News Discourse

Monika Bednarek, Helen Caple

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350063723
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sprachen & Linguistik
• Subtopic: Sprachliche Semantik

Now reissued and retypeset, this canonical book explores the role of language and images in newspaper, radio, online and television news. The authors introduce useful frameworks for analysing language, image and the interaction between the two, and illustrate these with authentic news stories from around the English-speaking world, ranging from the Oktoberfest to environmental disasters to the killing of Osama bin Laden. This analysis persuasively illustrates how events are retold in the news and made 'newsworthy' through both language and image. This clearly written and accessible introduction to news discourse is essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers in linguistics, media and journalism studies and semiotics.

1

Introduction

1 What is this book about?

This book is about news discourse – the kind of discourse we encounter when we turn on the television, when we open the newspaper, when we go online or when we switch on the radio to get our dose of daily happenings. The book offers readers an introduction to some of the main characteristics of news discourse but it also aims to introduce particular ways of analysing this discourse based on our own research into news discourse. It further aims to demonstrate the insights such news analysis can offer researchers. More precisely, this book is written for anyone interested in the meanings made through language and images in the news. Although it does assume some linguistic background knowledge on the part of readers, we believe that researchers in the area of Media/Journalism and Communications Studies will also find many sections useful.

We start this book by outlining a working definition of news discourse and discuss motivations for studying such discourse. We also summarize the main approaches to the analysis of news discourse, pointing out how this book fits within such approaches. Our objectives for this first chapter are to enable readers to understand:

what news discourse covers and why we should study it

what the main approaches to news discourse are in Linguistics

what some of the key theories of news discourse are in Media/Journalism and Communications Studies

what this book is about.

2 What is news discourse?

Before proceeding any further, it may be useful to clarify what we mean by news discourse. There are two issues to consider: First, what do we mean by news discourse ?, and secondly, what do we mean by news discourse? Both questions are in fact tricky to answer and we will not attempt to discuss them exhaustively here; rather, we provide a working definition that frames the concerns of this book. Definitions both of discourse and of news are plentiful and have been discussed in different disciplines (see, for example, Baker 2006: 3–5 on discourse and Lamble 2011: 34–5 on news). In this book, we consider discourse as multimodal, or multisemiotic,¹ that is, not being restricted to the semiotic system of language alone but, crucially, also incorporating the semiotic system of images.² We also look at how such discourse (language and image) is actually put to use and how it contributes to the construction of news. This distinguishes us from other researchers who only include language in the analysis of news discourse, those who define discourse in other ways or those who see discourse as reflecting rather than actively constructing what is news. We will discuss some alternative approaches in Section 4.

Further, news discourse for us is defined ‘externally’ at this stage, rather than through common discourse features. In other words, saying that this book is about news discourse means that it discusses the discourse that audiences encounter in news bulletins, news programmes, on news websites, or in the newspaper – discourse that reports on newsworthy events, happenings and issues. The four stories in Table 1.1 on pp. 3–5 are examples of what we consider news discourse in this book, showing some of the reporting on the 2010 Pike river coal mine accident in New Zealand in online, print, radio and TV news. Story extracts are in the left-hand column, with further information in the right-hand column.

TABLE 1.1 Online, print, radio and TV news discourse

TABLE 1.1 illustrates some of the kinds of news discourse that we will discuss in this book. Thus, in exploring news discourse we will draw on examples not only from news stories in newspapers but also discuss online news (e.g. online video news summaries in Chapter 9), radio news (e.g. podcasts in Chapter 6) and televisual news (e.g. text–image relations in Chapter 5). To sum up, this book introduces ways to research and analyse the use of language and images that report on newsworthy events, happenings and issues across a range of news outlets.

We recognize of course, that there is a lot of variety within these kinds of news discourse – for example, newspapers include different sections (national/international/business/sports news). On television and radio we encounter news documentaries, news and current affairs programmes (e.g. Today Tonight (Seven network, Australia) and Panorama (BBC, UK)), news interviews, or investigative journalism programmes (e.g. NPR’s All Things Considered (US) and Dateline (SBS, Australia)). Online we can come across news blogs, Twitter news updates, Google news, news feeds, You Tube news videos, news via digg or news websites. More generally, there is both mainstream news and alternative or specialist news, both community/local, provincial/rural, regional, metropolitan, and national news, both paid news (e.g. newspapers) and ‘free’ news (e.g. ‘freesheets’). Our main focus in this book will be on the ‘news’ section of national and metropolitan print newspapers because this is where most linguistic research to date has been done. However, as mentioned above, we will also discuss other news media forms (e.g. online, radio). While we will not be able to explore all different types of news discourse to the same extent, it is clearly important to recognize this variety.

Another focus of this book is that we limit our discussion to English-speaking news discourse of the ‘Western’ world (UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, NZ), as there are too many cross-linguistic and cross-cultural differences to do justice to news discourse in other languages and cultures within the scope of our discussion. This is also where our own research is situated. There is, however, a growing number of cross-cultural or comparative research projects, for instance comparing Britain, the United States and Germany (Lauerbach 2007), Britain, the United States and Italy (Haarman and Lombardo 2009), Britain and Japan (Murata 2007), Britain and Italy (Semino 2002, Pounds 2010) to name but a few. Research on languages other than English and on English-language newspapers outside the above countries also exists.

3 Why study news discourse?

Now that we have introduced our working definition of news discourse and the focus of our book, it is time to talk about the motivations for studying news discourse. Put simply, three reasons for such study are (1) there is a lot of it; (2) it is easy to collect examples of it; and (3) most importantly, since we all spend a lot of our time consuming it, it has great potential to exert considerable influence over us. In the academic literature, it is well documented that the production and distribution of news discourse is immense and that we spend a large portion of our waking hours attending to the news media. Some will even go as far as to suggest that news is an addiction (see Lamble 2011: 3). We listen, watch, read and then share with family, friends and colleagues. Sometimes we may modify our behaviour, ideas and beliefs, based on what we have r ead or heard and in this way we navigate our paths through our lives as members of a particular social group. This also points to the power of the media: the influence they exert both on our governments and major institutions as well as their ability to shape our ideas and behaviours.

In this book we study news discourse from a linguistic/semiotic perspective, and there are specific reasons behind this approach as well. Linguists and social semioticians would argue that the relationship between the producers of news media, the institutions and key figures that are scrutinized by them and the audiences who consume their end products is a relationship that is enacted principally through semiotic resources – words, sounds and images. The choices made in the use of language and sounds, in the capture and composition of images and in the layout and organization of these on the page or the screen have meanings, and these meanings may have powerful impacts. A linguistic/semiotic analysis of these choices and the ways in which they combine can help us to discover the meaning potential that lies behind the techniques used by news workers in their daily crafting of the news discourse we immerse ourselves in. We will introduce our own research-based linguistic and semiotic frameworks in Chapters 3, 6 and 7 in this book and hope to demonstrate how the application of such frameworks can give us detailed insights into the way meanings are discursively construed in the news. Other chapters (e.g. Chapters 5, 8 and 9) also demonstrate how looking at news discourse through a linguistic and semiotic perspective throws light upon the construction of news.

Another way in which a linguistic/semiotic perspective may be useful is in providing detailed evidence for researchers in other disciplines, for example in Journalism. A special issue of Journalism Studies dedicated to language and journalism (Richardson 2008a) explores this in more detail. Indeed, a systematic linguistic/semiotic analysis of news discourse has the potential to provide useful underpinnings for research in Media/Journalism and Communications Studies – whether that concerns the analysis of ideological positioning and power relations or the analysis of news practice and norms (cf. Chapter 3 on news values). Therefore, cross-disciplinary research projects that include detailed linguistic or semiotic analyses can provide rich multiperspectival results that are empirically grounded and frequently testable and replicable, and often make use of sophisticated analytic frameworks. In the following section, we introduce the principle linguistic frameworks that are commonly applied to the analysis of news discourse and position our own work within these approaches.

4 How to study news discourse?

News discourse has a long history of being explored in a variety of disciplines, including Journalism, Sociology, Linguistics and Semiotics, because its study ‘has much to offer to the different disciplines on whose territory it touches’ (Bell 1991: 5). For any researcher interested in exploring news discourse it is helpful to be familiar with some of the most important approaches and to locate themselves within this landscape of media research. We therefore start this section with an outline of key approaches in Linguistics, and how we position ourselves in relation to these in this book, and will then touch upon major theories in Media/Journalism and Communications Studies. For further details on each approach readers are directed to the references (not exhaustive) included under each heading.

4.1 Key approaches in linguistics

The sociolinguistic approach

Sociolinguistic concerns about news discourse tend to centre on correlations between style and social factors. In other words, to what extent is there a correlation between features of news discourse and the presumed social status of the audience of such discourse? This kind of research is closely connected to Bell’s (e.g. 1991) and Jucker’s (1992) study of news discourse. They both found that newspapers targeting different groups of audiences also use different types of apposition patterns. For instance, newspapers targeted at the (upper-) middle classes (such as The Times, the Guardian) deleted fewer determiners than newspapers targeted more at the working classes (such as the Daily Mirror, the Sun): the latter newspapers had more instances of naming expressions in the form businessman John Morris rather than the businessman John Morris. In other words, the language of newspapers varies depending on target audience. Bell calls this audience design, meaning that ‘newscasters are designing their speech for their audience’ (1991: 121). In the context of a different media form, Bell (1991: 110–22) investigates linguistic differences between radio stations in New Zealand. Conboy (2010) takes a sociolinguistic approach to the language of journalism across time.

The conversation analytical approach

This approach is located within the tradition of Conversation Analysis (Sidnell 2010), which focuses on the close analysis of spoken interaction. Regarding news discourse, such studies explore spoken interaction in the context of news interviews (e.g. Greatbatch 1998, Clayman and Heritage 2002). For instance, Clayman and Heritage (2002) found that both in the United Kingdom and in the United States, news interviews involve a mixture of adversarialness and objectivity, which becomes apparent through their investigation of a variety of linguistic features including question design. There are also other studies on news interviews that follow different linguistic traditions (e.g. Bell and van Leeuwen 1994).

The systemic functional linguistic approa...