I do not want to get too personal here, but apart from marriage & kid-having, one of the happiest moments of my life was reading through Bourdieu's Language and Symbolic Power and seeing him refer to "sciences" such as "semiotics"... with the quotation marks and all. It was very liberating. I'd always suspected that semiotics was a load of shit, and here was someone handily disposing of said load of shit in a remarkably efficient fashion. It was like waking up and discovering leprechauns had dealt with that pile of rancid laundry you'd been avoiding for over a month.
Bourdieu's critique of semiotics boils down to the argument that people only ever say things, and people only ever understand things, or try to understand things, within specific social, cultural, historical, and political contexts. In other words, nobody ever hears someone else say anything and asks the question "what does that mean?" while omitting, consciously or otherwise, the related questions "who the fuck are you and what do you want?" Semiotics pretends everyone constantly shows each other "signs" like as if you break out semaphore flags whenever you want to tell the world you need to take a dump.
I can tell you are all glued to your fucking keyboards.
The point, which I concede is oblique, is that this is nonsense. Here we have a post from a self-confessed semiologist who applies the full force of his discipline... and comes up with precisely the wrong conclusion.
Applied semiology in that post is merely applied axe-grinding. The proper interpretive procedure for the serious person is instead, you know, investigation: the less glamorous business of figuring out not merely what the writer might have meant but also all the various contexts that gave rise to the articles in the first place. Speaking generally, journalists, and after them, scholars, attempt to reconstruct such issues through a process often called "research."
Another dumbass way besides "semiology" to avoid having to work to understand stuff is called "intentionalism." Fortunately, such modalities are confined to a less than serious lunatic fringe.