Racism and Discrimination Discourse in the Egyptian press at the beginning of Corona crisis: Analytical study of a sample of Egyptian newspapers in March 2020

Author

Associate Professor of Journalism, Cairo University

Abstract

The spread of the COVID19 virus, insecurities and fear around the pandemic fueled nationalist tendencies and increased authoritarian tactics of governments all over the world.
In North America for instance, Anti-Asian racism increased, when US president Donald Trump dubbed the COVID19 virus the “Chinese virus”.
This study seeks to achieve a major goal of: monitoring, characterizing and analyzing patterns and processes of discrimination and blame related to the press discourse of the new Corona virus in a sample of national, party and private Egyptian newspapers.
The researcher set out to adopt this concept based on cultural, political and social foundations, to identify the manifestations of overlap in the Egyptian print press and to know which internal and external groups are created and whether the latter are to be blamed for spreading the virus and how. The researcher also addressed the aspect related to identifying the type of language used to create the logic of "us versus them" and perhaps demonize the other.
This study belongs to the field of descriptive and analytical studies, by employing the survey method, the comparative method, and the discourse analysis tool.
The sample of this current study was based on three major newspapers, Al-Ahram, Al-Wafd and Al-Shorouk, for a period of one month, represented in March 2020
The current study concluded with important indications related to the use of a racist tone in talking about the Corona epidemic in terms of its focus of spread, appealing to unproven matters and promoting them as if they were truths such as a conspiracy theory, in addition to the narrow horizon in dealing with the event as a divine punishment.
 

Keywords

References

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