Digital Commons Network^™

This article examines the discourse about race and racism that ensued in the US media after the shooting death of an African American youth, Trayvon Martin, by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, in February 2012. The analysis examines news programs from the three major cable television channels in the United States: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. The theoretical framework builds upon Hill’s (2008) discussion of the ‘folk theory of race and racism’ in contrast to critical race theory, and asks, to what extent does the mainstream media’s discourse about race remain embedded in folk ideas and to what extent …

In American politics, the National Rifle Association (NRA) has asserted itself as a leading voice in the gun rights movement. The strident rhetoric emanating from the NRA leadership impacts the development of a broader discourse in American public life over gun rights — a discourse of Second Amendment absolutism — that articulates a set of assumptions and explanations in defense of an absolutist stance against gun regulation in any form. This paper examines the ideologies that underlie this absolutist discourse and the identities those ideologies help to construct. In particular, the absolutist discourse is analyzed through the lens of what …

Human-computer systems that treat context simply as enumerated facts, rules, or axioms about the surrounding physical and social environment will always have trouble handling information requiring human pragmatic interpretation. One way to overcome such limitations is to draw upon human pragmatic awareness to create hybrid systems capable of both extracting large quantities of data and processing that data in a way that is meaningful to users.

The representation of issues, especially those that are highly contested or ambiguous, is an ongoing process always subject to challenge and new re-presentations. This article explores the discursive competition between journalists and White House officials over the recontextualization of words spoken by General Peter Pace, which seemingly cast doubt on White House claims of Iranian involvement in Iraq. Pace's words, along with those spoken by White House Press Secretary Tony Snow and President George W. Bush in their appearances before the press, enter into a web of intertextual connections involved in the contestation over the `truth' of the matter. The …

The textual analysis in this paper examines an interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney by Gloria Borger on CNBC’s 2004 Capital Report. The interview took place on 17 June 2004, the day after the 9/11 Commission released Staff Statement No. 15, a twelve page preliminary report that concluded no ‘‘collaborative relationship’’ existed between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The aim of the analysis is to show how the struggle over ‘‘truth’’ unfolds in micro-level discursive interaction and to underscore the way this process is embedded within and contributes to the circulation of truth claims associated with the macro-level War on Terror Discourse (WoTD).