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Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines

In the field of mass communication, both telecinematic discourse and political rhetoric are

social practices that interdiscursively reinforce cultural categorisations. The present paper

discusses the ways in which ethnic stereotypes of Mexico are constructed and perpetuated by

mainstream entertainment and the campaign rhetoric of Republican presidential candidate

Donald Trump. Adopting the perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the study

examines the TV series Breaking Bad and three recent feature films as well as public debates,

interviews, and campaign speeches by Trump. Just as the series and films establish violent,

unpredictable and morally deficient drug dealers and cartel bosses, Trump’s rhetoric

metaphorically frames Mexican immigrants and their government as treacherous criminals

and thieves. In order to legitimise enhanced border security, Trump chiefly employs the

When Donald Trump announced his presidential candidacy at Trump Tower

in New York City on 16 June 2015, he started his programmatic speech by

naming several nations that from his perspective pose economic challenges or

security threats to the United States. In addition to China and Japan, he

particularly highlighted problems of drug trafficking and violence imported

across the southern US border from Mexico. In this line of argumentation, he

could firmly rely on existing negative images of Mexico, which had likewise

been constructed by mass media and mainstream telecinematic discourse.

Accordingly, the present paper intends to identify Mexican stereotypes

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culture has to be understood as part of our politics’ (Street 1997: 4, emphasis

in the original).

In their seminal volume, Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi define the term

telecinematic discourse as the ‘integrated multimodal (verbal and visual)

fictional narratives’ (2011: 1) of television and cinema. In line with Critical

Discourse Analysis (CDA), telecinematic discourse and political rhetoric are

here considered as interconnected social practices (Wodak et al. 2009: 8).

for presidential candidates who proclaim the need for change in current

political agendas. It will be shown that in order to achieve this goal, orators

may employ one-sided misrepresentations of social or ethnic groups (Chilton

2004: 46), as they are analogously disseminated in telecinematic discourse.

By comparing the two discourse types, the present paper intends to raise a

critical awareness of how the two registers collaborate in establishing and

perpetuating long-lived and deep-rooted stereotypes in a nation’s collective

memory.

Although ethnic stereotypes are caused by numerous sources such as online

news platforms or social media, film and television are particularly suited to

One well-known example of an American president using popular imagery in

order to appeal to the public is Ronald Reagan. During the Cold War, he used

intertextual references to the Star Wars movie The Empire Strikes Back when

he labelled the Soviet Union ‘the evil empire’ (FitzGerald 2000: 22). Similarly,

after 9/11, president George W. Bush’s war on terror was ideologically

underpinned by movies which changed the image of stereotypical terrorists

from Eastern European extremists to ‘the Islamic/Arab fanatic’ (Croft 2006:

270), such as Peter Berg’s action thriller The Kingdom from 2007. It is

therefore safe to assume that movies, even if they do not have explicit political

content, are ‘cultural stimuli that potentially address and modify the political

movie screen, a number of typical preconceptions were established already

throughout the twentieth century (Ramírez Berg 2002), forming the

foundation for continued stereotyping. In consideration of the multimodal

quality of ‘telecinematic’ discourse (Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi 2011), this

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study will concentrate not only on the verbal and nonverbal communication

by the characters (Bednarek 2010) but will also take into account salient visual

aspects of cinematography.

As for the telecinematic dataset on which the present study is partly based, the

focus is on the crime and drama genre featuring illegal activities of drug

trafficking by tightly organised cartels. A recent case in point is the series

Breaking Bad, which was originally broadcast on the cable network AMC and

rhetorically concentrated most dominantly on illegal immigration and security

at the Mexican-American border (Blair 2015: xiv). By projecting social

problems on an ethnic minority, he has been able to reach voters who feel

underprivileged and are generally dissatisfied with the current political

establishment. Confirmed by positive polling results (Hammond, Roberts and

Sulfaro 2016: 871), Trump has continued his xenophobic approach, framing

Mexicans as villains and outlaws in similar terms as fictional film and

television. In addition, Trump himself is immensely experienced in

entertaining a wide TV audience, since he acted as the protagonist of the

reality television show The Apprentice on NBC from 2004 to 2015. Hence, it is

worthwhile to examine his linguistic and discursive strategies of political

polarisation against the backdrop of popular mass communication.

development of a chemistry teacher into an unscrupulous crystal meth

producer, is one prominent example of the highly acclaimed new category of

‘complex TV’ (Mittell 2015: 311–314). The series’ challenging complexity

manifests itself mainly in the psychological portrayal of an ethically doubtful

antihero, in intricate and non-chronological storytelling, as well as in highly

original cinematography. Still, as this paper will demonstrate, the show is

quite conventional in the stereotypical construction of the Mexican ‘Other’.

The huge impact and popularity of this series not only in the United States can

be measured by the high viewing figures and the great number of awards and

nominations (Thomson 2015: 213–214). For the present study, all five

by Steven Soderbergh (2000) shows drug trade not only from the vantage

point of DEA agents, police officers, users and dealers, but also from the

perspective of politicians, in particular judge Wakefield, played by Michael

Douglas, who is appointed head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

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By contrast, Oliver Stone’s crime thriller Savages (2012), which is set in

Laguna Beach, California, features two young US-American drug dealers who

get involved in a violent conflict with the Mexican Baja Cartel, whose

instances of telecinematic discourse were investigated on the convenient and

authoritative medium of DVD.

these five speeches were selected because they mark decisive milestones in the

development of Trump’s campaign and received extensive media coverage. As

far as interviews and debates are concerned, the dataset contains those

instances which most prominently mention Mexicans and Mexico.

In total, the Trump dataset contains 204,609 words and was retrieved from a

variety of online sources. Several of these documents are available in the

archive of the website ‘The American Presidency Project’

(<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/>), initiated in 1999 by John T. Woolley

and Gerhard Peters from the Department of Political Science at the University

of California, Santa Barbara. Following the link ‘documents’ to the sections

news media outlets such as Time Magazine, CBS News, MSNBC, or the

Washington Post.

The procedure of the qualitative analysis of both telecinematic and political

discourse comprised four consecutive steps, inspired by the strategy suggested

by Reisigl and Wodak (2009: 93–94): [1] identification: all appearances of

Mexicans and Mexico were traced and singled out by a careful investigation of

all episodes and documents. In the TV series and films, the focus was on key

scenes which involve Mexicans or Mexican Americans. Along these lines,

examples (1) and (2) in Section 5 feature the psychopathic Mexican drug

dealer Tuco, who is here prominently introduced as the antagonistic Other in

characters are chiefly marked by their own utterances, as devised by the

scriptwriters, political speeches contain utterances about Mexicans.

[2] Contextualisation: the utterances by Mexican characters on the screen and

statements by Trump on Mexicans were related to their respective discursive

situations (e.g. setting, speaker, addressees, topics). Thus, for instance, very

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informal settings, as in examples (1) or (5), were contrasted with the rather

formal encounters in examples (3) or (4). In the fictional TV dialogues, the

external producer-recipient level was distinguished from the inter-character

Trump’s biased images of Mexicans.

visible in example (6). In both registers, stereotyping clearly supports the

respective macrofunctions, although this process is more indirect and subtle

in the telecinematic data than in the political speeches.

notionally correlated with all examples tracked in the television series and the

films. The comparison of fictional character speech with Trump’s political

statements cannot simply be based on explicit overlaps of verbal cues. In

order to make the datasets relatable, it is necessary to include the

intermediate step of fictional characterisation: the utterances in the films and

the TV series yield a set of stereotypical characters, which can then be

5 and 6), those examples were selected which most saliently and clearly

epitomise particular stereotypes about Mexicans. Whenever a stereotype in

the telecinematic data was realised through both a minor and a lead character,

the latter instance was used. In the Trump data, extracts were singled out

which give summaries of his central ideas. Simultaneously, the stereotypes

found in the dataset were situated in the framework of traditional prejudiced

images of Mexico (see Section 4). As regards the sequence of chapters in this

study, telecinematic stereotypes (Section 5) are outlined before political

stereotypes (Section 6) for two reasons: first, from the chronological

perspective, the films and Breaking Bad preceded Trump’s campaign, and

of mass communication, such as news broadcasts, literary texts, popular

music, or social networking services. Telecinematic discourse and political

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rhetoric, which also constitute forms of mass communication with the

potential for stereotyping, are very different in their situational contexts but at

the same time similar in their popular appeal and manipulative mass impact.

political advertising’ (Reisigl 2008: 253) and are geared towards emotional

confrontations with political opponents. Such oratory is usually produced in a

collective effort by writers, advisers, and spin-doctors, while the news media

provide channels for significant extracts and soundbites intended for a wide

audience (Wodak 2009: 24).

here is entertainment and viewers act as external ‘overhearers’ (Bubel 2008:

62) of the dialogue between fictional characters, the creators of TV shows and

films also try to establish common ground and meet viewers’ expectations in

order to achieve a financial success. As in the case of political rhetoric,

telecinematic discourse relies on culture-specific cognitive preconceptuali-

sations, so that these two types of mass communication may mutually

reinforce ideological categories. In consequence, popular stereotypes may be

utilised by populist oratory with the aim of exerting sociopolitical influence.

The presidential race of 2016 is aptly paraphrased as a ‘media spectacle’ in

which real-life events are closely intertwined with new media entertainment

political stereotyping, it is both fruitful and necessary to draw analogies with

prejudiced images disseminated by the entertainment industry.

As regards interdiscursive relations in mass communication, explicit links

between telecinematic discourse and political practices are established in two

of the documents in the Trump dataset. When the renowned journalist Bob

Woodward starts his interview with the question ‘where do you start the

movie of your decision to run for president?’, Trump frames his candidacy

announcement at Trump Tower in cinematic images, since for him ‘it looked

like the Academy Awards. I talk about it. There were so many cameras’

(interview, 2 April 2016). In this intertextual analogy, Trump is literally

acting requires pretence and make-believe, as originally implied by

Woodward.

Committee’), Trump argues that ‘when you live in a society where athletes and

movie stars are the heroes, little kids want to be athletes and movie stars. In

Palestinian society, the heroes are those who murder Jews’ (speech, 22 March

2016). Conclusively, Trump here acknowledges the sociopolitical impact of

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telecinematic discourse, thus creating a conceptual analogy between events on

the movie screen and social conventions in a given community. According to

this logic, the consequence is that when you live in a society where Mexicans

In his cognitive model of characterisation in fiction, Jonathan Culpeper (2001:

35) points out that comprehension is a combination of top-down inference

processes based on the recipients’ prior world knowledge and bottom-up

Pop culture entertainment has such an impact on public attitudes and value

judgements that Cortes speaks of a ‘movie curriculum on race and ethnicity’

(1992: 75). In other words, the narratives of fictional film and television have a

strong educational influence on audiences, spreading preconceived ideas

Discourse Analysis reveals and deconstructs such subliminal ideological

frames.

According to the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), two central linguistic

for presidential campaigners who intend to convince the electorate of

‘rationalisation’, and ‘mythopoesis’ (van Leeuwen 2007: 92). It has been

shown, for instance, that official documents aiming at immigration control

mainly employ moral abstraction, followed by impersonal authorisation and

finally instrumental rationalisation (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999: 104–111).

Polarising political rhetoric, which aims to distance an ingroup from selected

ethnic or social outgroups, typically relies on culture-specific moral value

judgements (Schubert 2014: 322–323). In telecinematic storytelling, a central

role is played by powerful narratives corresponding to the strategy of

mythopoesis, which may portray actions of characters in an unfavourable

light. Since fictional telecinematic discourse, like election rhetoric, offers one

the production and processing of discourse, thus perpetuating prejudiced

perceptions. When stereotypes are adapted from one social practice of mass

communication to another, it is crucial to apply a ‘knowledge device (K-

device) that regulates the complex management of Common Ground shared

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by participants’ (van Dijk 2014: 54, emphasis in the original). Thus, for the

development of ideological context models, Trump and his advisers can refer

to culture-specific preconceptions that are to some extent reinforced and

out that telecinematic and political discourse correlate significantly in this

respect.

Cognitive-linguistic prototype theory has shown that experientially acquired

categories are marked by a prototype at their centre and fuzzy boundaries at

their margins (Rosch 2000: 3–6). According to the ‘principle of cognitive

economy’ (Evans and Green 2006: 255), prototypicality enables human beings

to categorise and classify entities encountered in everyday life. If the prototype

approach of prototype theory is relevant (Croft and Cruse 2004: 82). For

instance, the repeated representation of similar images may result in a

prototype, such as the portrayal of Mexicans as bandits or Latin lovers.

Alternatively, if no visual images are available, as in entirely verbal political

speeches, prototypes are constructed through lists of attributes, so that the

more criteria an individual item meets, the closer it will be to the prototype.

85), owing to their blatantly derogatory and openly offensive character.

about an out-group (THEM)’ (2002: 15, emphasis in the original). Thus,

stereotypes not only have a classifying function but also explain and preserve

social distinctiveness, which in turn justifies group-related practices (Ramírez

Berg 2002: 28). As a result, stereotypes are ‘a mechanism employed by the

dominant society to rationalise its behaviour toward subordinate groups’

(Limón 1992: 4). From the perspective of social psychology (Schneider 2004:

22–23), stereotyping is the result of both individual experience and mental

templates offered by the culture people are socialised in. Such culture-specific

perceptions are conveyed by parents, teachers, peer groups, institutions, and

by the mass media, whose influence has steadily grown over the past decades.

In his study of Latinos in Hollywood movies, Ramírez Berg (2002)

distinguishes between six fundamental stereotypes. He enumerates them as

English with a heavy accent and was ‘irrational, overly emotional, and quick to

resort to violence’ (Ramírez Berg 2002: 68). Two more recent incarnations of

the bandit are the ‘Latin American gangster/drug runner’ with a different

outer appearance and ‘the inner-city gang member’ (Ramírez Berg 2002: 68),

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yet these are merely superficially different manifestations of the vicious

bandit. In social scientific terms, traditional Mexican stereotypes may be

summarised by the descriptors ‘present time oriented’, ‘immediate

However, such negative perceptions of Mexican-origin people were not

Dijk 2009: 66), can be passed on across generations and even centuries within

a given culture.

In the drama and crime series Breaking Bad, Mexicans and Mexican

Americans mainly appear as drug-related gangsters. In particular, the

stereotype of the cartel member is subdivided into three main categories,

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(example 11), which insinuates that the US leaders are too weak and timid to

defend national economic interests. Example (12) contains the harshest

metaphors in the form of the verbs ‘killing’ and ‘destroying’, portraying