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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1418

Part of Session 168: Sociolinguistics of revolution in world’s capital cities (Other abstracts in this session)

Occupy Wall Street: How a Social Movement is Depicted in Mainstream Media

Authors: Frenz-Belkin, Patricia; Meddeb, Elizabeth
Submitted by: Frenz-Belkin, Patricia (Hostos Community College, The City University of New York, United States of America)

In 2011, the word “occupy” was selected as word of the year by members of the American Dialect Society. This term describes a form of non-violent social protest against social, economic, and racial inequalities. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement has been and continues to be one of the major loci of this grassroots initiative, which has become a pressing issue in the public discourse in general and within political debates, in particular. When the “Occupy Wall Street” initiative started on September 17, there were few headlines published about the movement, that is, it was conspicuously absent in the mainstream and local media sources. On September 24, while marching uptown, 80 protesters were arrested for disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Reports of police brutality (i.e., pepper spraying the protesters) increased the media coverage exponentially. Only when it became clear that the social activists were truly “occupying” the park (i.e., Zuccotti Park, which is located in the Wall Street Financial district) for the long term, did the papers start to cover the protest. Borrowing from the methodologies of critical discourse analysis (CDA), we examine headlines referring to “Occupy Wall Street” in print media such as The New York Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily News, AM New York, and Metro. These media outlets represent three different types of widely-read newspapers in New York (e.g., AM and Metro are free to subway riders in New York; the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal are internationally known; the NY Post and the Daily News are local NY papers). For this paper, we will provide a micro analysis of the language (semantics, syntax, metaphors, metonyms and pronouns) and accompanying photographs that are used to describe the Wall Street movement and its purported goals, and of the connotations that these descriptions are likely to evoke in readers, that is, potential voters.