ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how conflict is created through news discourse, especially in general election campaigns. It describes how the discourse of “stark choices” in newspaper editorial columns – mirroring the discourse of the politicians that they promote – is partly facilitated by oppositions that are “triggered” and exploited by the limitations of syntax, which encourages “either/or” types of constructions within or between adjacent sentences. The encouragement of readers to consider complex realities as “brutally simple” is echoed by the phrase “stark choice”, which was used to frame several crucial editorial columns in the 2015 and 2017 election campaigns. The chapter draws on how the particular strategy – just one of many employed by the right-wing press – is used to promote the Conservative Party in general election campaigning editorials while simultaneously demonising all other options. It discusses a sample of the ways in which oppositions in the data create consistent positive and negative representations of Conservatives and Labour respectively.
