Ida Klitgård

Affiliering (affiliation): Roskilde Universitet, DNK

Abstract:

Framing the Danish Prime Minister as North Korean dictator during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020

News framing and news satire have been widely debated in communication studies, but rarely together. In this study, I suggest that framing and satire share a core structure of ambiguity – a double vision - through subversive frame-shifting or frame translation.

This assumption is based on a scrutiny of the linguistic and stylistic construction of six satirical news articles in the Danish spoof website RokokoPosten which frame the Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen as a communist dictator during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020. Entman (1993) defines framing in textual communication as a selection of aspects of a perceived reality which are made more salient than others to bolster a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation. News satire, on the other hand, may be defined as an intertextual game wherein two texts are set against each other resulting in comic incongruity with the critical intention of laying bare, by way of ridicule, the ailments of society (Ermida, 2012).

However, studies have not adequately addressed the relations between the two strategies by viewing news satire as a particular kind of news framing. Thus, I will demonstrate how, cognitively, the translation of one frame to another has the effect of raising the salience of conceptual connections which can lead to the creation of new connections of meaning-making (Ritchie, 2005).

Specifically, I will examine the frame building, setting and framing effects by analysing the sender (RokokoPosten), the context (the COVID-19 crisis in Denmark), the message (the articles) and the receiver (Facebook comments). Special attention will be given to the medium (the genre) and the code (the language). As it turns out, RokokoPosten presents a systematic, ‘cascading’ (Entman, 2003) double frame narrative of conspiracy theory of the government and Health Authority in conjunction with incompetent apathy of the opposition, which draws readers together in solidary reflection and creative imagination. Hence, I argue that news satire translates framed situations, attributes, issues, responsibility and news by employing the shared frame and satire features of salience, bias and exaggeration.

References:

Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication. 43, 4: 51-58.

Entman. R. M. (2003). Cascading activation: Contesting the White House’s frame after 9/11. Political Communication. 20:4, 415-32.

Ermida, I. (2012). News satire in the press: Linguistic construction of humour in spoof news articles. In Chovanec, J. & Ermida, I. (Eds.), Language and humour in the media, 185-210. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Ritchie, L. D. (2005). Frame-shifting in humor and irony. Communication Faculty Publications and Presentations. Paper 14. Accessed at: http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/8752

Om (about):

Ida Klitgård holds a PhD and a Habilitation (Dr.Phil.) degree in English and Translation Studies. She holds a position as an Associate Professor at the Department of Communication and Arts at Roskilde University in Denmark. She has published widely on especially literary translation, translation in Higher Education, and news satire.

Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1963-3137
Website: https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/persons/idak