Pandemic discourse: from intimidation to social distancing

ENThe object of this research is the Lithuanian pandemic discourse as it occurred in publications during the two years following the start of the first quarantine in the most popular news portals (15min.lt, delfi.lt. lrt.lt., vdu.lt, vz.lt). This discourse was researched by applying the conceptions and approaches of qualitative research methods and using an interpretative approach of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995; Wodak and Meyer 2001). These approaches were chosen because of their particular interest in the relationship between language and power and in the characterization of ‘the Other’ and of personalities of another type (as in the old tradition of investigating antisemitic discourse), as well as in their attention to ideology and their interpretation of frameworks that organize sets of attitudes, and especially because of their attention to the formal side of the texts, their language, style, stereotypes and implications. Quantitative methods were used to extract keywords and key phrases (bigrams and trigrams) from the headlines of relevant texts of each pandemic period, which made up a word cloud. Despite the use of quantitative methods, this article concentrates on the evaluative aspect; therefore, we will begin by presenting the evaluative connotations of an otherwise neutral genre, that of information-bearing reports, and these connotations become evident in the titles of the reports. Later, when discussing the evaluative genre itself, we will limit ourselves to the so-called mainstream news portals, and we will mention the discourse peculiar to social media only to the extent that its reflections also occur in mainstream portals (p. 158).