Svitlana Svitlana Zhabotynska «BLACK LIVES MATTER – 2020» PROTEST NARRATIVE IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH MEDIA: A COGNITIVE LINGUISTIC DIMENSION

Abstract

Аbstract. Introduction. This study, done at the intersection of cognitive, political and media
linguistic vistas, considers a narrative image of «Black Lives Matter» (BLM) anti-racist movement whose
powerful protests swept through America and the world in 2020. These protests were widely discussed in
traditional media, where they obtained interpretations specified according to the narrator’s sociopolitical bias. In our study, the two narrators are American and British mainstream media, with the
discussion focus being the content of their articles that describe the BLM–2020 protests. It was
hypothesized that that their portrayal in American and British media yields two versions of one and the
same political image. The latter varies along some established parameters, and the divergencies in
variations help to define the image versions as consonant or dissonant. Such definition has practical
implications for political analysis and practices. To provide the comparison of media images, this study
proposes a new methodology grounded on the findings of cognitive linguistics.
Data and method. The data sets, dated June 2020 – April 2021, include (a) 877 textual
descriptions of BLM-2020 from 34 articles published by the centrist American newspapers «The New
York Times» and «USA Today», and (b) 644 analogous descriptions from 42 articles published by the
British centrist newspapers «The Guardian» and «The Observer». The overall information available in
the descriptions was analyzed as an image whose conceptual ontology is an event matrix structured by
hierarchical thematic chunks – those of domains, parcels, and thematic quanta. The two versions of the
BLM-2020 media image may vary with regard to (i) the presence of some parcels and their thematic
quanta; (ii) the factual salience of thematic chunks (shown by the number of their descriptions), which
demonstrates importance of the topic for the narrator; (iii) the chunk’s emotive value, which exposes the
narrator’s bias.
Results and discussion. The conceptual ontology of the BLM-2020 media image includes seven
domains: (1) BLM MOVEMENT, (2) PROTESTERS – BLM, (3) POLICE – BLM, (4) GOVERNMENT –
BLM, (5) SUPPORTERS – BLM, (6) OPPONENTS – BLM, and (7) INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY –
BLM. Each domain has parcels with the respective thematic quanta. The American and British versions
of the BLM-2020 media image vary in the domains’ factual salience. For the American media, the
salience of topics is: the first-plan – BLM movement, police, and protestors; the second-plan – American
government and BLM supporters; the third-plan – BLM opponents, and international community. For the
British media, the topics’ salience is: the first-plan – protestors and police; the second-plan – BLM
movement and its supporters; the third-plan – international community, American government, and BLM
opponents. Similar variations are exhibited by domains’ parcels and their thematic quanta. Emotively,
the American and British versions of the BLM-2020 media image demonstrate similarity: their principal