The Media as a consensus generator machine: Engagement strategies of alignment through language devices in two opposing-view liberal blogs about Edward Snowden

Abstract

This thesis analyzes language structures in two opposing-views blogs related to the well-known whistleblower Edward Snowden. These opinion blogs - ‘Edward Snowden is no hero’ and ‘Why Edward Snowden is a hero’- were published in The New Yorker Magazine -online- on June 10th 2013 and they provide an entry point to analyze the various alignment linguistic strategies for dialogic contraction used by the journalists Jeffrey Toobin and John Cassidy to generate media consensus on the Snowden case. It will also be of significance to understand how consensus is built in a liberal publication and how liberalism is re-defined in each of the blogs. For that, the notion of consensus building will be briefly addressed. Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005), situated within the Systemic Functional Linguistics Theory, provides the theoretical framework to qualitatively scrutinize wordings chosen by the journalists to make evaluative judgments or introduce other voices into the debate by means of dialogic heteroglossia.