Investigating conflict discourses in the periodical press: an overview

This chapter presents an overview of the concepts of conflict and conflict discourse, their coverage in the periodical press, and provides a review of relevant research. This is followed by reflections focusing on the use of discourse analysis in this area of investigation, with a brief discussion of some of the analytical tools most frequently deployed. In particular it is shown that the study of conflict discourse in the periodical press brings together various strands of research: on the one hand specifically linguistic and discourse analytical investigations of conflict communication, including Critical Discourse Analysis and argumentation theory, and on the other hand media studies, and in particular research on discourse in the news and in other periodical publications. It emerges from the analysis that for the only fact of being published in the periodical press (indeed prevalently in the daily press) articles dealing with conflictual issues contribute to spreading certain ways of viewing such issues. In the press news, events and notions are recontextualized in what could be defined as ‘the media order of discourse’, so their representation does not, or not only, reflect the issues involved, but rather it constructs them discursively, thus largely influencing people’s perception and opinions, with a different impact on public opinion and society depending on the nature of the conflictual or contested issue at hand, and its political, social or cultural weight (e.g. the debate over populism or immigration, or disabilities or environmental problems, etc.).