Civic voice in multimodal news narratives

Abstract

In this chapter, we examine civic voice in visual news narratives about the economic crisis. We discuss how the possibility of voice may be linked to particular practices in multimodal news discourse. We analyze captioned stock photo galleries depicting anti-austerity protests in Greece, and demonstrate how these narratives create a simplified grouping of actors with narrative necessity and a loose connection to the “real”. Thus, they reproduce the dominant master narrative juxtaposing financial pragmatism with emotioned expressions of civic voice. We discuss how this kind of doing the crisis tends to muffle civic voice and naturalize the establishment story of the crisis. We conclude by proposing how multimodal online news narratives might better realize their potential in mediating civic voice.