Political Metaphors In Covid-19 Media Coverage: Declaring War On Misleading Metaphors

Résumé: Abstract COVID-19 has in subtle and not so subtle ways permeated the discourse of politics. Metaphors of wars have remarkably prevailed at the onset. The virus has been described, for instance, as an "enemy" to be "beaten," a "tsunami" on health services and even as "glitter" that "gets everywhere." The present paper discusses different metaphors for the pandemic, and explains why they matter. War metaphors are considered first, as they were particularly abundant and controversial when the pandemic started. An overview of alternative metaphors is then provided, drawing from the "#ReframeCovid" crowd-sourced multilingual collection of metaphors for Covid-19. The results of the study reveal a plethora of lexical means to account for the dynamic image of the pandemic that exhibits a gradual shift from the war metaphor to variant interpretations. Finally, based on both the #ReframeCovid collection and a systematic analysis of a large corpus of news articles in English, it is suggested that the other metaphorical combinations might be appropriate and versatile in communication about different aspects of the pandemic, including contagion and different public health measures aimed at countering it.

Publié dans la revue: Aleph