Economy Talk as Blaming Strategy: Crisis Framings in The Guardian News Stories and Recontextualisations in User Comments during the Greek Bailout Referendum

Abstract

This article explores how the Greek financial crisis is mediatised and recontextualised in newspaper articles and their respective comments in The Guardian during the Greek bailout referendum of July 2015. Focusing on the use of economic terms that were prominent in both media discourse and laypeople’s follow-up comments, I explore the interaction between media discourses on crisis and users’ own discursive positionings. I argue that news stories frame crisis as chaos and uncertainty, which results in the reproduction of a discourse of fear. The Guardian users, in turn, recontextualise chaos and fear into discourses of blame and responsibility. Specifically, they resort to economy talk as a strategy of blame attribution, which gives rise to a discourse of superiority. These processes of mediatisation are enabled by the interactive formats of online media affordances and can shed light on the complex layers of meaning embedded in responses to crisis stories.