicate the emergence of new attitudes and opinions in the audience and, sometimes, a manipulative purpose. The preliminary results of my research, in this perspective, indicate that the frequency of the word diversity has dropped dramatically in the last year and that its use in the conservative newspaper Daily Telegraph seems also to outline an increasing criticism and conflictual attitude towards diversity policies. In previous studies of UK newspapers, based both on the SiBol-Port Corpus1 and some ad hoc corpora collected by the author (Zanca, 2015; 2017; 2018) the word Diversity appeared as virtually invariably associated with discourses indicating inclusive, empathic and positive contexts. According to the tradition of researchers such as Van Dijk (1991) this meant that discourses about Diversity were largely reproduced by the press as part of a shared set of values in the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dichotomy. There were, nonetheless, some relevant, exceptions, particularly when the discourse was related to ethnic or racial issues. This paper extends the research to a selection of the new 2020/21 corpus of British newspapers. The observations will be compared to data collected in previous years and, following the MdCADS methodology suggested in Partington (2010; 2013), the different corpora will be used to conduct quantitative and qualitative investigations aimed at ‘unveiling’ discourse features related to the idea of diversity and “the broader societal and political framework in which such discourse is embedded” (Schäffner 1996: 201), shunting back and forward from numbers and statistical information to qualitative findings and evaluations to identify “the relationship between instance and system, between the typical and the exceptional, between signal and noise” (Partington 2004).