Pussy Riot vs. Civil Obedience: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Two Texts

In February 2012, less than two weeks before that year’s presidential elections in Russia, a two-minute video of young women in brightly colored masks and short dresses was uploaded to YouTube. The video featured four members of the Pussy Riot punk feminist band performing a wild dance in front of the altar of Russia’s main Orthodox temple, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. Lip-syncing to a song, which they called a punk prayer, they beseeched the Virgin Mary to “drive” Vladimir Putin, then the prime minister and a presidential candidate, “away.” After generating scads of international publicity, the case ended with the three band members being sentenced to prison for two years on charges of hooliganism motivated by religious hatred. The clearly provocative nature of the performance – with costume changes mid-scene and anti-government, anti-Church protest slogans set to the music of a sacred Orthodox song – made the Pussy Riot case a springboard to discussion of the acceptability of religiously contextualized political speech in contemporary Russia. Through a critical discourse analysis of the original lyrics of the punk prayer and the report from the psychological and linguistic experts that formed the basis of the prosecutor’s case, this article explores the discursive devices and rhetorical strategies employed in these texts to challenge or sustain the existing power relations in Russia. As the analysis makes clear, while the punk prayer criticizes State and the Russian Orthodox Church as oppressive and corrupt by disrupting and denaturalizing the images typically associated with their rituals and spaces, the report normalizes conformity, depoliticizes Pussy Riot critique, and delegitimizes public political protests by pushing them beyond the boundaries of socially acceptable forms of citizens’ civic participation

Audience as Journalistic Boundary Worker: The Rhetorical Use of Comments to Critique Media Practice, Assert Legitimacy and Claim Authority

Through a textual analysis of online comments in response to live broadcast from the San Bernardino shooters’ apartment, we explore the rhetorical strategies the audience used to legitimate its participation in boundary work. Our study demonstrates that audience members can operate as resourceful boundary workers with a sophisticated, multifaceted understanding of journalism that echoes scholarly and normative professional discourse. Their critique was not limited to questioning unambiguously pernicious practices, such as glorifying violence, tabloidization, pack journalism, and violating the ethical obligation of minimizing harm. Instead, they went beyond that to problematize the practice of breaking news live as underdelivering on the promise of connecting audiences to newsworthy events of social significance, promoting voyeurism, and overusing the format as an end in itself. We also demonstrate that commenters operate as competent rhetorical agents. Although they did rely on established legitimating strategies (e.g., acting as proto-professionals), they appropriated them at the level of tactical moves in distinctive new ways (e.g., by parodying, rather than authentically emulating, the journalistic style of delivering breaking news live). They also deployed novel ways of establishing their authority as boundary workers, such as rhetorical questions and direct address, often using them in conjunction with other authority-claiming moves

Guarding The Firewall: How Political Journalists Distance Themselves From The Editorial Endorsement Process

Through a lens of boundary work and role conception, this study seeks to understand how political journalists discursively construct the role of the newspaper editorial endorsement. Researchers conducted long-form interviews with political journalists in the United States (n = 64) to understand how journalists conducted boundary work relative to endorsements. Journalists argued that the 2016 election was a decisive event in which political news endorsements lost their original objective. Political journalists described laboring to discursively distance themselves from the endorsement process and viewed political endorsements not only as ineffective, but also as jeopardizing their news organizations’ independence