The lockdown in the British media: Emotion talk in opinion articles from the Guardian and the Sun.

Abstract

This study focusses on opinion articles from the Guardian and the Sun written about Covid-19 lockdown. A qualitative discourse analysis was conducted to compare and gain insight on how emotion terms appear in both newspapers. Emotion terms were analyzed based on valance, polarity, the emoter, emotion attribution, emotion source and how the emotion was put in the text. In total 163 emotion terms were found, 105 for the Guardian and 59 for the Sun. Emotion terms appeared most often in the form of nouns and majority of emotion terms were negative. The three main patterns found pertain to positive emotions and the two-sided positivity they highlight, to the author’s emotions being seemingly absent, and to the author ascribing feelings to others without a source.