ABSTRACT
This chapter will show how conflict is created through news discourse, especially in general election campaigns. The representation of differing party-political policies as artificially exaggerated conflicting positions can be facilitated through constructed binary opposites (oppositions) triggered at the syntactic level. The premise is that political discourse is predisposed to representing complex moral positions, policies and practices as simple, polarised “stark” contrasts. At times of heightened political debate, such as general election and referendum campaigns, alternative positions are overstated to the extent that the discourse used to characterise certain policies plays a part in constituting that conflict. In other words, conflict is constructed through discourse, often by offering up “either/or” choices to the electorate. The UK Prime Minister Theresa May, for instance, in the 2017 general election campaign, claimed in the aftermath of a terrorist bomb at a Manchester Arena concert that killed 23 people that “[t]he choice that people face at the general election has just become starker” (Merrick, 26 May 2017). She asserted that the electorate had to choose between herself – who was “working to protect the national interest and protect our security” – and Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, “who, frankly, is not up to the job”. The implied message, of course, was that the election of Corbyn would compromise national security.
