Abstract

Sense-making and sense-giving represent an issue of communication (Weick et al. 2005). The former is associated with emotional processes of crisisassessment and cognitive processes of justifying and seeking social acceptance for decisions (Søderberg and Vaara 2003), while the latter is the framework communicated to the public to facilitate their understanding and subsequently motivate certain actions (Maitlis and Christianson 2014). The medium used to communicate this framework varies depending on the relationship an authority figure has with their audience. Analysis of this communication and its medium has focused primarily on political leaders through the lens of the Charismatic, Ideological and Pragmatic (CIP) model (Crayne and Medeiros 2020), and of the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) (Wodak 2021). This study uses both the CIP model and the DHA via Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) to examine influential physicians communicating the COVID-19 crisis in health podcasts in the U.S. and Australia. It therefore interprets the healthrelated information they disseminate, and how this information is framed and given meaning, to develop a perspective on how and why these podcasters differ in how they make sense of the crisis and, consequently, appeal to a broader audience.

Baker, Paul. 2006. Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.

https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350933996

Baker, Paul. 2014. Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Boyd, Ryan L., Ashwini Ashokkumar, Sarah Seraj, and James W. Pennebaker. 2022. The Development and Psychometric Properties of LIWC-22. University of Texas at Austin.

https://www.liwc.app

Crayne, Matthew P., and Kelsey E. Medeiros. 2021. "Making Sense of Crisis: Charismatic, Ideological, and Pragmatic Leadership in Response to COVID-19". American Psychologist 76 (3): 462-474.

https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000715

Egan, Lauren. 2020. "Trump Calls Coronavirus Democrats' 'New Hoax'". NBC News, February 28.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-calls-coronavirus-democrats-new-hoax-n1145721

Gillins, Mathew, Gerlinde Mautner, and Paul Baker. 2023. Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168144

Hunt, Daniel, and Gavin Brooks. 2020. Corpus, Discourse and Mental Health. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350059207

Hunter, Samuel T., Liliya Cushenberry, Christian Thoroughgood, Johanna E. Johnson, and Gina Scott Ligon. 2011. "First and Ten Leadership: A Historiometric Investigation of the CIP Leadership Model". The Leadership Quarterly 22: 70-91.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2010.12.008

Kealey, Terence. 2020. "South Korea Listened to the Experts". CNN, April 7.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/07/opinions/terence-kealey-south-korea-listened-to-the-experts/index.html

Maitlis, Sally, and Marlys Christianson. 2014. "Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward". The Academy of Management Annals 8 (1): 57-125.

https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2014.873177

Mautner, Gerlinde. 2016. "Checks and Balances: How Corpus Linguistics can Contribute to CDA". In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (Introducing Qualitative Methods Series). 3rd ed., edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 154-179. London: Sage.

McEnery, Tony, and Andrew Hardie. 2012. Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511981395

Orvell, Ariana, Ethan Kross, and Susan A. Gelman. 2017. "How 'You' Makes Meaning". Science 355: 1299-1302.

https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaj2014

Phillips, Tom. 2020. "Jair Bolsonaro Claims Brazilians 'Never Catch Anything' as COVID-19 Cases Rise". The Guardian, March 26.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/mar/27/jair-bolsonaro-claims-brazilians-never-catch-anything-as-covid-19-cases-rise

Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2016. "The Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA)". In Methods of Critical Discourse Studies (Introducing Qualitative Methods Series). 3rd ed., edited by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer, 23-61. London: Sage.

Rouhizadeh, Masoud, Kokil Jaidka, Laura Smith, H. Andrew Schwartz, Anneke Buffone, and Lyle H. Ungar. 2018. "Identifying Locus of Control in Social Media Language". In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 1146-1152. Bruxelles: Association for Computational Linguistics.

https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D18-1145

Scott, Mike. 2016. WordSmith Tools (Version 7). Stroud: Lexical Analysis Software.

Soderberg, Anne-Marie, and Eero Vaara. 2003. Merging across Borders: People, Cultures and Politics. København: Copenhagen Business School Press.

Tausczik, Yla R., and James Pennebaker. 2010. "The Psychological Meaning of Words: LIWC and Computerized Text Analysis Methods". Journal of Language and Social Psychology 29 (1): 24-54.

https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X09351676

The Lancet. 2020. "COVID-19: Learning from Experience". The Lancet 395 (10229): 1011.

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30686-3

Widdowson, Henry G. 2004. Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.

https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470758427

Wodak, Ruth. 2021. "Crisis Communication and Crisis Management during COVID-19". Global Discourse 11 (3): 329-353.

https://doi.org/10.1332/204378921X16100431230102

World Health Organization - WHO. 2021. Global Strategy on Digital Health 2020-2025.

https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/10665/344249.

Links to Podcasts

Coronacast

https://www.abc.net.au/radio/programs/coronacast

Coronavirus: Fact vs. Fiction

Podcast on CNN Audio (no longer accessible to the public)