Media reverberations on the ‘red line’: Syria, metaphor and narrative in news media

Abstract

This study uses a CADS (Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies) approach to identify a series of axes around which degrees of persuasion can be mapped in debates about international affairs. The author investigates how US and UK news media reported Obama’s use of the term ‘red line’ to describe the potential transgression if Syrian leader Assad used chemical weapons on civilians, which Assad then did. The article examines the connotational, argumentational and rhetorical behaviour of ‘red line’ across news media in the period 4–28 September 2013. In a corpus-assisted analysis of ‘red line’, six discoursal factors emerged as persuasive axes at work: (1) leader’s image; (2) ideological positioning, even in mutual intervention; (3) persuasion consistency; (4) factual investigation; (5) factual interpretation reporting; and (6) evaluated metaphor development. These axes proactively work at the crossroads of metaphor and narrative as transformative and mutually interactive agents in discoursal change. The analysis also identified other subcategories of research potential, plus correlated lexis and concepts such as ‘weakness’ vs ‘strength’. The study’s significance is to ground reflection on the function of metaphor and narrative in steering sense-making in diplomatic practice and to highlight their pragmatic force and dynamics – here in the news genre.