‘Situation improvement’ as reassurance: The discursive management of crisis in news discourse

Crisis discourse is a significant site for reporting crises and for discursively managing the public’s emotions. Existing studies of this discourse have largely examined how crises are discursively constructed and responded to, with reassurance treated primarily as a function of responses; few have focused on the reassuring potential of the situation itself. This study therefore investigates the discursive strategies through which media reports construe the COVID-19 situation as improving – a form of reassurance grounded in the situation. Using a mixed-methods approach, the data are analyzed with reference to the appraisal framework and the re-/coupling concept in systemic functional linguistics. Situation improvement is achieved discursively by mitigating and inverting negative evaluations of the crisis: negative values are downgraded or recoupled to improvement-oriented targets, which constructs a sense of persistent threat while subtly inviting a more positive reading of the situation. These findings could deepen understanding of the discursive management of crisis and the role of linguistic analysis in illuminating crisis communication and public reassurance in media discourse.