News Analysis

Case Studies of international and National News in the Press

Teun A. van Dijk

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136601989
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoria: Communication Studies

First Published in 1987. This book presents a series of case studies that illustrate the structures of national and international news in the press. It first summarizes our discourse analytical theory of the processes and structures of news reports as it has been developed in the last five years.

1
The Analysis of News as Discourse

News as Discourse

One of the most obvious properties of media news, ignored or neglected in both traditional and more recent approaches to media reporting, is that news reports, whether in the press or on TV, constitute a particular type of discourse. The prevailing influence of the social sciences in the study of mass communication has led to a nearly exclusive focus on the economic, political, social, or psychological aspects of news processing. This orientation provided important insights into the (macro) conditions of news production and into the uses or effects of mass media reporting. The message itself in such studies tended to receive attention only as far as it could provide information about the factors of its various contexts. Traditional, as well as more recent, forms of content analysis aimed at a methodologically adequate description of selected properties of such media messages with the primary goal to be able to make contextual inferences. The adequacy of this approach resided more in the reliability of scoring categories and in the sophisticated nature of the statistical treatment of the results than in the systematic analysis and understanding of the media messages in their own right.

Against the background of current developments in the new interdisciplinary study of discourse, we are now able to take a different approach. Central to this new orientation is its perspective on the very core of the process of mass communication, viz the mediated discourses themselves. No longer are these discourses merely analyzed in terms of practical, while observable and countable, intermediary variables between properties of sources or production conditions and characteristics of media users or effects. Media discourses in general, and news reports in particular, should also be accounted for in their own right, e.g., as particular types of language use or text and as specific kinds of sociocultural practice.

This means, first of all, that such media discourses should be analyzed in terms of their structures at various levels of description. Such a structural analysis is not limited to the grammatical description of phonological, morphological, syntactic, or semantic structures of isolated words, word groups, or sentences as it is customary in structural or generative linguistics. Discourses also have more complex, higher-level properties, such as coherence relations between sentences, overall topics, and schematic forms, as well as stylistic and rhetorical dimensions. Both as monological, printed, or spoken, text and as dialogical interaction, media discourses thus receive an integrated account of their more general as well as their more distinctive organization. In this way we are able, for instance, to describe the structures and textual functions of headlines or leads of news reports in the press, as well as the style, ordering, and thematic organization of such media stories. Similarly, news interviews or talk shows can be analyzed in terms of turn taking, sequencing, or strategic moves in publicly communicated verbal interaction.

Yet, this is not all. The study of discourse is not limited to an explicit account of structures per se. Developments in the study of discourse in such diverse disciplines as speech communication, cognitive psychology, social psychology, microsociology, and ethnography have shown that discourse is not simply an isolated textual or dialogical structure. Rather it is a complex communicative event that also embodies a social context, featuring participants (and their properties) as well as production and reception processes. Although a sound structural analysis of media discourse would already provide important contributions to the study of mass communication, it is this wider, contextual perspective on discourse that makes it particularly relevant for the study of media discourse. In this way, discourse analysis can also yield new insights into the processes of production and uses that are justifiably found to be of paramount importance in mass communication research. New in this approach is that the many factors or constraints in production, from economic conditions to social and institutional routines of newsmaking, can now be related explicitly to various structural properties of news reports. The same is true for reception processes: Understanding, memorization, and reproduction of news information can now be studied as a function of both textual and contextual (cognitive, social) properties of the communication process.

The Development of Discourse Analysis

The application of discourse analysis in mass communication research is relatively new; therefore, a brief introduction is necessary to discuss the backgrounds and developments of this new approach (see van Dijk, 1985c, for details). At the same time, this historical sketch may show the multi-disciplinary roots as well as the theoretical and methodological diversity of the field of discourse analysis.

Although the history of the new cross-discipline of discourse studies (in German “Textwissenschaft”) can be traced back to ancient treatises of rhetoric and poetics of more than 2,000 years ago, its modern development dates from the mid-1960s. Parallel to, and methodologically often inspired by, the development of both structural and generative grammars in linguistics, the present study of discourse has one of its roots in anthropology and ethnography and in the relationships of these disciplines with poetics and semiotics. Against the historical background of the movement of Russian formalism that accompanied the Soviet Revolution, anthropologists, linguists, and literary scholars provided the first elementary structural analyses of various types of discourse (Erlich, 1965). Until now, perhaps the most influential of these analyses across many disciplinary boundaries has been the morphology of the Russian folktale proposed by Vladimir Propp 60 years ago (Propp, 1928/1958).

Structuralism, Semiotics, Narrative Analysis, and Ethnography

Unknown in the West for decades, Propps study and those of other early formalists inspired the structural anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958, 1960) in the 1960s. Together with new developments in structural linguistics, his work on the analysis of myths and the first French translations of the Russian formalists (Todorov, 1966b) stimulated the growing movement that is now known as French structuralism. One major characteristic of this structuralist approach is its interest for the analysis of narrative. Both literary and everyday stories, followed by accounts of film and social myths, thus received a linguistically inspired description by such scholars as Barthes (1966), Greimas (1966), Todorov (1966a, 1969), Kristeva (1969), Eco (1966; 1976), Metz (1966), and Bremond (1964, 1973), among many others (Communications, 1964, 1966; see Culler, 1975, for an introduction). Although these initial studies started around 1964, their sociocultural context and especially their influence was not independent of the student movements and their consequent academic transformations in and after 1968. The 1970s saw a quickly spreading influence of this type of structuralism both in Europe and in the United States, although its major and most lasting impact can be seen in the Latin countries of Europe and the Americas.

One binding element in this very diverse set of approaches was the rebirth of a new discipline, viz. semiotics (in French, sémiologie), from several parent disciplines in the social sciences (Morris, 1938) and the humanities (Barthes, 1964; Eco, 1976). As the general study of signs, it enabled anthropologists, literary scholars, linguists, and sociologists alike to study meaning and signifying practices in a terminology that allows cross-disciplinary comparison and coherence. Besides the well-known study of myths, stories, and poems, it also spawned increased interest in the analysis of cultural objects or practices that hitherto had been neglected in the traditional disciplines, e.g., gestures, national flags and symbols, movies, advertisements, comics, and other media messages. (Many of these studies were first published in the well-known journal Communications.) This semi-otic approach later also influenced work in the analysis of media messages and news (Bentele, 1981; Hartley, 1982).

At the same time, on the other side of the ocean, structural anthropology had also given rise to systematic analysis of myths or folktales (Dundes, 1964; Köngas-Maranda & Maranda, 1971). Yet, it was linguistic anthropology in the United States that provided the background for a broader study of discourse and communicative events. Initiated by people such as Hymes and Gumperz, the mid-1960s also witnessed the emergence of the ethnography of speaking or ethography of communication (Hymes, 1964; Gumperz & Hymes, 1972). Besides structural analysis of myths, tales, storytelling, songs, and several type of everyday discourse, this orientation examined the full ethnographic context of such discourses, including their actual performance or the social and cultural conditions of their uses (Bauman & Sherzer, 1974; Saville-Troike, 1982; Gumperz, 1982a, 1982b).

Conversation Analysis

The second major source of current discourse analysis can be found in microsociology. Against the background of various interpretative or phenomenological orientations, sociologists as diverse as Goffman (1959, 1967) Garfinkel (1967), and Cicourel (1973) focused attention on everyday interactions and their underlying meanings and interpretations. This framework soon led to special interest in one of the most mundane yet at the same time perhaps most fascinating types of everyday interaction: talk (Sudnow, 1972; Schenkein, 1978). Under the initial impetus of the work by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) on turn taking, this conversational analysis rapidly spread to other disciplines such as sociolinguistics and ethnography and is now one of the dominant paradigms in the wider field of discourse analysis. Besides the continuing attention on informal talk, it also influenced or was paralleled by the analysis of other types of dialogical interaction, such as doctor-patient discourse, classroom interaction, meetings, or job interviews (Sinclair & Coulthard, 1975; Labov & Fanshel, 1977; Mehan, 1979; see also van Dijk, 1985c, vol 3; Atkinson & Heritage, 1984; McLaughlin, 1984).

Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics

The third direction of research that was important for the development of discourse analysis was inspired by philosophical studies, also during the 1960s, of speech acts (such as promises or threats) by Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and Grice (1967/1975). They provided the basic conceptual framework of the pragmatic account of language use and thus enabled the construction of the necessary link between verbal utterances analyzed as linguistic objects on the one hand and the accomplishment of social action on the other hand (Sadock, 1974; Parret, Sbisa, & Verschueren, 1981; Leech, 1983; Levinson, 1983) Although much of this work was initially limited to isolated one-sentence utterances, this pragmatic missing link between linguistic structures and social action also appeared to be relevant for the analysis of discourse as a sequence of speech acts and for the relationships between text and context (van Dijk, 1981).

The fourth influence on discourse analysis was the emerging discipline of sociolinguistics in the mid 1960s (Fishman, 1968). Instead of the more abstract and context-free study of language systems in terms of structural or generative grammars, sociolinguistics proposed a more empirical study of actual language use in its social context (Giglioli, 1972; Dittmar, 1976). It focused on the impact of social factors (class, gender, ethnicity, etc.) on linguistic variation and rejected the currently prevailing assumption of a homogeneous speech community sharing the same grammar. Under the inspiring influence of people such as Ervin- Tripp (1969) and Labov (1972a, 1972b), this study of the actual uses of language naturally led to the analysis of stylistic variation and various types of discourse, such as parent-child discourse, everyday stories, and verbal duelling among black youths. As with the other disciplines mentioned, much contemporary sociolinguistics merges with social discourse analysis (Stubbs, 1983).

Text Processing in Psychology and Artificial Intelligence

Fifth, the late 1960s and early 1970s also produced a paradigm shift in psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and artificial Intelligence. After its too-close encounter with generative sentence grammars, psychology soon discovered the fascinating field of text processing, with its obvious applications in educational psychology (Freedle & Carroll, 1972; Kintsch, 1974). Comprehension, storage, memory representation, and reproduction of textual information were the major processes analyzed in this fruitful research orientation (see van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983, for survey and further references). Stories were the major discourse type for which these processes were investigated, due at least in part through American transmitters inspired by the structural analysis of narrative (van Dijk, 1980b). The contribution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to this field also focused on stories and proved to be especially important in the computer simulation of the vast amounts of knowledge (organized in scripts) necessary for the interpretation of discourse (Schank & Abelson, 1977).

Text Linguistics

Finally, linguistics itself, partly under the influence of work in the structural analysis of narrative, started to grow out of its self-imposed sentence boundary. Especially in Western Europe, research starting at the end of the 1960s produced first proposals for the elaboration of text grammars and text theories (Petöfi, 1971; Dressier, 1972; van Dijk, 1972; Schmidt, 1973; see de Beaugrande & Dressier, 1981, and Beaugrande, 1980, for introduction). These were designed to capture linguistic regularities of sentence sequences and higher level semantic interpretations in terms of macrostructures (van Dijk, 1980a). In the United Kingdom, this attention for discourse structures has been characteristic of many linguistic studies inspired by so-called systemic grammar, developed by Halliday (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Benson & Greaves, 1985). It was found in this textlinguistic work that not only the interesting linguistic properties of sequences and whole text fragments, but also the very phonological and syntactic structures, as well as the semantic interpretations of sentences, depend on their position and function in discourse. Similar observations were made in the discourse grammars developed in the United States (Givón, 1979). These different forms of linguistic discourse analysis also allowed for the first time the specification of explicit relationships between grammatical structures of a text on the one hand and other discourse structures, e.g., narrative structures, on the other.

Integration of Discourse Analysis as New Cross-discipline

In the early 1970s, these various orientations of discourse analysis all resulted in monographs, special journal issues, conferences, and other institutional models. In the beginning, however, these developments were still relatively independent. Not until the end of the 1970s, did increasing cross-fertilization and integration take place among several of these subfields. What first started as a more or less autonomous development in various disciplines, increasingly appeared as different orientations of a newly emerging discipline, variously called discourse analysis, discourse studies, or textlinguistics (see van Dijk, 1985c). This new cross-discipline now has two international special journals, Text and Discourse Processes, and regularly appears as a special section in many of the conferences in the different disciplines of the humanities and the social sciences. Besides the original founding disciplines, others, such as the studies of history and law (both basically concerned with texts of all lands) and finally speech communication and mass communication, soon joined this new field of research.

This presentation of the emergence of discourse analysis as a discipline consisting of different fields, largely defined by their original parent disciplines, provides only a partial picture of ongoing research. More work may be occurring on speech acts in linguistics than in the original discipline, namely, philosophy, where the theory of speech acts was first developed. Similarly, the debate on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical usefulness of so-called story grammars has been fiercer, more extensive, and even more fruitful in psychology and AI than in literary scholarship, semiotics or anthropology together, the originators of the notion of a story grammar. In other words, the new discipline can also be viewed in terms of its problems or phenomena of research, and these will often cross original disciplinary boundaries.

Similarly, there are also differences among what might vaguely be termed types of discourse analysis in various countries. That is, style of theory formation, analysis, and writing, together with philosophical and even political differences, distinguish, for instance, much Anglo-Saxon discourse analysis from current French and Latin discourse analysis, although there are increasing crossovers, overlaps, translations, and hence mutual influences. Broadly speaking, Anglo-Saxon discourse analysis combines continuing influences from structural or generative linguistics, cognitive psychology, pragmatics, and microsociology. Unlike their own structuralist predecessors of the 1960s and early 1970s, some currently influential French schools (influenced by Althusser, Foucault, Derrida and/or Lacan) have a more philosophical style of discourse analysis, with frequent references to ideological, historical, psychoanalytical and neoMarxist work and applications especially in the field of literary studies (Culler, 1980). The writing style of some of these orientations is also more metaphorical and, therefore, sometimes difficult for the noninitiated.

This French discourse analysis, because of its historical and political background, also inspired the well-known cultural and ideological analyses of sociologists and media scholars in Britain, e.g., those of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) in Birmingham (Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1980). For application in the analysis of news, see Hartley (1982).

This broad distinction among different styles of research is merely a rough one. For instance, within the more Anglo-Saxon style, a distinction should be made between those researchers who work within a strict conversational analytic framework and other discourse analysts. The first group rather closely follows the original microsociological methods derived from phenomenological sociology; and the latter more freely borrow from both conversational analysis, linguistics, psychology, and the social sciences. Since news in the press especially is a form of written or otherwise fixed and planned discourse, we shall focus on theories that account for the structures of written texts. Within that perspective, however, we mention work from different approaches and styles when they deal with the same phenomena or problems.

Discourse Structures and News Reports

In our case studies of national and international news in the press, we make use of a series of theoretical notions from discourse analysis that need introduction. We suggested above that the analysis of text and dialogues, both within and outside of discourse analysis, varies relative to different theories, methods, schools, or even individual scholars. In this respect, discourse analysis is hardly different from most other disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. Still, without aiming at a consensus or common denominator,...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 THE ANALYSIS OF NEWS AS DISCOURSE
• 2 STRUCTURES OF INTERNATIONAL NEWS
• 3 RACISM AND THE PRESS
• 4 THE TAMIL PANIC IN THE PRESS
• 5 SQUATTERS IN THE PRESS
• 6 CONCLUSIONS
• APPENDIX
• REFERENCES
• AUTHOR INDEX
• SUBJECT INDEX