This book offers a comparative study of the political debate on the Euro crisis in the press. In the tradition of Critical Discourse Analysis, it investigates the ways in which discourse produces and reproduces social domination, and demystifies the hegemony of specific discourses. Combining quantitative content-based and qualitative text-based analyses, the book examines the discursive constructions of the crisis in a selection of broadsheet newspapers in Germany, Poland, and the UK, and discloses their ideological foundations. The analysis of the representations of the crisis, social actors and their agency, and legitimating strategies, including the use of metaphors, demonstrates how neoliberalism determined the hegemonic discourse on the Euro crisis. It resulted in ideologically biased discursive constructions that created and legitimised an image of non-agentic social change. The book will appeal to an international audience of discourse and media studies. It will be of interest to university teachers, graduate and undergraduate students and researchers of international and comparative media studies, political communication, linguistics, and politics.

Freedom is identified as the idea that determines the American sense of exceptional national identity. Also American politicians in the United States very often refer in their speeches to American freedoms. Therefore, in this paper, I focus on the qualitative content analysis of the 2008 US presidential campaign speeches to investigate how the concepts of freedom are used in America and how they are translated into practice in candidates' policies. Moreover, the purpose of this work is to explore the complex relationship between progressive and conservative notions of freedom on the American political scene today. Reflecting on the speeches delivered by the presidential candidates, it aims to answer the following questions: how the conservative and progressive notions of freedom differ, whether the nominees of the Democratic and Republican Parties, Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, conformed to them in their statements, or have Democrats and Republicans lost their distinct perspectives on the notion of freedom, now speaking a common language.