Media Studies

Media Discourse (II)

MA I, American Studies

Media Discourse
LECTURE OUTLINE
Media discourse the macro-level of
analysis
Discourses
Genres
The news narrative

Styles (the identity of journalists not

todays topic)

Media Discourse
Discourse analysis macro-level
Discourses
Definition: ways of representing the world particular
worldviews (sets of beliefs, values, attitudes), positions or
ideologies, such as liberal discourse, conservative
discourse, entrepreneurial discourse etc. (Fairclough
2003)
How can we recognize discourses in texts?
Themes
Viewpoints
Vocabulary (semantic fields, semantic relations, metaphors etc.)

Media Discourse
http://www.tfpstudentaction.org/politically-incorrect/abortion/10-reasons-why-abortion-is-evil.h
tml

10 Reasons Why Abortion is Evil & Not a "Pro-Choice"

By TFP Student Action

Since the legalization of abortion in 1973, over 54 million
unborn children have been killed, more than the entire population
of Spain. That's 1 baby every 20 seconds.

By the time you finish reading this article, more than 30 innocent
lives will be lost. Gods plan for them will be ruined forever.
Can we remain indifferent to such immense human slaughter?
NO. So please read the top 10 reasons why abortion is wrong and
must be opposed:

Media Discourse
Genres
Genre is the term used for a specific product of a
social practice. It is a form of discourse,
culturally recognized, which, more or less, obeys
socially agreed structures. [...] Examples of
literary and linguistic genres are novels, poems,
university lectures, biology lab reports, letters,
theatre reviews. [...] Genre is also sometimes used
as a term for social events that use regular linguistic
and discoursal patterns, such as committee meeting,
and thus, to some extent, can overlap with the term
social practice. Genres can also be seen from the
point of the institutions within which they evolved.
Thus, minutes of meetings, annual reports, business
correspondence are associated with business

Media Discourse
Media genres examples:

News stories
Editorials/ Leading articles
Columns
Features
Letters to the editor
Reality shows
Talk shows

Media Discourse
Journalists are the story-tellers of our age (Bell 1991:
147)
Classification of stories in the news:
Hard news stories (information of public interest/
relevance that needs to be delivered right away
adapted narrative structure)
Soft news/feature stories (human interest stories
classic narrative structure)
But what are narratives in general? How do news stories

Media Discourse
A brief definition of narratives
A narrative is a perceived sequence of non-randomly
connected events, typically involving, as the
experiencing agonist, humans or quasi-humans, or
other sentient beings, from whose experience we can
learn. [] our preference is often for the sequence of
connected events to take shape around a state or
period of turbulence or crisis, subsequently
resolved. (Toolan 2001: 8)
foregrounded individuals
sequenced and interrelated events
crisis to resolution progression

Media Discourse
Typical characteristics of narratives:

A degree of artificial fabrication or constructedness

sequence, emphasis and pace are usually planned
A degree of prefabrication (they contain elements which
create the impression we have seen or heard them before)
A trajectory they usually go somewhere or are expected
to go somewhere; they are expected to have beginnings,
middles or ends (which the teller knows and controls)
They have a teller, who is important, even if s/he is
backgrounded or invisible;
They recount happenings that may be spatially and
temporally removed from both teller and audience. (Toolan
2001: 4-5)

Media Discourse
The structure of oral narratives of personal
experience William Labov and Joshua
Waltzkey (American sociolinguists)
Two main functions of the narrative:
The referential function: the narrative functions
as a means of recapitulating experience in an
ordered set of clauses that matches the temporal
sequence of the original experience;
The evaluative function: the narrative should
have a point, should be worth telling, as far as
the teller (and preferably the addressee also) is

Media Discourse
A

six-part structure for a fully-formed oral

narrative, later adapted to news stories by Teun van
Dijk and Allan Bell.

The six parts of the oral narrative:

(1)Abstract: What, in a nutshell, is this story about?
(2)Orientation: Who, when, where?
(3)Complicating action: What happened and then what
happened?
(4)Evaluation: So what? How or why is this interesting?
(5)Result or resolution: What finally happened?
(6)Coda: Thats it, Ive finished and I am bridging back
to our present situation (in Toolan 2001: 148)

Media Discourse
How do the characteristics and structure of the (oral)
narrative translate in news stories?
As a genre, news stories are regulated by media
production and consumption practices:
objectivity
use of news sources
news values (constructing meaning for ideal,
projected audiences)
gate-keeping and agenda-setting
economic determinants news as commodity
(Fulton 2005, among others)

Media Discourse
In hard news stories, Labovs structural elements
are modified (see Bell 1991, in your reader):
the abstract is not optional it is the most
important part of the news story, to be found in
the headline and the lead;
the events are not narrated chronologically, but
in order of their importance/ newsworthiness
the inverted pyramid style;
the resolution typically missing or not final;

Media Discourse
In

hard news stories, Labovs structural

elements are modified (see Bell 1991, in your
reader):

usually no coda at the end of a news story;

news story relies a lot on direct quotation
intertextuality/ multiple voices included (the
norms of balance and impartiality)
complex syntax:

Media Discourse
Six or seven soldiers were wounded when at least three
men,
believed to be leftist guerillas, used highpowered weapons in an ambush of a bus carrying 28
passengers 20 kilometers north of the capital
Tegucigalpa, United States embassy spokesman Terry
Kneebone said. (example from Bell 1991)

Other features of the hard news story, related to

the ideal of objectivity:
a third-person narration, in which the narrative
voice is externalised and elided from the account
a high proportion of empirical observation regarding
dates, places, times, amounts of money and so on

Media Discourse
a lack of modality, that is, an absence of
adjectives, adverbs and phrases indicating
evaluation or opinion, and a preponderance of
declarative verbs indicating certainty (BUT low
level
modality,
metaphors,
loaded
representations,
assumptions
introduce
evaluation) (Fulton 2005: 232)

Soft news stories are closer to the classic

narrative structure (chronological sequence,
evaluation, third-person narrative within the
story or first-person narrative, resolution).

Media Discourse
Teun van Dijk (linguist) and Allan Bell (media
scholar) have analyzed hundreds of news stories
and come up with a classification of the structural
elements that make up the news (for details, see
excerpts from Bell in the reader):
News text
Abstract

Attribution

Headline Lead
Episode n

Source Place

Story
Time

Episode 1

Media Discourse
An episode consists of events and an event has
the following components:

Attribution
Actors
Setting (Time, Place)
Action
Follow-up (Consequences, Reaction)
Commentary (Context, Evaluation, Expectations)
Background (Previous episodes, History)

Media Discourse
In news stories, journalists can manipulate by:
making certain elements salient by placing them
in the headline, lead or other key positions;
creating the impression of intertextuality (multiple
viewpoints, deliberation etc.) while citing mainly
certain viewpoints (official, for example) and
naturalizing particular worldviews and ideologies;
leaving out events without the readers noticing,
due to the reverse chronological order;
obscuring causation also related to the
amalgamated chronological sequence;
decontextualising agency no resolution, little
background, a sense of temporality in the present;

Media Discourse
overemphasising individual responsibility and
blame to the detriment of an analysis of
institutions, socio-political causes etc.;
focusing on the individual as a fictional character
individualising or narrativising news: heroes,
victims a feature of soft news, linked to the
phenomenon of tabloidization;
oversimplifying
events little
discussion,
contextual analysis
(Bell 1991; Fulton 2005; Richardson 2007)

Media Discourse
Fulton believes that in this way readers are
disempowered, exposed only to a mosaic
of stories with similar plot lines and
characters,
with
little
context,
no
resolution
(inexplicability),
and
overreliance on the agency of individual
characters political leaders, movie stars,
charismatic individuals to restore order
in an otherwise chaotic world.

Media Discourse
News story analysis handouts:
What structural elements can you recognize?
What is the order in which the events are narrated in
the text? Can you retell the story in chronological
order?
What sources are quoted? Are there participants who
are left out or represented to a lesser extent?
What elements are given salience? (selection and
position in the text)
How is evaluation realized?
What discourses can you identify in the news (themes
and viewpoints)?
What is the background knowledge the journalist relies
on in communicating with his/her ideal audience?

References
Bell, A. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford UK &
Cambridge MA: Blackwell.
Bloor, M. And Bloor, Th. (2007). The Practice of Critical
Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. London: Hodder
Education.
Fairclough, N. 2003. Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis
for Social Research. London and New York: Routledge.
Fulton, H. et. al. 2005. Narrative and Media. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Richardson, J.E. 2007. Analysing Newspapers An Approach
from Critical Discourse Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan.
Toolan, M. 2001. Narrative: A critical linguistic introduction
(2nd ed.). London & New York: Routledge.