Abstract
In the on-going pandemic, the migrant workers in India were stranded in different parts of the country when the states went under lockdown. This crisis is heavily reported by the news media houses even today. However, the month of May 2020 was the last month of the lockdown in India, where news outlets reported heavily on the politics of migrant workers who were struck or attempted to reach their hometowns on foot. For this purpose, this paper offers a comparative study of the headlines of two English medium digital newspapers of India, The Quint and Scroll. This paper, firstly, has a textual analysis of headlines, and secondly, identifies the registers through which the language links up to particular imagined audiences and social types. Through conducting a textual analysis and examining registers in selected headlines in the corpus, the paper determines the created reputations of migrant workers and propagates “public words” through the medium of newspapers. For this linguistic analysis, this study takes the headlines that have bigram “migrant workers” in its headlines to narrow down their meaning and identify a migrant worker’s position in the pandemic crisis. Based on the analysis of the data, the paper concludes that The Quint’s headlines are in contrast to Scroll with the classification of the words and expressions used in their headlines. There are certain differences in the linguistic linkages and textual strategies used by these two digital journalism platforms.
Presenters
Khushboo SahrawatStudent, MA Degree, Indian Institute of Technology, Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Newspaper Headlines, Pandemic, Migrant Workers, Identities, Linguistics
