Power, Media and the Covid-19 Pandemic Framing Public Discourse

Introduction: Power, Media, and the Covid-19 Pandemic: framing public discourse

PART I: The Pandemic: historical, medical and racial configurations

1 Killing Fields: Pandemics, Geopolitics and Environmental Emergency

Graham Murdock

2 Biopolitics, Eugenics and the New State Racism

Ben Harbisher

3 The Subsumption of Racial Discrimination: the representation of Chinese mainstream media of the maltreatment of African nationals in Guangzhou during the Covid-19 Pandemic

Zhou Yang and Na Yuqi

PART II: Power, Crisis and Repression

4 The Cultural Politics of Crisis in the UK

Ben Whitham

5 UK Universities during Covid-19: catastrophic management, ‘business continuity’, and education workers

Stuart Price

6 Covid-19, Police Brutality and the systematic targeting of the black and disadvantaged population in Brazil

Fernanda Amaral

PART III: Journalism, Information and Structures of Argument during Covid-19

7 Just Following the Science: fact-checking journalism and the Government’s lockdown argumentation

Jen Birks

8 The burden of responsibility: Investigative journalism in South Africa during the Covid-19 crisis

Allen Munoriyarwa

9 "It's just a little flu": Covid, institutional crisis and information wars in Brazilian journalism - the Folha de São Paulo newspaper

Thaiane Oliveira, Rodrigo Quinan, Juliana Gagliardi, and Afonso de Albuquerque

PART IV: British Political Discourse during the Pandemic

10 The BBC and Covid-19: the Politicisation of a Pandemic?

Sumaya Alnahed

11 How the UK Government ‘turned on a sixpence’ to change its story: a discourse analysis of the No.10 daily coronavirus news conferences

Ruth Garland

12 Mortality, Blame Avoidance and the State: constructing Boris Johnson’s exit strategy

Leighton Andrews

PART V: Homelessness and Dispossession during the Pandemic

13 Has homeless rough sleeping in the UK and Europe been solved in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic?

Jo Richardson

14 Leper Islands: Coronavirus and the Homeless ‘Other’

Simon Stevens

Biography

Stuart Price is Professor of Media and Political Discourse, and Director of the Media Discourse Centre. He is the author of a number of monographs including Brute Reality (2010) and Worst-Case Scenario? (2011) and Editor (with Ruth Sanz Sabido) of The Legacy of Dissent (2015) and Sites of Protest (2016). Recent publications include Journalism, Power and Investigation (2019) and "8M and the Huelga General Feminista, 2019–2020" for The Routledge Companion to Political Journalism (2021).

Ben Harbisher is Senior Lecturer in Teaching and Research at De Montfort University. He is Deputy Director of the Media Discourse Centre and Chair of the MeCCSA Practice Network. He has published in several academic journals and edited volumes, with lead articles in the Journal for the Study of British Cultures and Hard Times. Other published works appear in Surveillance and Society and Critical Discourse Analysis. Dr Harbisher is also Lead Academic on the international #SDGFilmfest, which is a collaborative research project between the UK and South East Asia.

'Coterminous with the Covid-19 crisis has been a global "infodemic", as responses by governments, political actors and publics have met, meshed and competed in the multi-dimensional media spaces formed by mass self-communication. One of the many strengths of this volume is its multiple disciplinary lenses, deployed to ask a question of strategic importance: has the pandemic reinforced existing relations of power and dominance? The book will prove a significant asset for researchers in many fields as they meet the challenges bequeathed by events that have dominated news agendas over the past two years..　

Professor Jake Lynch, University of Sydney, and Leverhulme Visiting Professor, Centre for Trust, Peace and Social Relations, Coventry University, UK