Constructing Syriza: The Greek Elections in British Online Newspapers and Blogs

The steps taken by the EU towards increasing political and economic unification, together with the recent advances in communication technologies, have contributed to making what happens in one of the member states extremely significant for the whole union, thus blurring the border between what is nationally and what is internationally relevant. As a consequence, one cannot underestimate the role of online newspapers, which can be easily accessed throughout the EU and which have incorporated genres native to the Web such as blogs. At the end of January 2015, the electoral victory of Syriza, a Greek political party which heavily criticizes the idea of Europe vehiculated by the Union’s institutions and its recently-adopted austerity measures, did not simply have national relevance, but aroused interest and generated a lively debate across all member countries as different European notions and narratives entered into play, often conflicting. Quite expectedly, online mass media had a strategic role on this occasion; editorials and journalistic blogs played a big part in the discussion as they presented and promoted their authors’ views. News stories also contributed to orientating the public opinion by conveying covert ideological messages in favour or against Syriza and its idea of Europe. Drawing on the theoretical premise that news discourse can never offer a value-free representation of the world as news is the result of a process of discursive as well as social construction (cf., among others, Fowler 1991; Fairclough 1995; Jäger 2001), this study sets out to investigate the online media coverage of the recent Greek elections in the United Kindgom. More specifically, the analysis focuses on the discursive representation of the electoral outcome, its significance on the international and local political scenario as well as of its protagonists so as to highlight the different ideological stances at play and the concern over the possible future of the EU. A combined approach is adopted which integrates Critical Discourse Analysis with Corpus Linguistics: the former activates a “useful synergy” when utilized with the rigorous, data-based tools of the latter (cf. Stubbs 1996; Garzone/Santulli 2004; Baker et al. 2008). The analysis is carried out on an ad hoc-built corpus consisting of news stories, editorials and blogposts posted on the online versions of three British newspapers (The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Times). It was decided to focus on the UK’s online press as this country seems representative of a specific as well as controversial attitude towards the notion of Europeanness: it still uses its own currency and has joined the EU at a later stage, revealing an insular, often self-isolating culture which holds itself unique and different from the rest of the Continent.