A ‘wind of change’—shaping public opinion of the Arab Spring using metaphors

How does mass media affect the way we think about controversial topics such as the “Arab Spring”? What persuasive role do metaphors play especially in opinion pieces? We analyze how the political events of the years 2010–2011 in the Middle East and North Africa Region (“Arab Spring”) are categorized and assessed using metaphorical constructions in newspaper opinion pieces. We show ways in which particularly the use of metaphors reveals how the media tried to achieve acceptance for the events based on our cultural models (Quinn and Holland, 1987), which are grounded on our western knowledge. To this end, we constructed a pipeline that automatically detects (and filters) metaphors appearing within certain grammatical constructions, before clustering them by presumed source and target domains (Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). The results give us insights into how the “Arab Spring” is metaphorically structured by semantic clusters in opinion pieces.