Abstract
This article aims to analyze the use of economic metaphors in the particular case of the European sovereign debt crisis, by the examination of the public discourse as reflected in the daily press. Three countries of the European Union with severe sovereign debt problems (Greece, Italy, and Spain) and three countries without them (Finland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) have been selected for analysis. The general hypothesis, in accordance with the research undertaken in similar studies on economic metaphors and on the uniformity of economic journalism frames, is that one can expect a fairly common use of the same metaphors and with the same weight among countries, types of newspapers, and diverse economic conditions. The findings basically support this hypothesis, showing how difficult it is for the media, even when using rhetorical devices such as economic metaphors, to stand aside from the experts’ discourse or to forge new ways of analyzing economic events outside the traditional and prevalent frames.
Keywords
Introduction
The financial and economic crisis that began in the United States and Europe in 2008 has been a great testing ground for experimenting with all kinds of expressive resources used by specialists and the media to explain the nature of a really complicated economic situation. As on many other occasions, when confronted with phenomena of a very abstract nature, the use of metaphors for understanding current events has been a widespread practice. ‘Toxic assets’, ‘green shoots’, ‘stress test’, and a host of similar expressions have been part of the language of the crisis, perhaps more intensively than ever. Metaphors for the Euro crisis have even captured media attention in publications as influential as Time, The Economist, Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, among others. 1
This article aims to analyze the use of economic metaphors in the particular case of the European sovereign debt crisis, by the examination of the daily press of six European countries. The so-called Euro crisis, the special way in which the international financial and economic turmoil has been finally manifested in the Old Continent – as a result of the very diverse national crises in the Eurozone – has enabled a comparative analysis of enormous interest. On one hand, there has been a general crisis of the Eurozone, which has affected its unity and integration; on the other hand, every country has participated in that crisis in a different way, depending on the severity of its own economic and financial problems.
The analysis of metaphors used in press coverage of the crisis makes it possible to evaluate to what extent the cognitive frames of the news, as captured by those rhetorical devices, converge or diverge. This convergence or divergence of metaphorical frames helps to examine whether the crisis has been interpreted from the same conceptual perspectives in diverse countries and media, or whether the metaphors used by the press have reflected the particularities of national circumstances and the peculiar targets and editorial orientations of different types of newspapers. If the first case is true, then economic metaphors will have contributed to the spread of a quite homogeneous and unilateral view of the crisis, which would not correspond well with its real impact on different countries and audiences. On the contrary, if the second is true, and economic metaphors have help to build divergent frames of interpretation, they can be seen as mechanisms that contribute to create a richer debate and to present to the national public opinions’ perspectives of analysis different from the more conventional and dominant ones, based on the logic of global capitalism.
Cognitive metaphors of the crisis and economic journalism elitist views
This study can be framed by the context of the metaphoric analysis carried out from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. More specifically, we will use conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), but with a research approach inspired by the analysis of corpus-based expressions (corpus-based research) (Charteris-Black, 2004; Stefanowitsch, 2004, 2005, 2006). We will follow with slight modifications the method proposed by Stefanowitsch, better known as metaphorical pattern analysis. The basic idea of this method, based on the power of the word as a central element in the analysis of metaphors (Stefanowitsch, 2006), is to analyze metaphorical target domains (a semantic domain that we try to understand and that is structured and explained metaphorically in terms of another domain), retrieving their representative lexical items and studying the frequency of their appearance in the corpus. In our case, following Deignan and Semino (2010), we applied this technique to source domains (the conceptual domains from which we draw conceptual metaphors), on the basis of the metaphors used in the newspaper articles covering the Euro crisis.
So, in this article, we use the term ‘metaphor’ as equivalent to ‘conceptual metaphor’ (The economic crisis is a war) and ‘metaphorical expressions’, following the Lakovian scheme (Lakoff, 1993), as particular linguistic constructions reflecting it (The firepower of the European Central Bank). At the same time, we connect the semantic fields of ‘source domains’ (war, health and disease, mechanical, etc.) with news framing theory, which understands frames as ‘tools for presenting relatively complex issues efficiently and in a way that makes them accessible to lay audiences because they play to existing cognitive schemas’ (Scheufele and Tewksbury, 2007: 12).
To complement the cognitive approach, this article is designed along the lines of studies that try to integrate CMT with critical discourse analysis (CDA), at least in its basic purpose. These studies make metaphors particularly salient in the context of social cognition and analyze them as a valuable starting point to study cognitive and ideological determinants of discourse (Hart, 2010; Koller, 2005). The application of this hybrid approach to economic, business, and financial discourses can be especially fruitful considering the specialized nature of news contents around these issues. For example, O’Mara-Shimek et al. (2015) suggest that ‘metaphor has the capability of embedding ideologically informed visions of the stock market in the language of finance reporting in the business press’ (p. 119).
To contextualize the study from the two perspectives outlined, the following paragraphs will briefly present both research on cognitive metaphors used in the media coverage of the 2008 crisis and current research on the characteristics of economic journalism as a distinctive form of an elite-to-elite communication process.
Crisis metaphors from a cognitive approach
The financial and economic crisis that started in the United States and Europe in 2008 makes an excellent object of study for anyone trying to understand the role of economic metaphors in public discourse. In fact, numerous investigations in recent years have already addressed this topic from different perspectives, employing press reports as data. Some of them, using a comparative approach, have analyzed the uniformity in the use of metaphors among different countries, in order to see whether culture, language, or other national factors can modify this use. Silaski and Durovic (2010) confirmed the hypothesis of uniformity in the case of the British and Serbian press, Esager (2011) between the British and the Danish newspapers, Wang et al. (2013) working with texts in English and Russian, Joris et al. (2014) analyzing the press in the Low Countries, and Pühringer and Hirte (2013) when comparing German, Austrian, and Swiss publications. In all of these cases, there are similar conclusions: the use of the main conceptual economic metaphors is quite uniform in different countries and types of news outlets; by contrast, the variables that could change from one to another are the frequency of use and some specific cultural expressions included in particular metaphors.
A number of other studies have paid attention to the frames used by the media to characterize, more or less positively, the role of different actors during the crisis as built through the use of certain types of metaphors. Orts and Rojo (2009) have studied the evolution from positive toward negative metaphors in the case of Spain before and after 2008 and have also compared the main frames in two publications: one British, The Economist, and one Spanish, El Economista (Rojo and Orts, 2010). Slintáková (2010) has carried out a quite similar analysis, in this case between the Czech and German press, to see the evolution of the metaphors considering their linkage with positive or negative emotions. Finally, to cite one more example, Breeze (2014) has studied the negative frame shown by the British press when using metaphors that reinforce old stereotypes about southern Europe, stigmatized as poor, idle, and potentially dangerous. All these studies have called attention to the importance of local context (economic, cultural, etc.) to understand the differences in the choice of conceptual metaphors, both over time and between countries.
In the majority of studies already mentioned in this review, the authors work with some kind of classification of the semantic fields of source domains. Table 1 shows a summary of the categories used in a selection of these studies.
Published research on metaphorical source domains used during the 2008 crisis.
As seen in Table 1, there exists, on one hand, a considerable heterogeneity between the schemes of conceptual metaphors studied by researchers; on the other, there also exists an implicit logic of certain general categories that emerge as dominant. These categories are as follows: (1) health and disease; (2) natural events and disasters; (3) events around artifacts and constructions; (4) wars and clashes; (5) sports, games, and entertainment; and (6) actions and situations of living beings. As will be seen later, this classification meets the requirements for the empirical analysis carried out in this article.
Economic journalism elitist views
The generic model of mass communication, which explains the relationship established between journalistic elites and society as a whole, has been supplemented in recent years by new analysis schemes that take into account more particular communication processes. One of these processes is the one that takes place in the communication between elites (elite-to-elite communication), which occurs in certain specialized areas such as economic and scientific news. These are journalistic fields in which the media play a special role in mediating between the decision makers (Kunelis and Reunanen, 2012; Strömbäck, 2008), a process that has not received much attention by researchers (Kepplinger, 2007).
Davis (2003) has proposed a ‘critical elite theory alternative’ centered on how the media affect the decisions of elites who promote certain public policies (p. 673). In this alternative model, ‘elites are simultaneously the main sources, main targets and some of the most influenced recipients of news’. According to Davis, the way economic and financial information is spread among specialized audiences produces a type of news process that is dominated, ‘captured’ by expert sources (financial, corporate, institutional, etc.). This generates a journalism that follows the information agenda of business and markets, ignoring other interests (Davis, 2000: 285–286) – a type of journalism with a coverage that is narrowly defined in its main contents by the need to focus on information that can affect and move markets (Davis, 2005: 307) and which, in practice, excludes, rather than includes, the needs and interests of the general public (Davis, 2003: 684). As a result, ‘financial and business news coverage reproduces the prevalent ideas, norms and values of those who work in these sectors’ (Davis, 2011: 2).
The economic and financial press, and economic journalism in general, participate in the ‘circularity and reflexivity’ (Thompson, 2012) which occurs in the process of communication between elites. More specifically, research in economic journalism has emphasized some features that constitute the specificity of the coverage of economic and financial issues with respect to other news beats, such as a utilitarian approach and a narrow economistic view of current events. They reflect the logic of elite-to-elite communication, the dominant logic of news in high economics and finance that has been manifested in the coverage of many economic issues (Arrese and Vara, 2015). This view is consistent with the thesis that economic media reproduce, without much critic, the global capitalist and neoliberal economic discourse (Chakravartty and Schiller, 2010; Kantola, 2006; Sandvoss, 2010).
Economic metaphors could simply follow this logic and act as communicative devices for the spread of a common and institutionalized view of the crisis, or they could act as persuasive tools to challenge dominant and partial frames, which respond to particular ways of understanding the causes, responsibilities, and consequences of the crisis.
Research design and methodology
Research design
The analysis of metaphors for this article is based on a study of news stories about the Euro crisis published in newspapers from six countries of the European Union (Finland, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom). The identification of the main metaphors in each news article was a part of the content analysis carried out in the framework of a European research project, The Euro crisis, media coverage and perceptions of Europe into the EU, led by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (University of Oxford).
The selection of cases was made in an effort to draw comparisons between two groups of countries that in the period under research had very different and opposed economic circumstances: countries with serious problems of sovereign debt (Italy, Greece, and Spain) and countries without them (the Netherlands and Finland within the Eurozone and the United Kingdom outside it). Other countries participating in the general study, such as Germany or France, were discarded because the very low number of metaphors encoded did not allow statistical analysis. For each country, four types of national newspapers – the leading brand by circulation in each category– were analyzed in their printed editions: a conservative daily, a liberal daily, an economic newspaper, and a popular one. The aim of this selection was to have a contrast between quality newspapers with very different ideological orientations – left and right – and between dailies in the popular–specialized spectrum, in order to test the influence of the variable type of newspaper in the use of metaphors. In the event that a country had no representative of the latter format – as in the case of Spain, Italy, and Greece – it was opted to include a third general journal, one more popular or sensationalist than the quality papers already selected. Table 2 shows the choice of titles by country.
Newspapers under research by country.
The daily newspaper is the ideal outlet for a discourse analysis focused on economic news because it has always been the most influential media when covering economics and finance, in particular through its ability to shape the discourse among the elites and to dictate the agenda for the rest of the news media (Arrese, 2002). More generally, as noted by Krennmayr (2011), news stories are especially rich as sources of figurative language. Unlike academic texts, which exhibit a much higher degree of unclear terminology, reading newspaper articles does not require much expert knowledge to understand their general meaning. As a result, the contextual meaning of the words, and its role as part of specific metaphors, can be set with clarity in the vast majority of cases.
Full-text articles were retrieved by national researchers from two databases: Factiva and LexisNexis. The criteria for searching the news cases was to include in the initial sample all the articles that had the words ‘euro’ and ‘crisis’ in any part of the text: the headline, the lead, or the body. All of them had to be published around 11 key events or developments that were selected by the multinational research team, as representatives of the evolution of the Euro crisis between 2010 and 2012, and only the news items that were directly related to those events or the Euro crisis in general were codified. More precisely, dailies were analyzed for seven days prior to and seven days after each of those events. The periods of analysis and the central news events are shown in Table 3.
Periods of analysis and central news events.
Smaller period as a result of overlapping dates between periods 7 and 8.
Articles from each country were analyzed by national researchers and by encoders trained in content analysis, who worked with a coding sheet of nearly 50 variables. In each country, the codification team was composed by two researchers from the project already mentioned and two or three lecturers and doctoral students working on economic journalism subjects, so they were used to reading the business press regularly and thinking about current economic events and how they are presented in the media. The coding was carried out between January and March 2013. In total, for the six countries under research, 6810 articles were analyzed, distributed as follows: Finland (876), Greece (1358), Italy (947), the Netherlands (671), Spain (1062), and the United Kingdom (1896).
Methodology
One of the tasks in the content analysis was to take note literally of the expression or expressions in which a conceptual metaphor was identified, up to two per article. The encoder, after reading the complete text, had to select the two more salient metaphors – the clearest metaphorical expressions that an ordinary reader could easily identify as such – with the first occurrence as the main one. The aim was to conduct not an exhaustive rhetorical analysis, but rather the type of analysis that a non-specialist reader could reasonably make, due to his or her familiarity with the typical linguistic resources used in journalistic texts. Subsequently, the researchers in charge of each national content analysis – all of them bilingual – proceeded to translate all the metaphors into a common language: English.
The corpus of 3066 metaphorical expressions was treated with the content analysis package QDA Miner 4.1.3 and its software for word analysis WordStat 6.1, already used in other similar studies (Lowry et al., 2008). As justified in the ‘Crisis metaphors from a cognitive approach’ sub-section earlier, in this first phase of the research we decided to work with the unit word (not with lexemes or sets of words). In total, the corpus of words extracted from the metaphorical expressions consisted of 13,209 words, reduced to 4140 after the implementation of the dictionary of excluded terms (closed class words such as articles, prepositions, or auxiliary verbs) run by WordStat 6.1. The type-token ratio (TTR), a measure of repetition in language that reflects breadth of vocabulary, was .31. That implied that the corpus did not have a large lexical variety, which helped in working on smaller samples of terms.
In order to focus on the most common expressions, the new corpus was reduced to those words that had at least a frequency of four, 160 terms, with a joint frequency of 1484. As we were interested in the comparison of the dominant semantic fields and metaphorical expressions across countries and newspapers, the words with a frequency below four – even if they are concentrated in the same country – do not add statistical weight to the analysis. Before continuing to the next phase of the analysis, using the WordStat 6.1 ‘words in context’ function that allows comparison of metaphorical expressions containing the same terms, we checked, word by word, the possible cases of synonyms and polysemy, in order to subsequently clearly assign each of them to a particular source domain of conceptual metaphors. As an example, the expressions ‘bailout’ and ‘rescue’ were used in all cases with the same meaning, so they were unified under the term ‘rescue’ (see Schäffner (2012) on the problem of translation of these terms from German to English). However, the word ‘fire’ had a double meaning: when it referred to fire as a natural process, the word ‘fire’ was maintained, but when it referred to bellicose language it then became ‘firepower’. Something similar happened with ‘green’: almost half the metaphors that contained this word were related to ‘green shoots’ (so ‘shoots’ was chosen) and the other half to ‘green light’ (then we opted for the term ‘green’). We proceeded in the same way for other words that posed similar problems, following Williams Camus’ (2009) methodology.
The last step in the preparation of the database was to assign each word of the final corpus, and the metaphors that include them, to the six types of conceptual metaphors already discussed: (1) health and disease; (2) natural events and disasters; (3) events around artifacts and constructions; (4) wars and clashes; (5) sports, games, and entertainment; and (6) actions and situations of living beings. The two authors of this article and five professors from their department independently conducted the allocation of each word to a conceptual metaphor, after a basic explanation of the meaning of each category. This exercise tried to emulate the thinking of a normal newspaper reader, not of a language expert. The inter-coder reliability was measured through the Holsti test, which achieved a value of .86, significantly above the .80 limit considered as adequate in such studies. Appendix 1 lists some examples of the definitive assignment of words to different conceptual metaphors.
Hypothesis
This article tests the general hypothesis that the use of economic metaphors about the Euro crisis in the news has been very uniform across countries and media, irrespective of factors such as country of origin, type of newspaper, and economic conditions. This idea is based on the research and findings outlined in the earlier section ‘Cognitive metaphors of the crisis and economic journalism elitist views’, in particular on those derived from comparative studies about universal economic metaphors and on those that point out the peculiar unilaterality of economic discourses in elite-to-elite communication processes. Therefore, we propose the following specific hypotheses for empirical testing:
H1. The national origin of the press sub-corpus does not account for significant differences in the use of the conceptual metaphors referring to the economic crisis.
H2. The type of newspaper does not explain statistically significant differences in the use of the conceptual metaphors referring to the economic crisis.
H3. The variable ‘countries with sovereign debt problems versus countries without sovereign debt problems’ does not explain statistically significant differences in the use of the conceptual metaphors referring to the economic crisis.
Results
Quantitative analysis
A general view of the articles analyzed shows that about a third of them (34.2 %) include at least one metaphor. More specifically, in 23.4% (1592 items) there was one and in 10.8% (737 articles) two metaphors. The distribution of metaphors by country is presented in Table 4.
Distribution of metaphors by country.
Based on the analysis of the selected keywords and their classification into the six types of conceptual metaphors, 1484 metaphorical expressions were obtained. The most commonly occurring conceptual metaphors were those with the labels ‘disease’ (412) and ‘natural’ (370), followed by ‘organism’ (245), ‘mechanical’ (216), ‘war’ (181), and ‘sports and entertainment’ (56). The term with the highest frequency of use in metaphors (156) was ‘contagion’, in the majority of cases referring to the contagion of the Greek crisis (see a particular analysis of such use of the idea of contagion, this time in the American press, in Tracy, 2012). It is interesting to note that there was not a single mention of the contagion metaphor in Greek newspapers. The second most common word in metaphors was ‘storm’ (76) and the third ‘fire’ (71). The distribution of these conceptual metaphors by countries is shown in Table 5.
Distribution of conceptual metaphors by country.
After this general description of the main data, we proceed to test the hypotheses. The variables of interest for this study had statistically non-normal distributions that led to the use of non-parametric methods for independent samples to analyze the data. Chi-squared and Mann–Whitney U-tests of association were used to compare groups.
To test H1, a chi-squared test was performed, with country as grouping variable and with each type of conceptual metaphor as the dependent variable. We assessed with this test the null hypothesis of the existence of significant differences in the use of the various types of conceptual metaphors between the six countries surveyed. As testing with multiple categories may result in false-positives simply due to chance, the significance level was adjusted in accordance with the Bonferroni correction. To determine the significance level, a p-value of .05 was divided by the number of comparisons done in each case (n = 12; p = .0041) and was subsequently set at p < .005.
The test was significant for four of the six metaphors (disease, natural, organism, and war), as shown in Table 6. With these variables, it is possible to reject the null hypothesis and, therefore, to accept that the country variable is associated with significant differences in the use of these metaphors. There is not enough evidence to reject the hypothesis in the case of mechanical, and sport and entertainment metaphors.
Chi-squared test for the relationship between country variable and the different types of conceptual metaphors.
N = 2397 corresponds to all valid cases of articles with at least one metaphor.
As seen in Table 6, the country variable is significant when explaining differences in the use of the majority of metaphors, which contradicts our H1. This assertion, however, must be taken with caution, as there are pairs of countries that show high homogeneity – and a very clear heterogeneity with respect to the others – when analyzed by paired Mann–Whitney U-tests. For example, this test revealed that the differences between countries such as Great Britain and Spain are only slightly significant in the case of the disease metaphors (U = 104,995.5, z = −1.994, p = .046) and organisms (U = 114,630.5, z = −2.163, p = .031). On the other hand, the differences between Greece and the Netherlands are significant in all cases, except around the mechanical metaphors (U = 61,014.5, z = −.422, p = .673). Table 6 also shows how the strongest association between the country variable and differences in the use of conceptual metaphors, measured by Cramer’s V (ϕ
Regarding H2, the results of the Chi-squared analysis allow us to confirm that hypothesis. We ran the analysis for two groups of papers distinguished by format (general, specialized, and popular) and editorial orientation (conservative, liberal, and popular). In all cases, except the smallest group of sport and entertainment metaphors (2% of all metaphors), the association between kinds of newspapers and types of metaphors was statistically irrelevant. Perhaps surprisingly, the hypothesis is confirmed even when we analyze the types of newspapers by pairs. For instance, publications as diverse as economic and popular dailies diverge significantly only in the case of disease metaphors (χ2(1, N = 928) = 4.386, p = .036).
Finally, H3 tries to test to what extent the different economic situation of groups of countries with regard to the sovereign debt problems may affect the use of conceptual metaphors, as could be expected considering the fact that they experienced the crisis very differently. Only in the case of ‘war’ metaphors (χ2(1, N = 2397) = 5.523, p = .019) was there a statistically significant association between both variables. And contrary to what one may think, the group of countries without sovereign debt problems had a higher frequency of use of that particular metaphor: 7.8% compared to 5.4% in the case of countries with debt problems. Also in this case, the hypothesis that countries with sovereign debt problems, as a group, may have a different pattern of use of conceptual metaphors than countries without sovereign debt problems must be rejected.
In fact, when comparing the general patterns of use of metaphors between pairs of countries, not between groups, it is interesting to highlight some unexpected similarities in countries facing the crisis in very different ways. This can be seen in the correlation matrix (Table 7) built from absolute data on the amount of use of each type of metaphor by country. Some correlations could seem more logical, such as the inverse correlation between the Netherlands and Greece (r(6) = −.898, p < .05). However, although at the limit of statistical significance, other associations are more surprising, such as those between the Netherlands and Italy (r(6) = .878, p = .05) or Spain and Finland (r(6) = .873, p = .053). 2
Correlation matrix between countries by use of types of metaphors.
p < .05.
Qualitative analysis
Based on the findings of the corpus research, we proceeded to carry out an analysis of some examples of economic metaphors in their textual context. To do that, we selected three out of the 11 events under review and studied how they were metaphorically covered in different countries and types of newspapers. The aim was to shed more light on the general hypothesis of this article and to reinforce the results of the quantitative research. These three periods, highly representative of the tensions around the European sovereign debt problems, are as follows: (Period 2) Agreement for €100bn intervention for Greece, 2 May 2010; (Period 6) EU Summit increases the stability fund, extends new aid, and requires banks to raise new capital, 26–27 October 2011; and (Period 10) Spain formally requests financial assistance, and German Prime Minister Merkel calls the Eurobonds economically wrong and counterproductive, 25–28 June 2012. They are selected to illustrate how dominant economic metaphors frame the news, more or less unilaterally, considering the variables under analysis (country, type of newspaper, and economic situation). We will also undertake a general rhetorical analysis to identify how the most common metaphorical expressions in certain conceptual categories contribute to explaining the technical and unilateral view of the crisis.
Disease metaphors and contagion
Disease metaphors frame in a very common way the coverage of the 100bn financial aid to Greece (Period 2) in the six countries analyzed. Although many different metaphorical expressions help to explain the Greek rescue, disease ones build the underlying common discourse on the event: Greece is ill (The disease of Greece is spreading in southern Europe, Kauppalehti, 30 April 2010; Greece needs an economic medicine, ABC, 30 April 2010), there exists a risk of contagion (The contagion of a Greek default, The Times, 1 May 2010), and the rescue plan is gezond [healthy] (De Volkskrant, 3 May 2010) or aimatirós [bloody] (Ta Nea, 3 May 2010).
The largest group of disease metaphors conceptualizes the crisis around the expression contagion. In fact, this was the most frequent word (156 occurrences) in the whole metaphor database. Except in Greece, where the term was not common – the country was seen by others as the infection focus – using contagion as a central metaphorical image means that the crisis is conceptualized as a spreading disease that could affect the entire Eurozone:
The concepts of risk, fear, and lack of control, as in these examples, are easily related to disease contagion, and they frame the crisis as a serious threat for survival of the Eurozone (Blickes et al., 2014). At the same time, as pointed out by Besomi (2011), the contagion and other medical metaphors, with a long tradition in economic texts, appeal to the existence of sick and healthy economies, evaluated with respect to a ‘normal state’ that is in some way generally accepted as the good one. These metaphors ‘convey the view that something “wrong” is going on with the economic system, regardless of whether the malaise is of an occasional nature and driven by impediments or external causes or whether it is instead the product of internal tensions’ (Besomi, 2011: 104). As could be expected, to keep the economic body healthy and to avoid contagion, some economic policies were needed, such as austerity measures and structural reforms in labor markets, among others.
Natural events and disasters
Taking as a reference the second event selected, around the decisive EU Summit of October 2011 (Period 6), it is fairly easy to find dominant and common metaphorical frames among different types of newspapers from the same country. In Italy, for example, the situation after the Summit, on 1 November 2011, is described in the same way in very different dailies (Il Sole 24 Ore, La Repubblica, Il Corriere della Sera) using natural metaphors such as abyss, storm, or perfect storm. Before the conclusion of the event, on 26 October, the Dutch press, from the economic newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad to the populist De Telegraaf, used bellicose expressions to warn the public of the probable adverse political outcomes of the meeting. They spoke about ‘political kamikaze pilots’, ‘populists holding the governments hostage’, or the ‘sword of Damocles’ of EU policies. Newspapers’ ideological orientations do not seem to justify different metaphorical frames either. Commenting on the effects of the Summit, the Spanish El País (left wing) wrote, ‘The situation in Italy is dramatic. While the whole of Europe is exposed to the epidemy, Rome is without any doubt the capital with less defenses’ (2 November 2011). The same day, the right wing ABC was applying the idea of the ‘Greek virus’ to frame the European and world financial dangers. About the same time, in Finland, two ideologically distant dailies (Helsingin Sanomat and Kaleva) drew upon natural metaphors as the underlying rationale for explaining the situation. The first of them mentioned that ‘the crisis polluted the core of the Eurozone’; the second, that ‘pollution started from Greece and has already spread to Germany and Finland’ (25 November 2011).
However, despite the diversity of conceptual metaphors shown here, natural metaphors were clearly dominant around the EU Summit of October 2011. And the most common of them were metaphors that used the concept of storm. This word, along with other connected expressions (turmoil, turbulences, clouds, etc.) accounted for more than 100 occurrences in the entire set of metaphors under study. The following examples give an idea of its use in different newspapers and contexts:
These examples show how storms and turmoils are images that describe the turbulent, often unexpected, and almost always inevitable behavior of financial markets in specific moments of the crisis. These are typical characteristics of the so-called weather metaphors, which have also a long tradition in the way that economists and experts explain to lay people the logic of financial shocks (Besomi, 2011). White (2004) remarks how this type of metaphor sees economics ‘as being the working out of blind primeval forces independent of human action and thus in such a view the futility of market intervention comes to forefront’, or in an alternative reading, only ‘palliative measures are at the disposal of human intervention’ (p. 82).
War and fire metaphors
Finally, different economic circumstances between countries do not seem to be enough reason to change the patterns of metaphorical thinking in economic news. This can be illustrated with the analysis of discourses on the financial assistance for Spain and on Germany’s opposition to Eurobonds (Period 10). The reading of articles covering this news in Spain and the United Kingdom – two countries in a different positions with respect to the rescue – does not show substantial divergences. Apart from the widespread predominance of natural and disease metaphors, there are some interesting coincidences in the use of similar frames from other source domains. For instance, as a case in point, on 30 June 2012, The Guardian and ABC appealed to the same mix of war and game metaphors to explain the confrontation between Germany and the indebted countries of Southern Europe. In ‘Angela Merkel risks German Wrath with Eurozone Concessions’, For those who view this endless euro crisis summitry as a gladiatorial zero sum game, Merkel lost this week. (…) The other way of seeing the summits is as a marathon round of muddling through; of bluff and counter-bluff resulting in mushy compromise. (The Guardian, 29 June 2012)
The Spanish ABC, in ‘An important victory in Brussels’, makes reference to the meeting as follows: Rajoy [Spanish Prime Minister] brings from this important European Council the direct recapitalization of banks, an important Spanish vindication in the battle to save the Euro. […] Rajoy has saved a match ball and he can claim a victory over his European partners. (ABC, 30 June 2012)
In both cases, mixed metaphors or clusters of metaphors used to describe the climate of confrontation correspond to conceptually ‘affine’ metaphors (Kimmel, 2010), adjacent metaphors which may be taken to be conceptually coherent because they share a source domain ontology. In this case, sports and war share the ‘competitive/contest’ frame (Charteris-Black, 2004; Greco, 2009; Koller, 2005).
Many of the war metaphors found in this study include references to fire, the third most common term (71 occurrences) among the keywords extracted from the full set of metaphors. As already mentioned, fire is used in economic news with a double meaning. It means on one hand, the representation of financial and economic problems functioning as a natural phenomenon, which can devastate forests, buildings, and so on; on the other hand, fire is a symbol of violence, aggressiveness, and destruction derived from actions taken by economic and financial actors, similar in some way (in a metaphorical way) to those caused by war weapons (as in firepower, fire fighter, war fire, etc.). In both cases, violence and destruction are the frames that capture the mood of the crisis. At the same time, the fire metaphor appeals to the role of political and economic powers in the battle to save the Euro:
Natural fire metaphors convey the idea that economic events can become too hot and get out of control (Esager, 2011), and they are basically inanimate metaphors. However, when fire is used in a bellicose context, as in Examples 1 and 2, it shares the basic features of war and conflict metaphors, which could be labeled as animate (man-made) metaphors. As pointed out by Ferrari (2007), conflict frames are related to a strategy of fear as a fundamental persuasion strategy. Both conflict and fear are also characterized – as in the case of disease metaphors – by a bipolar structure (good vs evil, us vs them).
The standardized metaphorical terms employed in different countries and newspapers to make sense of the crisis, for example, contagion, storm, and fire, and the way in which they are used to frame specific events in a similar manner, confirm the idea that they function as communicative devices for the spread of a common and institutionalized view of the crisis. From a cognitive point of view, these very simple and ‘conventional metaphors’, representative of the ‘western (economic) discourse’ (Boers and Demecheleer, 1997), dominate news coverage of the Euro crisis across countries and media, making it easier for European citizens to have a general and unilateral view of such a problematic, complex, and abstract crisis. In that view, concepts and ideas such us lack of control, fear, impact of systemic non-human factors, and the contrast between normal and deviated economic behaviors play a fundamental role in framing the crisis and influencing public opinion. From a more pragmatic perspective, this general pattern of metaphorical economic discourse on the Euro crisis reinforces, on one hand, the idea that the economic discourse in the media is dominated by elite and institutional frames. As commented by Pühringer and Hirte (2013), disease and natural metaphors – the dominant categories in our study – prevail in economists’ public discourses when explaining the normal functioning of (financial) markets. On the other hand, the pragmatic contexts of use of these conventional metaphors are very similar among countries and media, an observation that has been confirmed by previous studies, including Charteris-Black and Mussolff (2003) on the reporting of the Euro in the British and German financial press.
Discussion
The results of this cross-country study on the use of conceptual metaphors during the Euro crisis can be framed within the long tradition of research on the rhetoric of economics, and more specifically on the more or less universal use of the same metaphors in media discourse. This research, however, analyzes and interprets this phenomenon in the context of the peculiar characteristics of economic journalism as a typical expression of elite-to-elite communication processes.
The first conclusion that can be drawn from this study is the predominance of two types of conceptual metaphors (disease and natural) in the media coverage of the European sovereign debt crisis. They represent almost half of the conceptual metaphors analyzed and virtually dominate in the six countries reviewed. It is interesting to note the fact that these prevailing metaphorical frames – with dominant expressions such as contagion or storm – assume an understanding of the crisis as something quite uncontrollable, not easily managed by human intervention alone. Both are metaphors which relate to a natural – not human – cause of events, something that reinforces the frame of lack of control. Compared to the rest of the conceptual metaphors, those of disease and nature appeal less strongly to the responsibility of individuals – they are inanimate metaphors – placing the interpretation of the crisis in a context far away from concepts such as guilt or mismanagement by government, politicians, companies, and citizens. The crisis, in this sense, is mainly due to external causes, ‘is something that infects us’, at least for those countries less affected by economic, financial, and fiscal tensions.
On the other hand, from the point of view of how to respond to problems raised by the crisis, these metaphorical frameworks suggest that solutions to economic challenges require technical answers (as medical treatments against diseases) or urgent measures (as emergency plans for natural disasters). Considering the period under analysis – February 2010 to August 2012 – in which the sovereign and banking debt problems of Greece and Spain were at the center of the hurricane, it is understandable, for example, that Spanish media coverage reflected with these metaphorical frames the fear of ‘contagion’ from the Greek ‘terminal’ financial situation, as well as the fate of a country whose economic destiny depended on the level of Eurozone distress. Of course, this rhetorical interpretation of the crisis was not shared by all European countries. Joris et al. (2014), based on the analysis of a similar corpus of metaphors in the case of the Netherlands, highlight how in that country war metaphors were significantly more important than the rest.
With both the main metaphors and those less frequent, this research verifies on one hand their relative universality, as demonstrated in several works cited in the review of academic literature, and on the other the diversity of their use in different countries. In fact, the country variable is the only significant factor that explains different frequencies of use of each type of conceptual metaphor.
While the metaphors of particular nations are largely homogeneous, there are significant contrasts when they are compared with each other. Thus, for example, Spain and Finland – also to a large extent the United Kingdom – share patterns of metaphorical uses that are very different from those of Italy and the Netherlands, which in turn are very different from those in Greece. It is precisely Greece, with the ‘sickest’ economy during the period analyzed, that presents the most peculiar profile, with a predominance of organic and mechanical metaphors. In this sense, the special situation of Greece determines the particular rhetorical discourse of the newspapers in this country. As already commented on, the most common key word in the crisis metaphors of this study, ‘contagion’, does not appear in the Greek news examined; by contrast, the word ‘haircut’ (a percentage that is subtracted from the market value of an asset) was dominant in the metaphors published there, but virtually non-existent in news stories from the rest of the countries.
However, other factors that are often quoted as relevant for that differentiation, for instance, the different socio-economic context in each country, have not been found significant in this research. Indeed, the distinction between countries with debt problems and countries without them is not associated with significant changes in the patterns of use of metaphors. Only one type of metaphor, that of war, exhibits slightly different use patterns linked to that distinction, which is understandable in view of the confrontational climate that prevailed between ‘countries with debt problems’ and ‘countries without debt problems’ during the period under research, as well as considering other possible cultural and historical reasons, as suggested by Charteris-Black and Musolff (2003) in their analysis of the use of the COMBAT metaphor in British and German financial reporting.
As for the third hypothesis, the uniformity in the use of metaphors by type of newspaper analyzed reflects a common view of the Euro crisis, at least from the perspective of its rhetorical framework, which is quite surprising taking into account their ideological and editorial diversity. This fact confirms the power of the conceptual metaphors to create shared frames of interpretation for current events, in this case, an economic and financial crisis.
The analysis of the economic discourse of the media from a rhetorical perspective adds a new dimension to the debate about the extent to which the media coverage of economic issues tends to produce uniform thinking, interpretations dominated by technical arguments, and institutional and elitist explanations of current events (Arrese and Vara, 2015). In this way, the media contribute to the expansion of the ‘governmentality’, which depends on crucial respects upon the intellectual technologies, practical activities, and social authority associated with expertise (Miller and Rose, 1990).
This stability and uniformity in metaphorical language shows how difficult it is for the media to stand aside from the experts’ discourse or to forge new ways of analyzing economic events outside the prevalent consensus, usually guided by the principles of a free market economy. It could be expected, as pointed out by Llamas (2010), that metaphorical conceptualizations could serve to introduce into the news particular value judgments, based on different professional or political postulates. Not surprisingly, the analysis of causes, effects, and responsibilities on the sovereign debt crisis has been open to multiple and, in some cases, opposing economic views (Picard, 2015). However, this research shows how, at least in the case of the countries under review, the discourse on the Euro crisis has been ‘captured’ by the more traditional forms of metaphorical economic understanding, characterized by a unilateral, systemic, and technical view of the functioning of economies.
This finding reinforces the results of other studies on the media coverage of the Euro crisis, which have demonstrated that the media have not been able to distance themselves from the specialized frameworks of analysis used by experts and economic agents. They define the European institutional debate and are very active in setting the limits of the debate. This idea has been supported by several studies, such as Fahy et al. (2010), Titley (2012), and Mercille (2014) on the Euro crisis coverage by Irish general newspapers, and Mylonas (2012) on the representation of the Greek crisis in the German popular daily Bild. All of these studies point out that the discussion on the crisis has been dominated by the logic of the elite-to-elite communication, which highlights the views of political, business, and financial institutions, at the expense of ‘man-on-the-street’ approaches.
Further testing of these findings in different contexts and, above all, in more transnational comparative studies could be both interesting and worthwhile. In addition, it may also be worth exploring the extent to which the uniformity in the use of conceptual economic metaphors corresponds or fails to correspond with the use of the same specific metaphors and keywords.
Footnotes
Appendix
Conceptual metaphors, corpus words, and metaphorical expressions.
| Conceptual metaphors | Corpus words | Metaphorical expressions |
|---|---|---|
| DISEASE | Contagion, collapse, health, injection, disease, fever, medicine, pain, virus, cure, immune, treatment, and so on | Fear of contagion, contagion effect, European disease, Greece’s disease, social fever, debt fever, economic medicine, medicine of austerity |
| NATURAL | Storm, fire, abyss, wave, clouds, catastrophe, winter, earthquake, turmoil, hurricane, bubble, and so on | Economic storm, financial storm, market fire, firewall around Spain, financial turmoil, on the brink of abyss, housing bubble |
| MECHANICAL | Domino, tunnel, building, green light, sink, meltdown, harbor, belt, engine, mechanism, parachute, Titanic, and so on | Domino effect, light at the end of the tunnel, Greece sinks, financial meltdown, economic belt-tightening, growth engine, financial mechanism |
| WAR | Firepower, war, attack, battle, bazooka, explosion, bomb, siege, shoot, artillery, hostage, shield, and so on | ECB firepower, Greece is a war zone, Euro fights battles, ECB bazooka, financial explosion, European economic artillery, banks hold consumers hostage |
| SPORT & ENTERTAINMENT | Game, poker, play, party, rally, ball, cards, and so on | To be in a chess game, a poker hand, Christmas party by speculation, the ball is in play, cards on the table |
| ORGANISM | Bailout, haircut, tragedy, bitter, fear, monster, drama, vicious, marriage, divorce, panic, ghost, pigs, hawks, and so on | Bailout plan, bailout package, haircut on Greek bonds, Greek tragedy, Teutonic monster, financial drama, vicious circles, Euro panic, inflationary ghosts, the guinea pigs |
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.