Values and Choices in Television Discourse

A View from Both Sides of the Screen

Roberta Piazza, Louann Haarman, Anne Caborn, Roberta Piazza, Louann Haarman, Anne Caborn

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137478467
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137478474
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

The high-pressured, fast-paced environment of television production leaves little time for producers to reflect on how the potentialities of texts and images will be interpreted outside of the immediate broadcast imperatives. This volume brings together the producers and analysts of television in a formal and productive way.

Part I

The Analysis of the Television Product

Roberta Piazza and Louann Haarman

Part I is a collection of chapters offering a number of perspectives on television discourse by academics working in the fields of media and discourse analysis. While the practitioners’ contributions in the following section address the preparation and the production stage of the television product, revealing choices made on the ‘other side of the screen’ invisible to viewers, the studies in this section address what appears on the viewers’ side. Practitioners’ choices are principally dictated by pressing pragmatic and contingent reasons, deriving for example from time, money or marketing constraints. Academics, while not ignoring this, tend to analyse the finished broadcast product, offering a reading of its multiple aspects. From this perspective the product may be seen as having entailed other kinds of choices, which, rather than by practical imperatives, are motivated by adherence to a system of cultural values and personal or social beliefs.

Similar to the practitioners’ part, this collection is characterised by its multidisciplinarity. The authors represent different theoretical and methodological backgrounds, some of them bringing in expertise derived from a professional past in the production of news. The analytical approach is prevalently comparative (either across countries or private and public networks), for, as Entman (1991) notes, it is precisely through the careful comparison of texts that features peculiar to one or the other emerge, features that would have otherwise remained unremarkable.

Part I opens with a comparative analysis by Bednarek and Caple on the way four British and Australian news providers (BBC World and ABC News 24, The Guardian and Sydney Morning Herald) represent themselves in promotional television advertisements. Taking a multimodal approach, the authors show the different types of engagement that the news media aspire to achieve with their audiences, and the journalistic values that they claim for themselves.

This is followed by chapters focusing specifically on television news and other factual programming. In Chapter 2, Duguid explores values which emerge in the visual and verbal texts of four English language world news channels (France 24, Russia Today, Al Jazeera and China’s CCTV) whose mission statements characterise them in contraposition to the hegemonic power of older world news channels BBC and CNN. She is followed by Koga-Browes (Chapter 3), who analyses a corpus of British and Japanese news images and discusses how camera angles may impose particular standpoints on viewers from which to position themselves vis-à-vis the image. Writing from previous experience as a practising television camera man, he gives examples of how practical problems in filming may determine a certain kind of shot which in turn may suggest a ‘meaning’ to viewers beyond any intentionality on the part of the producer. In Chapter 4, Bonfiglioli offers a quantitative analysis of news angles and frames. Starting from the assumption that news media language and images help shape our understandings, she discusses ideological positioning in news coverage of overweight and obesity by investigating their reported causes, attributions of responsibility and promotion of solutions. In Chapter 5, Lorenzo-Dus addresses the representation of commemorative events by CNN and by British, Argentinian and Spanish broadcasters in television news and documentaries. Her analysis points out similarities and differences in the television data and emphasises the cross-cultural valence of such manifestations in memorialising the cultural traumas of the past.

The two final chapters on factual programming are also carried out in a comparative perspective. In Chapter 6 Piazza discusses the role of the omniscient narrator in the realisation of two documentary films on commercial and public networks (Channel 5 and BBC) regarding Britain’s mobile community of travellers. Piazza’s analysis highlights the interplay of the representation of a disenfranchised group with, in one case, the desire to entertain and, in the other, the desire to offer as far as possible an objective ethnographic report. The closing chapter is a reflection on an example of reality, lifestyle-based programming, the cooking competition, in which Haarman compares British, Australian and American versions of MasterChef. Focusing on the various formats, production strategies and broadcasting styles, she highlights the choices which, within the limits of the programme franchise, enable the country versions to adapt to and represent stereotypical characteristics of the different cultural contexts.

By adopting a comparative and often interdisciplinary approach that considers both the verbal and visual planes, these academic reflections on television discourse in news and other factual programmes bring to the fore the ideological, cultural and commercial choices that can be identified in the discourse of television, choices whose motivations will be discussed by practitioners in Part II of the book.

1

Promotional Videos

What Do They Tell Us about the Value of News?

Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple

Introduction

In this chapter we investigate values in contemporary journalism as expressed through the promotional television advertisements of news organisations. When news organisations advertise themselves, they make claims that are meant to attest to what they stand for: be it that they give us ‘the whole picture’ (The Guardian, UK), that we should ‘know no boundaries’ (the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia), that they offer audiences ‘your news, your way’ (ABC News 24, Australia), or that they demand that we ‘stay ahead, stay connected’ (BBC World News, UK) by engaging with their programmes. In questioning the concepts of ‘value’ and ‘value creation’ (Picard 2010: 10) and what these mean for news organisations and their increasingly active audiences, this chapter explores the way in which news providers sell themselves and/or their products to audiences through promotional television advertisements. This initial study examines promotional television advertisements produced in 2012/2013 for four long-established, well-resourced and widely recognised, and hence ‘legacy’, quality news media organisations: the BBC and The Guardian in the UK, and the ABC and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia. Through analysis of both the verbal and visual features of these advertisements we ask the following questions of these texts: What kind of values do these news organisations present to the world? Do they attempt to redefine themselves in the face of evolving practices? If so, how do they achieve this? The analysis demonstrates the differing degrees of uptake of interaction with audiences, of digital innovation and the ‘values’ that stand as the measure of worth or importance placed in the products and services that these news organisations claim to provide. We start by providing an overview of values in general and values with respect to journalistic practice, before introducing our data and methodology in more detail and presenting and discussing our findings. We conclude by summarising the values that are emphasised by these legacy news outlets today.

Values

The study of promotional television advertisements in this chapter is part of a wider interest that we have developed in recent years around values and journalistic practice. Before considering values in this professional and institutional context, however, it may be useful to consider the general meaning and usage of the word value.

As Table 1.1 shows, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has two main definitions, with several sub-definitions within each.

Table 1.1 Definitions of value

OED definitions for value

Definition 1: ‘Worth or quality as measured by a standard of equivalence.’ 15 sub-definitions (incl. rare/obs.) Definition 2: ‘Worth based on esteem; quality viewed in terms of importance, usefulness, desirability, etc.’ 6 sub-definitions (incl. rare/obs.)

What these definitions illustrate is that value concerns some kind of standard and is evaluated positively. Value also seems an important concept: the OED includes about ten phrases within the entry for value (e.g. of value, to add value to, value for money. . .), and the word value also occurs in 91 phrases in 87 other entries (e.g. asset value, family values, land-value, news value. . .). Most of these 91 phrases have to do with business and law and value in the sense of money, and many technical terms are present (e.g. significance value). Interestingly for us in the context of this chapter, news value is one of these recognised phrases in the OED. We will return to this phrase later in the chapter. That value is an important concept can also be inferred from the fact that value occurs in many compounds (e.g. value growth, value system, value-driven, value judgment), including compounds where value is constructed as an objective: value-creating, value-enhancing, value-making, value-adding and so on. These compounds reinforce the notion that value appears to be inherently positive.

To briefly consider how the word value is actually used in general British English we can consult the British National Corpus (BNC), a corpus of 100 million words of spoken and written British English, mainly from the 1990s. Table 1.2 lists the top 20 lexical collocates – words that co-occur significantly with the word form values – limited to those collocates that occur across more than 20 texts (log likelihood measure, maximum window span of 4). Here we can see that apart from the economic land/property and the technical serum/rateable/parameter/reflectance/range, values are often associated with beliefs, attitudes and norms; that they are perhaps said to occur in a set; that they are associated with culture (moral, cultural, social, traditional, society, Victorian) and that they may be objects of (dis)agreement or negotiation (shared/different). Interestingly, news is not a very frequent collocate of values in the BNC (the exact term news values occurs 15 times across as many texts).

Table 1.2 Collocation analysis: values

Top 20 collocates for values in the BNC (>20 texts)
Nouns	beliefs, attitudes, serum, norms, parameter, land, set, reflectance, society, property, range
Adjectives	moral, cultural, traditional, different, rateable, shared, social, Victorian

To sum up this general overview, it appears that values concern some kind of standard; they define a culture; they are often seen as positive or as an objective to attain; they are important for our society; and they are open to negotiation. In the context of this chapter’s focus on journalism, we can thus ask the following questions: what kinds of standards can we discover; how do values define journalism as a culture; how do news institutions try to attain ‘value’; what kinds of values are important for journalism; which values are emphasised at different times (negotiation); are there any value shifts; and so on. We believe that these are important questions to ask of our news media in times of such monumental change, and that values are therefore an interesting object for journalism research.

Values and journalistic practice

As mentioned above, this chapter is part of our wider research interest in values and journalistic practice. There are in fact different ways in which values could be addressed in this professional and institutional context. To name but a few perspectives, we could study journalistic values as the moral-ethical principles that journalists hold (partially codified in the codes of practice that members of news organisations are supposed to adhere to). This relates to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• A Word of Introduction
• Part I: The Analysis of the Television Product
• Part II: What’s Behind the Screen?
• Index