Abstract
This chapter will apply the methodological understandings developed in the previous chapter to illustrate how metaphors map source onto target domains and how this predicates the action of terrorism and the terrorist actor in the German Bild and the British The Sun newspapers. So far metaphor and predicate analysis has predominantly been applied to elite discourses or what can be called ‘high data’. So for example the focus has been on speeches by leading politicians (Ferrari 2007) or on government statements or documents (Hülsse 2003a) from one country. Although there has been some investigation of media reporting (Pancake 1993; Zinken 2003; Lule 2004) and quality press newspapers (Flowerdew and Leong 2007), analysis of popular tabloid newspapers from different countries has so far been neglected.1 The central idea behind analysing the media rather than the political elite is that the media, and in particular the widely read tabloid media, give an insight into the construction of terrorism possibly held by large portions of the general public and the metaphoric ‘Joe the plumber’ or his German female equivalent ‘Erika Mustermann’. Furthermore, it is important to note that it was not the political elite but the media who were the first to metaphorise the events of 9/11 as war. George Lakoff (2001), one of the leading scholars on metaphors, has pointed out that the Bush administration first used a ‘crime’ metaphor to describe the attacks of 9/11 but then quickly replaced these with a ‘war’ metaphor.
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‘Metaphor is a solar eclipse. It hides the object of study and at the same time reveals some of the most salient and interesting characteristics when viewed through the right telescope’ (Paivio 1979)
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© 2010 Alexander Spencer
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Spencer, A. (2010). The Tabloid Terrorist in the Bild and The Sun. In: The Tabloid Terrorist. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281301_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281301_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-36569-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-28130-1
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