The Discursive Construction of Economic Inequality: Cads Approaches to the British Media

This book analyses diverse public discourses to investigate how wealth inequality has been portrayed in the British media from the time of the Second World War to the present day. Using a variety of corpus-assisted methods of discourse analysis, chapters present an historicized perspective on how the mass media have helped to make sharply increased wealth inequality seem perfectly normal. Print, radio and online media sources are interrogated using methodologies grounded in critical discourse analysis, critical stylistics and corpus linguistics in order to examine the influence of the media on the British electorate, who have passively consented to the emergence of an even less egalitarian Britain. Covering topics such as Second World War propaganda, the ‘Change4Life’ anti-obesity campaign and newspaper, parliamentary and TV news programme attitudes to poverty and austerity, this book will be of value to all those interested in the mass media’s contribution to the entrenched inequality in modern Britain.

Eva M. Gomez-Jimenez is Lecturer of English Language at the University of Granada, Spain.

Michaela Mahlberg is Humboldt-Professor and Professor of Digital Humanities at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.

Michael Toolan is Professor of English Language at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Gavin Brookes is Senior Research Associate within the ESRC Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science in the Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, UK.