Here is a link to the published journal and article
Transitivity: The Discursive (Under) Formation of Immigrant Workers in the Media
Transitivity: The Discursive (Under) Formation of Immigrant Workers in the Media
Dr. C. Allen Lynn and Dr. Daniel
Gilhooly
Lynn, C., A. &
Gilhooly, D. (2017). Transitivity:
The Discursive (Under) Formation of Immigrant Workers in the Media.
Journal of Training, Design, and Technology, 1(1), 9-19.
Abstract
This article explores the discursive
construction of immigrants derived from the linguistic analysis of the
transitivity system in a series of newspaper articles collected from printed
media. Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of these texts, this paper
shows how word choice in the grammatical system of transitivity (e.g. who does
what to whom) positions immigrant groups as victims of the harsh, low-paying
poultry industry. However, the depictions are lacking in many key ways that
subvert blame for the treatment of the immigrants. The effect is a series of
articles that display sympathy for the plight of the exploited, but hold no one
accountable. This paper is in accordance with the scholarly paradigm critical
discourse analysis that sees language, as a social practice, as a central
element in social life. Hence, the media depictions reflect the immigrant
community’s limited agency in improving their situation because of the
dispersed nature of their exploitation.
Keywords: critical discourse
analysis, immigration, newspaper, media
United States capitalism has provided a
standard of living, level of personal consumption and wealth unparalleled in
recorded history. However, there is a marked shift in the nature of this
economic model after the 1970s. The last 40 years has subjected laborers, both
native and immigrant, to “probably the highest rate of class exploitation
(ratio of surplus to necessary labor) in the capitalist world” (Resnick &
Wolff 2003, 209). It appears that globalization, or more precisely new
capitalism (Fairclough 2003), drives much of the complexity behind immigration
to the United States. While it has been argued that immigration benefits both
sojourner and receiving community, the current economic strain felt by many in
the U.S. makes the issue of newcomers working in the secondary labor market a
more troubling issue (Nadadur 2009). Yet, at times the lexical choices of the
mainstream media obfuscate many of the underlying reasons for the migration and
dissatisfaction. Considering the current turmoil in employment and immigration
legislation, we explore how such matters are important.
Through a critical discourse analysis (CDA)
lens, we show how two immigrant groups are portrayed in a series of four
articles printed in the Washington Post in the year 1999. We came across the
articles while researching immigration issues related to an identical situation
now taking place at a poultry plant in rural Georgia. Though separated by 15
years, the similarities of circumstance are striking. Of note is the lack of
control the immigrants have over their difficult circumstances as depicted in
the media. As suggested by Fairclough (1995), “Media texts are sensitive
barometers of cultural change which manifest in their heterogeneity and
contradictoriness the often tentative, unfinished and messy nature of change”
(60). Hence, the media depictions reflect the immigrant community’s limited
agency in improving their situation because of the dispersed nature of their
exploitation as part of the changing U.S. labor market in the 1990s. The word
choice of the authors reflects the “re-structuring” and “re-scaling” of social
life in the U.S. as affected by new capitalism (Fairclough 2002). More
specifically, the authors’ use of nominalization and passive voice results in a
particular effect. Commentary about these lexical choices and the resulting
effects on the reader are the aim of this paper. Shortcomings of the method and
scope of the paper are included in the final remarks.
Immigration
in the 1990s
There are two major immigrant groups in the
four articles, Guatemalans and Koreans. Their presence in the Delmarva
Peninsula (Delaware/Maryland/Virginia) of the East Coast during the 1990s is
representative of the hiring practices of the poultry processing industry in
the wake of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). The act
criminalized employers who knowingly hire illegal aliens. However, employers
continued to pursue “new” immigrant workers and refugee groups due to the high
cost of production and low wages these groups would accept. Although seen as a
burden, new laws such as IRCA did little to stop the practice of hiring
immigrant workers (Griffith & Runsten 1992).
The late 1990s was a period when the countries
of origin for immigrants to the United States took a marked shift. Glass (2008)
states,
Between 1980 and 1993, the percentage of European
immigrants to the U.S. dropped to 13% while the percentage of immigrants from
Latin America rose to 43%. More than 30 million persons, some 14% of the total
population, were classified as “foreign born” in 2000. Of these 30 million
persons who immigrated with authorization to the U.S., approximately one third
indicated that Mexico or Central America was their place of birth (102).
Many of the receiving communities were
unaccustomed to outsiders, especially those who did not outwardly resemble what
was familiar in their neighborhoods. The Washington Post reflects this negative
attitude in the tone of the four articles. While the immigrant groups did not
suffer violent reprisals for coming to work in the poultry plants, they were
clearly not welcomed with open arms. And although the newcomers were seeking
better circumstances just as the original Scots-Irish settlers of the region,
it is irrelevant whether or not these immigrants conceived of themselves as
“people of color”; that is the label that was mirrored at them in communities
unaccustomed to immigrants (Suárez-Orozco 2000, 194).
Anti-immigration sentiments among a large
sector of the native population were high at this time (Zolberg 2007). The
political climate of the 1990s reflects the anti-immigrant sentiments. The
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed into law in 1992 by then
President Clinton. NAFTA stimulated the expansion of transborder economic links
between Mexico and the US, particularly truck traffic, which facilitated
undocumented entry. The backlash from what was seen by conservatives as a
“tidal wave of immigration” resulted in the passage of the Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996. This law, much like
the aforementioned IRCA, focused largely on enforcement, allowing state and
local authorities to enforce immigration law, thus appeasing some immigration
opponents. This was not the case for employers looking for a source of cheap
labor, then or now. On the contrary, the free circulation of labor is in the
interests of big capital. Essentially, it is the local businesses who are
inherently multiculturalists and tolerant, not the residents (Zizek 2009).
This leads to the crux of our
argument. While newspapers such as the Washington Post may genuinely attempt to
remain unbiased and report the news with the intent to remain politically
neutral and present all sides of an issue (Bennett 1988), the very language
used in the four articles under review mitigates any such attempts. The lexical
choices that have become de rigueur for reporting in print media reflect the
shift to neoliberal economic policies in the 1980’s. The manner in which
corporations and government agencies are portrayed owe their penetrative power
to the relative power of the social forces behind them, and the relative
weakness of the social forces which do or might oppose them (Bourdieu &
Wacquant 2001). The effect is that certain participants have agency while
others do not. The balance of this article will be spent expounding upon this
idea.
The
Media: Newspapers
Chouliaraki (2008) asserts that the crucial
link between media representations and public action remains under-theorized
(831). Her belief is that media texts may promote an “ethics of care and
responsibility, or indifference and apathy towards a distant other” (832).
Adding to this notion, newspapers fall within the sphere of media texts and act
as a pivotal resource needed to manufacture popular consent, especially in the
domain of ethnic relations (Van Dijk 1991, 42-43). The liberal and egalitarian
discourses used in newspapers rely upon particular patterns in the depiction of
out-groups that focus more on culture than race in the depiction of minority
groups (Van Dijk 1991; Billig 2006). The result is a representation that
oftentimes depicts the situation as an “us” and “them” binary highlighting the
differences of the immigrants’ cultures, but little about the underlying
reasons for their presence in the United States. This is true for the
Washington Post articles covered here.
Caution should be exercised when undertaking an
analysis of this nature however. While analysis such as CDA aims to uncover
complicity between the media and the dominant social classes and groups, it
should be undertaken on a case-by-case basis. The authors’ portrayal of the
immigrant groups in the four articles is noticeably sympathetic toward their
plight. However, we find Fairclough’s (1995) formulation of the complex nature
of media discourses helpful here. While the Washington Post does extol non-bias
reporting, conflicting ideologies are often at play in what is seemingly
‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ media. The poultry industry and U.S. government
agencies involved in the articles at hand are not openly vilified in the
articles. Yet, Perdue Farms Inc., the nation’s third largest poultry producer,
did subsequently end one of its immigrant recruitment programs reported upon in
the articles. The point being that the relationships between the media and
capital are complex and variable.
However, our intent is not to extensively
analyze the Washington Post’s representation of the immigrant groups. Much work
has been done in this area (see Bell 1991;Van Dijk 1991). While there are
numerous approaches to CDA that could be used in such an analysis, we chose the
elements of nominalization and passive voice particularly because they
underscore the extent to which the language of new capitalism has been
incorporated into contemporary U.S. immigrant labor discourses in the media.
Theoretical
Framework
We are proponents of what Deleuze and Guattari
call “nomad thought”. The way that a rhizome “establishes connections between
semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the
arts, sciences, and social struggles” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) offers the
opportunity to engage in exciting, multifaceted, methods of inquiry. With
regard to immigrant issues in the U.S., using systemic-functional linguistics
(SFL) in conjunction with critical discourse analysis (CDA) provides one means
of exploring how language, as social practice, is a central element of social
life. By analyzing specific uses of language, the researcher is able to better
understand the wider and historical context in which it occurs (Young &
Fitzgerald 2006).
Media political economists focus their
attention on accounts of the power of state and market forces to shape news
media and public information. Such conceptions describe top-down influence
sustained through a mixture of conscious, direct means and unconscious, indirect
influences (Davis 2007). Conversely, theorists such as Fairclough (1992)
suggest looking at the micro level for more subtle ways in which power is
exercised and hegemony maintained. As Fairclough explains, “The news media can
be regarded as effecting the ideological work of transmitting the voices of
power in a disguised and covert form” (110). Although the ideals of journalism
aim to produce professional, objective and socially reflective news, “the very
discursive practices that are supposed to reveal the world as it is also,
unwittingly, serve to leave crucial causal elements of inequality and crisis
uncovered” (Davis 2007, 36). In other words, the good intentions of many
liberal newspapers actually perpetuate injustice and inequalities.
Newspapers, as a form of media texts, are the
manifestation of a process in which knowledge, beliefs, and opinions are
combined with existing or incoming information about events, the social
contexts of news production, and representations of the reading public (Van Dijk
1983). Hence, the depiction of the poultry industry and US government agencies
in the articles are a part of a globally circulating discourse related to new
capitalism that is open to the local appropriation of the Washington Post
(Salskov-Iverson et al. 2000). The strength of these discourses lies in how
they are positioned within relations of power. Discourses related to the
poultry industry and the U.S. government owe their power to the strength of the
social forces behind them, and the relative weakness of the social forces that
oppose them (Bourdieu & Wacquant 2001). Equally, the authority of the
poultry industry and the U.S. government is taken as a given and not
questioned. This is accomplished through the lexical choices made by the
authors.
Of importance to note is the growing strength
of the neoliberal/financialized nature of the U.S. economy in the late 1990s.
This was a period when the concept of corporate personhood was becoming well
establishing in law. The courts gave corporations the same rights as persons of
flesh and blood, thus enacting a form of nominalization that affords great
power while shielding individuals from blame (Chomsky 2010). The reporting in
the Washington Post reflects this trend. The corporations gained power during
this period not only in the courts but also texts.
SFL and
CDA: Nominalization and passive voice.
Young and Fitzgerald (2006) explain that SFL
provides the researcher with “the methodological tools to answer questions that
provide a description of a discourse”
(23). That description can then used to answer CDA questions that “provide an explanation and interpretation of a discourse in terms of the relationships
between language, power and ideology” (emphasis in original, 23). Put another
way, “CDA analyses social life in its discursive aspects, aimed at providing
social criticism based on linguistic evidence” (Alameda-Hernández 2008). SFL
analysis prevents “the criticism of vagueness and lack of objectivity” that CDA
alone sometimes encounters (Renkema 2004).
Our critical analysis reveals how the
respective groups’ identities were discursively constructed across the four
articles. As mentioned, the Washington Post has historically positioned itself
as a liberal media outlet. And while most newspapers claim to report the news
objectively, the political stance of the editors is often evident in the
stories. What CDA affords is a lens through which to look at this subject
matter in a more objective manner, while SFL provides a way of preserving a
researchers interpretation from extreme ideological bias (Alameda-Hernández
2008).
Methodology
Data
collection.
As mentioned, we found the four articles analyzed in this paper while
researching a similar situation with Korean immigrants working in a poultry
processing plant in southeast Georgia. What struck us as interesting was the
time period of the Washington Post piece in relation to the economic situation
in the U.S. at the time. It has been argued that the precursors for the current
economic woes of the U.S. began with the deregulation of the financial industry
in the 1980s (Stiglitz 2010). Accordingly, the language used in the Washington
Post articles reflects the emerging changes in media coverage at that time
(Suro 2008). Our analysis demonstrates how these links manifest themselves in
the language used by the authors.
Fairclough’s (1995) conception of CDA relies
heavily upon the idea of “orders of discourse”. These networks are constituted
by all of the discursive types used within a social institution or social
domain. In the case of this paper, we are primarily concerned with the
discourse used in the four articles at hand, the particular. At the same time,
we are interested in the much broader aspects of the media, the economy and
immigration, the general. What CDA affords is a way to make connections between
the particular and the general. As Fairclough explains, “The focus here is upon
the configuration of genres and discourses which constitute the order of
discourse, the shifting relationships between them, and between this order of
discourse and other socially adjacent ones” (56). The links between the general
findings in the four articles and their connection to larger trends in the
media, the economy and immigration issues will be made in the findings section.
Data analysis. The textual analysis that we employ in this paper draws heavily from Halliday’s systemic grammar (see Halliday 1994). As mentioned earlier, we choose the particular articles under review while researching a similar situation with Korean immigrants working in the poultry industry. What struck us while reading the articles was the lack of accountability for the harsh working and living conditions. While the authors gave apt descriptions of the conditions, there seemed to be an avoidance of culpability in the actual language used in the articles. Halliday’s SFL provides a means of examining this phenomenon.
Transitivity refers to the aspect of the
grammar of a clause or sentence that relates to its ideational meaning. The
grammar gives the option of alternative process types as well as participants.
Systemic selection of a particular process type could be of ideological
importance. Another option is the use of transformation, “for example where
what might have been formulated as a clause (‘x criticized y a lot’) is
actually formulated in a transformed way as a ‘nominalization’ (‘there was much
criticism’)” (Fairclough 1992, 27). Use of the passive voice is another
transformation, such as (‘the worker was fined’), wherein agency is obfuscated.
Both methods permit the agent of the clause to be deleted, thus obscuring
agency and responsibility. The result is that readers are left to interpret for
themselves. The more unspecific writers are, the more open the statements are
to various interpretations by differently positioned readerships (Fairclough
2000). However, the assumption here is that “discursive practices of the media
construct social processes from privileged perspectives, cueing audiences to
‘preferred’ meanings whilst suppressing others – though such ‘directive
closures’ cannot a priori preclude the range of audiences’ understandings of
new meanings (Chouliaraki 2000).
We are interested in lexical choice and
transitivity in the four articles with regard to new capitalism. In other words,
how does the language in the articles reflect the trends in globalization
taking place in the late 1990s? We utilize CDA to show how the use of
nominalization and the passive voice effectively removes human agency in and
responsibility for processes in accounts of the “new global economy”
(Fairclough 2003). And while the authors of the articles may not be consciously
applying such methods in a blatant attempt to further the cause of the
employers, the use of nominalization and the passive voice minimize accountability
for the immigrants’ working conditions. Below we will give examples from the
text that illustrate these constructions.
Findings
The series of articles
appeared over the course of four days as part of a broader focus on the impact
of the poultry industry on the Delmarva Peninsula. A follow-up piece comprised
of six interrelated articles concerning the environmental costs of the poultry
industry appeared the following August. We believe that in a broad sense the lexical
choices described below dominate the discourse about the poultry industry and
U.S. government in the four articles. And while the motivation for the
immigrants in the area is certainly the search for economic opportunity that
was not afforded in their homeland, the complexity of the immigrants’ plight in
the 1990s makes their acceptance and integration all the more contingent upon
the discourses constructing the situation and presented in the media. Nowhere
in the four articles are the underlying reasons behind the poultry industry’s
quest for cheap labor discussed, nor the U.S. government’s complicity or
noninvolvement with the poultry industry. Only the receiving communities’
reaction is highlighted, thus avoiding the culpability of anyone other than the
immigrants. An explanation of the possible implications of such lexical choices
follows the examples.
On
Chicken’s Front Line – November 28, 1999.
The first of the four articles has the most
extensive use of nominalization and the passive in its depiction of the poultry
industry and the U.S. government. The description of the tasks assigned to
workers creates the effect of a dismal, gory occupation and all tasks are nominalized.
Workers are assigned to positions such as live
hang, kill room, evisceration line, the chiller, and backup
killer. The poultry processing plant itself is referred to as a slaughterhouse. All of the tasks are
interrelated to the pace of the line,
which is referenced 43 times in the article. The line is treated as an almost independent entity, separate from
any one person’s control. And its pace is the one factor around which the
entire industry operates. The following quotes are good examples. Nominalizations
are italicized and the passive voice is underlined:
“Plants rank
themselves based on pounds of chicken produced each week, and conveyor lines
are cranked to run at 91 chickens a minute, twice as fast as two decades
ago.”
“Line speed is regulated only by
the Department of Agriculture, which monitors speed for reasons of food safety, not worker strain. Limits are set to give inspectors
time to check birds for
disease or contamination.”
Both quotes relieve
individuals of agency and put the ‘plants’ in charge of the action. Any adverse
effects upon the workers are not the result of any one person’s activities.
Rather, the author makes the choice to move the agent to the more suppressed
and abstract position. The following paragraph is an exemplar of this mode in
first article. It is as if the auger
is alive and works of its own volition:
At the Allen plant where Frazier
works, Juan Villagomez slipped into an uncovered ice auger two years ago. The auger runs parallel to the
floor, and crushes ice with slow-moving blades. The auger slowly crushed his right foot. He tried to pull
his leg out, but could not. “I was screaming and looking for something to turn
the machine off,” said Villagomez, 31. No switch was ever found.
Eventually, the machine tore
his leg off, freeing Villagomez enough so he could drag himself to the
plant floor.
No one is to blame for Villagomez’s injury. The machine did it.
Although the author is clearly sympathetic to
the plight of the immigrants in the article, no reference is made to
individuals responsible for the low pay and hazardous working conditions of the
foreign-born workers:
“Poultry
workers earn less than others in manufacturing – and are injured at
twice the rate.”
“Fatal
injuries, while rare, do occur.”
The conditions are not represented as processes
with agents responsible for their existence, but as entities absent of agents.
Equally, the following quotes suggest that the poultry industry has no control
over working conditions at their plants. They are at the mercy of consumers and technology:
Consumers want
processed chicken, boneless and skinless, cut and molded, and technology has found no
better alternative to the precision and efficiency of human hands. This places an extraordinary demand on
the workers, the repetitive nature of cutting and moving chicken over time
taxing hands, wrists, arms and shoulders.
The use of nominalization and passive voice
here omits poultry plant owners from the text. The owners are not to blame for
the working conditions. In keeping with CDA’s premise that there exists a link
between textual analysis and society and culture, we attest that these
representations reflect the attitude of both the poultry industry and the US
government at the time. A 2005 report about the poultry industry written by the
Congressional Research Service (2005) describes the contemporary poultry plant
worker as “often (but not always) transient, low-skilled but hard-working, less
assertive of their workplace rights than experienced workers, and willing to
work for low wages under conditions that may be adverse” (7). Hence, the
reporting by the Washington Post mirrors the attitudes of the poultry industry
and government whether the authors explicitly harbor these feelings or not.
Journalistic objectivity loses nonpartisanship whenever facts are overlooked.
Immigration
Transforms a Community – November 29, 1999. The second article in the series focuses
more on the living conditions of the poultry workers. However, there are
examples where the agency for the dismal conditions is shifted away from
individuals and placed upon circumstances beyond anyone’s control. For example:
The demand
for workers,
and in turn their demand for work, created
a climate where laws are not always heeded, where housing abuses are common and
where something as critical as a person’s identity – who he or she really is is
often difficult to establish.
No mention is made of low-paying jobs that are
hard to fill with native workers. The
demand for workers is the entity responsible for the conditions.
What is interesting in this, and the two
remaining articles, is the use of nominalization to label the foreign-born
workers. Converse to the absence of reference to the poultry plant owners, The Guatemalans are referenced throughout
the article. And interestingly, there is very little use of the passive voice.
The Guatemalans, while represented as a collective group, are given agency and
responsibility for each process in the article. For example, they are
responsible for the “alarmed longtime residents”. The nominalization The Guatemalans is used 36 times in the
article, strengthening the perception that they are responsible for the
changing conditions in the town. “For the Guatemalans, life in America is
defined almost entirely by work.”
Workers
Answer to Multiple Names – November 30, 1999. The third article in
the series has a number of instances where US government agencies are
nominalized when describing the enforcement of immigration laws. However, their
position as a nominalized group is rarely that of the agent of the verb. For
example:
This year, a
computer system came online, allowing DMV
workers to display a picture of licensed drivers who come in to conduct a
transaction. Georgetown police are in
the process of installing a similar system, with help from a grant by Perdue.
At the DMV, officials said identification fraud is exposed two or three times a
week using the online system and
followed up with aggressive questioning.
The effect is that a computer system is upholding immigration law, not individuals.
However, the immigrants violating the identity fraud laws are given agency
throughout the article. Another interesting quote illustrates this shift of
agency:
The shortage of legal workers and high industry turnover – Allen has a core
group of workers but a fifth of its workers are in constant flux – are at the
root of the identity fraud problem.
The repercussions of this shortage of manual labor are felt far beyond
Delmarva, not only by the poultry
industry but also by many other industries desperate for reliable workers.
The lack of higher wages that would attract
more workers from the local population is not mentioned. Hard work for low pay
is taken as a given.
Chicken
Plant Jobs Open US Doors for Koreans – December 1, 1999.
The last article in the series concerns Korean
immigrants, a bit of an anomaly in the poultry industry in the 1990s. In this
article, it is the immigration broker who is the agent of processes. He is also
not nominanalized but specifically named and the most demonized of the
participants in the article. Again, the poultry industry as well as the U.S.
government are nominalized and portrayed as entities:
A Perdue official said this week that the company was not aware of the $5,000 deposit paid by the workers
until questioned by a reporter. As a result, she said, the company has begun an internal investigation into the
transactions.
In
this example, the company is
portrayed as a sentient entity capable of instigating an investigation, but no
individuals are responsible for the act.
The author also uses nominalization
when addressing the actions of agencies of the US government whose function is
the enforcement of immigration laws:
The
Labor Department, citing “the potential for abuse” and reports of a
“reputed secondary market involving the sale of labor certification,” tried in
the early 1990s to outlaw substitutions, but a court blocked that attempt saying not enough public notice of the
policy change had been given.
Here
the failure to curtail the actions of the immigration brokers was not the
failure of any particular individual, but the result of an action by a court. Therefore, no one is to blame
for the abuses.
In summation, what concerns the
writers in all four of the articles are not the underlying reasons for the
arrival of immigrant workers, the government’s role or the actions of the
individuals in charge of the poultry processing plants, but the “immigration
problem” as a kind of phenomenon (Alameda-Hernández 2008). The Washington Post
printed a follow-up article on February 25, 2000 explaining how Perdue Farms
ended the practice of using immigration brokers to recruit Korean workers. So,
there were ramifications to the articles that effectively stopped one form of
exploitation. However, the principle motivations for neither the practice nor
the architects of the policies were addressed. Our current research focuses on
a similar situation at a poultry processing plant in southeast Georgia. The
February 10th headline of the Claxton Enterprise for 2005 reads,
“The Koreans Are Coming!” in large type followed by a much smaller “But Claxton
Poultry’s Immigrant Employees Will Live in Bulloch” (Cunningham 2005, 1A). And
thus began a new immigrant story in a different location: déjà vu all over
again. The crux of the article is a concern over lost jobs and immigrant
encroachment, not the actions of the poultry plant or U.S. Customs Enforcement.
Implications
As
mentioned above, the current paper is one example of how such an analysis can
be done. There are many other options, depending upon one’s desired focus. And
while space constraints dictate the scope and depth of this paper, a cursory
inspection of the four articles provided a tentative view of how the immigrant
groups are portrayed as compared to the poultry processing companies and U.S.
government agencies. Analysis of the use of nominalization and passive voice
highlight “Who does what to whom under what circumstances?” (Butt, et
al. 2000).
The implications of such depictions of
immigrants are of immediate importance with regard to texts as elements of
social events. Fairclough (2003) states, “…texts have causal effects upon, and
contribute to changes in, people (beliefs, attitudes, etc.), actions, social
relations, and the material world” (8). A study by Van Dijk (1987) shows that
discourses propagated by the mass media “play a major intermediary role in the
reproduction of public conceptualizations of out-groups and provide the input
for most adult citizens’ thoughts and talks about ethnic groups” (28). As such,
the four articles related to this study play a role in a number of different
societal issues such as education, labor or immigration policy. The authors
depict poultry processing plants as dangerous, low-paying forms of work.
However, this depiction is portrayed as a given without foregrounding the
activities and motivations of those responsible. The Marxist theorist Slavoj
Zizek (2009) puts it this way:
What makes capital exceptional is its unique combination
of the values of freedom and equality and the facts of exploitation and
domination: the gist of Marx’s analysis is that the legal-ideological matrix of
freedom-equality is not a mere “mask” concealing exploitation-domination, but
the very form in which the latter is
exercised (125, emphasis in original).
Although the journalism is intended to be
objective, a more blatant portrayal of the actions of company owners could lead
to eventual reform. However, the depictions of the immigrant groups in the
present form hold more tenuous possibilities. One the one hand, such depictions
could build sympathy in more liberal readers. Alternatively, conservative
readers of the Washington Post may find the negative portrayal of Hispanics and
Asians as further proof of immigrants putting strains on host communities.
Of interests to us as researchers is that the
media is rarely concerned with the underpinnings of “globalization”. The
conditions in the countries of origin which promote migration, both legal and
illegal, as well as the low wages and danger in industries like poultry
processing which discourage most local residents from working in the plants are
rarely discussed in the mass media. Van Dijk (2005) speaks of symbolic elites
(e.g. politicians, journalists, scholars, writers, directors and policy setting
boards of internationally effective media) as having “preferential control”
over the hegemonic narratives re/produced and re/created in mass communication.
It is CDA’s attempt to make explicit “the interconnectedness of things”,
uncovering the power structures and unmasking ideologies at the micro level
(Wodak & Meyer 2009) which make an analysis such as this possible. What CDA
affords is a way for researchers to remain more objective in claims made about
the power of such discourses.
Further research with more current articles is
warranted. The meatpacking and poultry industries continue to alter their
hiring practices in order to stay one step ahead of labor shortages and
hardships for immigrants working low wage jobs persist (Kandel & Parrado,
2014). Researchers undertaking such critical discourse analysis in the spirit
of exposing injustice however must exercise caution. The tendency to over
search for examples in these microforms of analysis easily presents
opportunities for cherry picking data.
The fact that newspapers like the Washington Post publish such articles
in the first place is a testament to their concern. However, critical discourse
analysis offers ways to scrutinize their work.
References
Alameda-Hernández, A.
(2008). SFL and CDA: contributions of the analysis of the transitivity system
in the study of the discursive construction of national identity (Case study:
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Table 1
Washington
Post Articles
Title of Article
|
Date Published
|
Author
|
On Chicken’s Front Line
|
November 28, 1999
|
Lena H. Sun and Gabriel Escobar
|
Immigration Transforms a Community
|
November 29, 1999
|
Gabriel Escobar
|
Workers Answer to Multiple Names
|
November 30, 1999
|
Gabriel Escobar
|
Chicken Plant Jobs Open US Doors for Koreans
|
December 1, 1999
|
Peter Pae
|
Autobiographical note:
Dr. C. Allen Lynn is an assistant professor in
the TESL program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His research
interests include critical discourse analysis, refugee and immigrant education.
Dr. Daniel Gilhooly is an assistant professor
at the University of Central Missouri. His research interests include refugee
and immigrant education as well as participatory action research.
