Legitimation through Differentiation: Discursive Construction of Jacques Le Worm Chirac as an Opponent to Military Action
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | The article demonstrates how an image of a political actor can be negatively skewed in media discourse through the use of referential and predicative markers. It turns out that the 'dehumanizing/animalizing' meaning of the stereotype-laden descriptive label le worm, used in reference to Jacques Chirac, was not only well able to underline the French president's adversarial position with respect to the 2003 military intervention in Iraq, but it also managed to present the French (as a group) as outside players in the political game. The polarization effect that the device helped to achieve corroborates strong manipulative force and rhetorical efficiency of negative labelling in political discourse. |
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