Negotiating trust through COVID-19 press briefings: A multimodal analysis
Issued Date
2024-01-01
Resource Type
ISSN
15692159
eISSN
15699862
Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85187925634
Journal Title
Journal of Language and Politics
Rights Holder(s)
SCOPUS
Bibliographic Citation
Journal of Language and Politics (2024)
Suggested Citation
Bunnag O., Chaemsaithong K. Negotiating trust through COVID-19 press briefings: A multimodal analysis. Journal of Language and Politics (2024). doi:10.1075/jlp.23090.bun Retrieved from: https://repository.li.mahidol.ac.th/handle/20.500.14594/97746
Title
Negotiating trust through COVID-19 press briefings: A multimodal analysis
Author(s)
Author's Affiliation
Corresponding Author(s)
Other Contributor(s)
Abstract
Drawing from televised COVID-19 press briefings, this study explicates how the interplay between verbal and visual resources help policy makers restore public trust following organization-level failures by neutralizing unfavorable discourses that threaten the public’s perceptions of their competence, integrity and benevolence and by emphasizing positive aspects associated with these factors. The findings reveal that these mediated multimodal speeches not only prioritize the political interests of the government by apportioning blame for the surveillance failures, while aggrandizing their ad hoc responses without addressing the causes. This trust repair practice serves to frame the pandemic – initially as an external biosecurity threat and subsequently as a natural and expectable characteristic of an infectious disease that can be handled – hinging largely on the creation of “us-them,” which undermines equitable public health objectives and transmission mitigation in the long run.