The Language of Inequality in the News
A Discourse Analytic Approach

Explores how UK wealth inequality is discussed in newspapers, with a particular focus on changes over the past forty-five years.

Michael Toolan (Author)

9781108474337, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 December 2018

252 pages
23.5 x 15.6 x 1.7 cm, 0.48 kg

'Michael Toolan skilfully dissects the language of mainstream media, exemplified by The Times and the Mail … This book is a showcase project for all discourse-oriented interpretive social studies.' Wolfgang Teubert, University of Birmingham

Why in the early 1970s does The Times reject the idea of a national lottery, as rewarding luck not merit and effort, but warmly welcome one by the 1990s? Why in the 1970s do the Daily Mail's TV reviews address serious contemporary themes such as class- and race-relations, whereas forty years later they are largely concerned with celebrities, talent shows, and nostalgia? Why does the Conservative Chancellor in the 2010s mention 'Britain' so very often, when the Conservative Chancellor in the 1970s scarcely does at all? Covering news stories spanning fort-five years, Michael Toolan explores how wealth inequality has been presented in centre-right British newspapers, focusing on changes in the representation may have helped present-day inequality seem justifiable. Toolan employs corpus linguistic and critical discourse analytic methods to identify changing lexis and verbal patterns and gaps, all of which contribute to the way wealth inequality was represented in each of the decades from the 1970s to the present.

Part I. Analysing the Evolving Press Discourse of Contemporary UK Inequality: 1. Increased wealth inequality in the UK
2. Why does increasing wealth inequality matter?
3. Facts, discourse, myths
4. 'Ethical' differentiation
5. Inequality as 'British' once more
6. Why The Times and the Daily Mail?
7. Spreading the word about the new inequality: the news media
8. Landmarks in the politics of language tradition
9. Language-oriented critical discourse analysis: a brief survey
10. Corpus linguistic methods for exploring the ideology in discourse
11. Theoretical and methodological assumptions of this study
12. Brief outline of the chapters
13. Political affiliations
Part II. What's Fair and Unfair in The Times: 14. The language of fairness
15. Why concentrate on fair and unfair?
16. The 1971 and 2011 selections of fair and unfair stories
17. A national lottery
18. Industrial relations in 1971: strikes and unfair dismissal
19. Industrial relations in 2011: the burdens of employment law and 'abuse' of tribunals
20. Mr Marples's manifesto for the control of fair incomes
21. The squeezed middle and fair pay in 2011
22. Fair rents, fair housing
23. Pensions 'reform'
24. Fair and unfair in other contexts
25. Conclusions
Part III. Budgets and Burdens, from Barber to Osborne: 26. Introduction
27. Style and genre differences between Barber 1971 and Osborne 2011
28. Lexical contrasts
29. We in Osborne
30. Fair and help in Osborne
31. Taxation
32. The disappearing burden of taxation
33. Chancellors' metaphors and the stories they tell: ruts and dust versus the march of the makers
34. The editorial reception of the Barber and Osborne budgets in The Times and the Daily Mail
Part IV. Peter Black, Christopher Stevens, Class and Britain: 35. The TV reviewer as spokesperson of everyday ideology: Peter Black and Christopher Stevens
36. General topics in Black and Stevens Compared
37. Methodology
38. Peter Black on class
39. Class and other values in Christopher Stevens, 2013
40. Equal and fair in CS and PB
41. Coronation Street, sex and race, then and now
42. Key semantic domains in Black's and Stevens's journalism: a comparative analysis
43. The meanings of Britain and the British then (in PB) and now (in CS)
44. Conclusion
Part V. Forty-Five Years of Luddite Behaviour: 45. Ned Ludd and Robin Hood
46. The Luddites
47. Luddite and Luddites: grammar, meaning, and frequency
48. Luddite in the early 1970s in The Times: a preliminary survey
49. Luddite/Luddites used politically in The Times and the Mail during the first Thatcher term
50. Luddite/s after June 1983
51. The Miners' Strike of 1984-5
52. Concluding remarks: the Luddite narrative
Part VI. Forty-Five Years of Robin Hood: 53. Powerful names
54. Robin Hood in The Times: preliminary profile
55. Robin Hood in the Daily Mail: preliminary profile
56. Robin Hood in the 1970s
57. Grunwick
58. Robin Hood in Mrs Thatcher's 1980s and John Major's 1990s
59. Keynes, not Robin Hood
60. Bishops more progressive than Labour
61. Gordon Brown as (nearly) Robin Hood: the New Labour years (1997 to 2010)
62. Robin Hood since 2010
63. Conclusion
Part VII. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Sociology [JHB], Sociolinguistics [CFB], Linguistics [CF]