Racism in football: patterns in media discourse

This work departs from notions of Systemic-Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014) and Appraisal Theory (Martin & White 2005) to analyse the media discourse regarding racism in football in England and Brazil to find patterns of representation regarding the topic in these discourses, considering hard news journalism, a form of communication that presents itself as neutral and factual (Martin & White 2005). To find these patterns, the work considers a main Judgement in common among the corpora - racism as a social wrong (Fairclough 2019) and evaluates how this Judgement is constructed through the discourse by positioning different experiences of the world, of people that play different roles in the discourse, to generate meaning to this Judgement. For this task, I also consider Ideology as the higher strata of language (Lukin 2019) and understand race as a social construct with real impacts on those affected by it (Gillborn & Ladson-Billings 2020). So, the positioning of meanings from the Writer can influence the main ideology regarding this topic and the maintenance of structural racism in both societies. Through a framework developed considering the assumptions of the Transitivity System (Halliday & Matthiessen 2014) in reflecting the experience of one in the world, a corpus-based discourse analysis, with quantitative and qualitative resources for manual annotation, identified 17 labels, which are called Reactions, that offer an overview of how different people react to the main Judgement. These Reactions and their placement in the discourse reveal that the media discourse in both contexts prioritises the voices of actors who are not directly involved in the racist remark but are offering their help through an action, a comment, or a remark regarding the victim. The placement of these patterns reveals that the media discourse for this context is attached to values such as colourblindness, race as a commodity and football as a commodity, giving less priority to the representation of the voices of the victims and their experience in the world