Towards a rhetorical understanding of statistics in politics: Quantifying the National Health Service ‘Winter Crisis’

Lawson, Brendan; Lovatt, Matthew David

doi:10.1177/0267323120966842

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Since the third age of political communication, expertise has come to play a dominant role in public decision-making (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999: 211; Coleman, 2018). Yet politicians often use expert evidence, such as statistics, as rhetorical devices (Lawson and Lovatt, 2020). This has resulted in the emergence of ‘epistemological suspicion [among citizens] … that claims to truth and knowledge are tied to particular social and material interests’ (Van Zoonen, 2012: 56).…”

Section: Populist Epistemology: a Challenge To Expertise And Claim To...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Populist disruption and the fourth age of political communication

Sorensen

2023

European Journal of Communication

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This paper argues that understanding populism as a communicative process and contextualising its modern forms in relation to our current political communication environment improves our understanding of how it grips citizens. The paper identifies the disruptive communicative practices of modern populist politicians as characteristic of a digital media-dominated fourth age of political communication in extension of Blumler's account. It explores the reaction of the current wave of populism against institutional norms of political communication and its recognition and construction of a perceived disconnect between public representatives and citizens. The paper identifies three aspects of modern populist communication that, through this oppositional positioning, erode institutional communication in the fourth age: a populist pragmatics of disruptive symbolic action, an ontology that sees directness as the only means of breaching the divide between appearance and reality in politics, and an epistemological stance that replaces expertise with authenticity. These constitute an injection of grassroots communicative forms into institutional politics. The result is the exposition but also deepening of the lopsided efficacy of the fourth age whereby citizens feel inefficacious in relation to institutional politics but increasingly able to participate at a grassroots level.

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Section: Populist Epistemology: a Challenge To Expertise And Claim To...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Populist disruption and the fourth age of political communication

Sorensen

2023

European Journal of Communication

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“…After these processes of quantification, the data (or number) is communicated to a wider audience – often by the actor or organisation who asked for the number to be created in the first place. This means that the communication of numbers can be seen as a set of rhetorical strategies geared towards specific goals (Aviles, 2016; Lawson and Lovatt, 2020). For others, it involves seeing the quantitative underpinning broader discourses that sustain structures of power or provide misleading conceptions of society (Lugo-Ocando and Lawson, 2018; Redden, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How journalists do memory work with numbers: The case of the 220,000 deaths during the Colombian conflict (1958–2012)

Ortega

Lawson

2022

Journalism

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This paper explores the relationship between memory, journalism and numbers. It does so through a case study that examines how the Colombian news media reported on a particular figure during a peace negotiation: the 220,000 people who died because of the armed conflict in Colombia. The number was produced by the National Centre for Historical Memory in 2013 in a comprehensive report about the ravages of the Colombian conflict (1958–2012). Following a mix-method approach – a quantitative content analysis and a thematic analysis of the news articles – we find that the way in which journalists reported on the figure contradicts two key aspects of the report. While the report rejects an ‘official memory’ of the conflict for one that is more open to political and social debate, one characterised less by ‘closed truths’, the news reports treated the number as a fact and very rarely provided a form of contestation to it. Moreover, while the report emphasises the need for clarification over distortion and concealment when constructing memory, the news articles misrepresented those accountable for the casualties: Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) was consistently positioned as the main illegal armed organisation responsible for the death toll. This representation ran counter to the findings from the report that emphasised the way paramilitary groups, rather than guerrilla groups (e.g. FARC), were more responsible for the killings. Considering our findings, we argue that an adherence to accuracy by journalists is more desirable than a practice of vagueness in the contribution to memory formation in post-conflict contexts.

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Political communication, press coverage and public interpretation of public health statistics during the coronavirus pandemic in the UK

Lawson

Lugo‐Ocando

2022

European Journal of Communication

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This article examines the way numbers, often concerning risk, were communicated by politicians, covered by the news media and interpreted by the public during the early stages of the COVID-19 crisis in the United Kingdom. To explore this topic, we adopted a mixed-methods approach that included content analysis, comparative thematic analysis and a series of focus groups. Whilst coherency and consistency are touted as essentials in public health messaging, our textual analysis highlighted the disconnect between political communication and news media coverage. Whereas the UK government relied on vague references to curves and peaks to underpin a narrative of consistency and certainty in public health policy, the UK news media referred to specific numbers from within and outside the UK to criticise the government's approach as haphazard and lacking. This disconnect gained even more significance during our focus groups. When discussing numbers, participants referred to news media coverage rather than political messaging, using these figures to challenge the timing and nature of the UK lockdown. These findings present a significant critique of the UK government's communication during this health crisis. Instead of putting forward a coherent, homogenous and clear message to the public, the discourse around numbers and risk was diffracted, disconnected and opaque. This was largely due to the competing narratives presented by the news media.

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Towards a rhetorical understanding of statistics in politics: Quantifying the National Health Service ‘Winter Crisis’

Cited by 3 publications

References 39 publications

Populist disruption and the fourth age of political communication

Populist disruption and the fourth age of political communication

How journalists do memory work with numbers: The case of the 220,000 deaths during the Colombian conflict (1958–2012)

Political communication, press coverage and public interpretation of public health statistics during the coronavirus pandemic in the UK

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