- Email: [email protected]
Political Discourse in the Media
Journal of Pragmatics 42 (2010) 2601–2603
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Political Discourse in the Media Fetzer, Anita, Lauerbach, Gerda E., Eds., John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2007, viiii + 379 pages The phenomenon of mass communication and the institution of the media as well as its relation to other institutions of the public (e.g. politics) and the private (e.g. family) sphere have been the object of study in various disciplines, including linguistics. Most of the work produced in these fields has aimed at investigating different aspects of the media in specific cultural contexts, paying little attention to how, if at all, these aspects are realized in different cultures. Political Discourse in the Media examines media communication from a cross-cultural perspective, focusing on political discourse on television. The cross-cultural perspective adopted in this collection of papers consists in the description and comparison of the (discursive and other semiotic) practices of journalists and politicians in different cultural contexts as well as the practices of international broadcasting, which needs to cater for a culturally diverse and heterogeneous audience. The volume is divided into four parts, the first of which coincides with the editors’ introductory contribution. In their introduction, G.E. Lauerbach and A. Fetzer look at the wider issues involved both in the analysis of political discourse in the media and in the adoption of a cross-cultural analytic perspective. With regard to the former, the editors discuss the relation between politics, the media and the public sphere and enumerate the benefits that a cross-cultural approach can offer to their analysis. Concerning the latter, they reject traditional definitions of the concept of culture (which saw culture as an autonomous, well-bounded, homogeneous unity), present their own formulation of it and refer to the goals of cross-cultural discourse analysis, which, according to them, can function as a useful complement to theories seeking to account for the relation between the linguistic/semiotic micro-structure of the text and the macro-structure of its sociocultural context. Moreover, they address the problems that a conception of culture as a varied, heterogeneous entity poses for cross-cultural research. The introduction ends with a discussion of the features of mediated political discourse and the presentation of the volume’s contributions. The first chapter, thus, delineates the basic theoretical premises upon which the remaining contributions of the volume are based. Part II (‘From linguistic device to discourse practice’) comprises two chapters, which focus on the micro-level of the text and examine the function in discourse of specific linguistic forms. In the first, A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen, P.R. White and K. Aijmer investigate the extent to which taken-for-grantedness is strategically employed as a means of persuasion in political television debates. Adopting a functional perspective and drawing upon appraisal theory (more specifically, the system of engagement), the authors focus on two types of taken-for-grantedness: (a) presuppositions, and (b) meta-discursive locutions such as of course. Their data consist of English, Flemish and Swedish radio and television interviews and debates. The study shows that both types of taken-for-grantedness are rhetorically exploited to present a proposition either as so widely known as to be ‘self-evident’ (use of ‘of course’) or as ‘given’, as something which is simply not at issue and, therefore, need not be contested (use of presupposition). Furthermore, the use of these strategies is found to be similar in the three cultural contexts examined, which, as the authors point out, suggests that the rules of interaction work in a more or less similar manner in the specific media genres in these three cultures. R. Scheithauer’s chapter looks into the cross-cultural differences in the use of metaphors in election night television programs, based on Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive constructivist theory of metaphor. The author presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the metaphors used by anchors and journalists to describe the election process in the opening sequences of the broadcasts of six national (both public-service and commercial) and three international channels covering the 1997 British elections, the 1998 German elections and the 2000 US presidential election. The findings reveal striking similarities across cultures both in the type and the frequency of the metaphors used, with only minor differences detected between national and international television stations. The frequent use of gender-biased metaphors is another finding of the research (by the way, this is the only reference to gender-related issues regarding the discourse practices of politics and the media in the volume). However, there is no statistical processing of the results, which would have reinforced the validity of the claims made by the author. This study as well as those by A. Becker, R. Schieß and G. Lauerbach (see below) are all part of the research project ‘Television Discourse’, supported by the German Research Foundation and directed by G. Lauerbach. The contributions which make up Part III (‘Discursive practice in political interviews’) employ what the editors call ‘‘a textual meso-perspective’’ (p. 23) and look into specific discourse practices in the genre of political interview. The first paper 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.03.007
2602
Book review
in this part, by A. Becker, investigates journalists’ questioning practices in interviews with politicians and experts, using the same data as in the previous contribution. The author draws upon conversation analysis and appraisal theory to analyze, both qualitatively and quantitatively, 65 questioning turns with respect to five features: (a) addressee orientation, (b) complexity, (c) question type, (d) appraisal and (e) discursive function. In addition, the most frequent combinations of these features are separately assessed. The analysis yields profiles for all nine channels examined, but, as the author points out, no clear national interviewing style can be established despite the fact that particular differences were observed in journalists’ questioning practices in their interviews with politicians, on the one hand, and experts on the other. Some elaboration on the section on feature combinations and their patterns would have been welcome as their presentation is a bit vague and confusing (for instance, was the mere presence of particular features the only criterion for the classification of the patterns or was their frequency also taken into account?). M. Johansson’s contribution looks at the communicative functions of represented discourse in French and British televised political interviews. Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective, the author seeks to investigate how the discourse of others is employed in the talk of French and British politicians when answering journalists’ questions. The analysis reveals differences in the functions represented discourse performs in these two cultural contexts. In the next chapter, A. Fetzer examines the linguistic means employed by politicians in their interviews with journalists from the general elections in Britain (1997) and Germany (1998) in order to challenge the validity claims of their interlocutors’ contributions. Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective informed by Habermas’ ideas, the author focuses on five types of challenges (categorized on the basis of their referential domain) and their connectedness with culture-specific and media-specific modes of linguistic realization. The results point to cultural differences in the communicative styles adopted by British and German politicians. In the final chapter of Part III, E. Weizman, I. Levi and I. Schneebaum explore interviewers’ discourse patterns of challenge and support in TV news interviews. The data consist of news interviews broadcast on the Arabic channel Al-Jazeera and on Israeli television. In all the interviews, one journalist interviews two politicians representing opposing political views. The authors identify and analyze the following discourse patterns: (a) topic introduction in the openings, (b) explicit comments, and (c) elaborative reformulations in the course of the interviews. Their analysis yields interesting differences in the interviewing styles of the two interviewers, which, according to the authors, may suggest that neutrality is not a universal value in news and that ‘‘cultures may differ in terms of their perception of the interviewer’s role’’ (p. 221). Part IV (‘Media events: from public address to election nights’) consists of three chapters, which adopt a more encompassing outlook and seek to explore the multi-modal nature of media events, focusing on the interplay of language and other semiotic (audio, visual) modalities which go into the production of media outputs. In his contribution, C. Sauer focuses on the multi-modal quality of televised Christmas Messages by royal and elected heads of state in nine European countries. His theoretical framework is informed by functional pragmatics, critical discourse analysis and multi-modal discourse theory. As the author observes, Christmas Messages are characterized by ‘‘a kind of secondary literacy, an overt reoralization of a written text’’ (p. 234), which needs to be adjusted to the features and the semiotic resources of the medium. His analysis reveals differences in the way the Christmas Messages of the nine European heads of state are adapted for television audiences, which, depending on the combination and the type of semiotic resources employed, range from a ‘‘documentary and multimedia style transmission’’ to ‘‘a sermon-like speech’’ transmission (p. 268). The latter is found to be the style most commonly adopted in the messages of the European representatives examined. R. Schieß’s chapter explores the boundary between entertainment and information in election night broadcasts in Britain, Germany and the USA, focusing, in particular, on the visual components of these programs. Being part of the same research project (and making use of the same data) as Scheithauer’s, Becker’s and Lauerbach’s studies, it seeks to examine to what extent the visual style of entertainment programs is intertextually appropriated by news programs in order to attract viewers’ attention. More specifically, the author looks into four elements of election night broadcasts: (a) the title sequence, (b) the studio setting, (c) the graphics and (d) the visual management of outside broadcasts. The results show that television stations resolve the dilemma of entertainment vs. information differently and to different extents. However, some elaboration on the categories of variety, light-heartedness, interestingness and catchiness, which the author sees as constitutive of entertainmentoriented communication, would have been welcome as it is not clear how these categories relate to the visual features of the broadcasts under examination. Moreover, as the author himself acknowledges, there is a one-sided emphasis on entertainment, whereas little attention is paid to the notion of information and the interplay between the two. G.E. Lauerbach’s chapter presents a comparative analysis of the presenting practices of election night television programs in Britain, the United States and Germany. Drawing upon Goffman’s concept of frame and conversation analysis, the author investigates the discursive and framing practices employed by presenters in order to orchestrate the multitude of voices that make up the discourse of election night programs and in order to construct the broadcasts as a coherent and comprehensible text for the audience. Her data consist of the opening sequences of the election night programs of both national (publicservice and commercial) and international channels (see above). Her analysis reveals differences among national television stations at the level of sequential generic patterning, which extend to the international channels as well. In contrast, no culture-specific profile could be established at the micro-level of linguistic realizations as the findings point, rather, to differences between the public-service and commercial television stations, on the one hand, and between national and international ones on the other. All in all, Political Discourse in the Media brings together papers that focus on a neglected area of research, that is, the crosscultural analysis of mediated political discourse, which can yield valuable insights into the workings of politics and the
Book review
2603
media through the comparative study of their practices in different cultural contexts. Within this perspective, a vast array of cultural contexts is examined, including ones which are not so widely known (see, for instance, Weizman, Levi and Schneebaum’s paper on journalists’ interviewing styles on Arab and Israeli television). In addition, drawing upon different theoretical frameworks (such as systemic functional linguistics, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and pragmatics), the volume covers a wide spectrum of topics, which reflect current interests in the analysis of mediated political discourse. The contributions in Part IV are particularly telling in this direction as they explore the multimodality of media outputs, an object of study which only in the last 20 years or so has attracted the attention of researchers. Therefore, I believe the volume can be a useful complement not only to discourse analysts and sociolinguists, but also to researchers in media and cultural studies with a particular interest in the study of political and media discourse. Lena Gialabouki got her PhD in 2008 (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Department of Linguistics). Her dissertation, entitled Intertextuality and Journalistic Discourse, discusses the polyphonic constitution of the discourse of journalists and offers a critical reading of the way the discourse of others (discourse representation) comes to be reported and utilized in television news. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and media discourse.
Lena Gialabouki Institute for Modern Greek Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece E-mail address: [email protected]
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Pragmatics journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Political Discourse in the Media Fetzer, Anita, Lauerbach, Gerda E., Eds., John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2007, viiii + 379 pages The phenomenon of mass communication and the institution of the media as well as its relation to other institutions of the public (e.g. politics) and the private (e.g. family) sphere have been the object of study in various disciplines, including linguistics. Most of the work produced in these fields has aimed at investigating different aspects of the media in specific cultural contexts, paying little attention to how, if at all, these aspects are realized in different cultures. Political Discourse in the Media examines media communication from a cross-cultural perspective, focusing on political discourse on television. The cross-cultural perspective adopted in this collection of papers consists in the description and comparison of the (discursive and other semiotic) practices of journalists and politicians in different cultural contexts as well as the practices of international broadcasting, which needs to cater for a culturally diverse and heterogeneous audience. The volume is divided into four parts, the first of which coincides with the editors’ introductory contribution. In their introduction, G.E. Lauerbach and A. Fetzer look at the wider issues involved both in the analysis of political discourse in the media and in the adoption of a cross-cultural analytic perspective. With regard to the former, the editors discuss the relation between politics, the media and the public sphere and enumerate the benefits that a cross-cultural approach can offer to their analysis. Concerning the latter, they reject traditional definitions of the concept of culture (which saw culture as an autonomous, well-bounded, homogeneous unity), present their own formulation of it and refer to the goals of cross-cultural discourse analysis, which, according to them, can function as a useful complement to theories seeking to account for the relation between the linguistic/semiotic micro-structure of the text and the macro-structure of its sociocultural context. Moreover, they address the problems that a conception of culture as a varied, heterogeneous entity poses for cross-cultural research. The introduction ends with a discussion of the features of mediated political discourse and the presentation of the volume’s contributions. The first chapter, thus, delineates the basic theoretical premises upon which the remaining contributions of the volume are based. Part II (‘From linguistic device to discourse practice’) comprises two chapters, which focus on the micro-level of the text and examine the function in discourse of specific linguistic forms. In the first, A.-M. Simon-Vandenbergen, P.R. White and K. Aijmer investigate the extent to which taken-for-grantedness is strategically employed as a means of persuasion in political television debates. Adopting a functional perspective and drawing upon appraisal theory (more specifically, the system of engagement), the authors focus on two types of taken-for-grantedness: (a) presuppositions, and (b) meta-discursive locutions such as of course. Their data consist of English, Flemish and Swedish radio and television interviews and debates. The study shows that both types of taken-for-grantedness are rhetorically exploited to present a proposition either as so widely known as to be ‘self-evident’ (use of ‘of course’) or as ‘given’, as something which is simply not at issue and, therefore, need not be contested (use of presupposition). Furthermore, the use of these strategies is found to be similar in the three cultural contexts examined, which, as the authors point out, suggests that the rules of interaction work in a more or less similar manner in the specific media genres in these three cultures. R. Scheithauer’s chapter looks into the cross-cultural differences in the use of metaphors in election night television programs, based on Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive constructivist theory of metaphor. The author presents a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the metaphors used by anchors and journalists to describe the election process in the opening sequences of the broadcasts of six national (both public-service and commercial) and three international channels covering the 1997 British elections, the 1998 German elections and the 2000 US presidential election. The findings reveal striking similarities across cultures both in the type and the frequency of the metaphors used, with only minor differences detected between national and international television stations. The frequent use of gender-biased metaphors is another finding of the research (by the way, this is the only reference to gender-related issues regarding the discourse practices of politics and the media in the volume). However, there is no statistical processing of the results, which would have reinforced the validity of the claims made by the author. This study as well as those by A. Becker, R. Schieß and G. Lauerbach (see below) are all part of the research project ‘Television Discourse’, supported by the German Research Foundation and directed by G. Lauerbach. The contributions which make up Part III (‘Discursive practice in political interviews’) employ what the editors call ‘‘a textual meso-perspective’’ (p. 23) and look into specific discourse practices in the genre of political interview. The first paper 0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2010.03.007
2602
Book review
in this part, by A. Becker, investigates journalists’ questioning practices in interviews with politicians and experts, using the same data as in the previous contribution. The author draws upon conversation analysis and appraisal theory to analyze, both qualitatively and quantitatively, 65 questioning turns with respect to five features: (a) addressee orientation, (b) complexity, (c) question type, (d) appraisal and (e) discursive function. In addition, the most frequent combinations of these features are separately assessed. The analysis yields profiles for all nine channels examined, but, as the author points out, no clear national interviewing style can be established despite the fact that particular differences were observed in journalists’ questioning practices in their interviews with politicians, on the one hand, and experts on the other. Some elaboration on the section on feature combinations and their patterns would have been welcome as their presentation is a bit vague and confusing (for instance, was the mere presence of particular features the only criterion for the classification of the patterns or was their frequency also taken into account?). M. Johansson’s contribution looks at the communicative functions of represented discourse in French and British televised political interviews. Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective, the author seeks to investigate how the discourse of others is employed in the talk of French and British politicians when answering journalists’ questions. The analysis reveals differences in the functions represented discourse performs in these two cultural contexts. In the next chapter, A. Fetzer examines the linguistic means employed by politicians in their interviews with journalists from the general elections in Britain (1997) and Germany (1998) in order to challenge the validity claims of their interlocutors’ contributions. Adopting a socio-pragmatic perspective informed by Habermas’ ideas, the author focuses on five types of challenges (categorized on the basis of their referential domain) and their connectedness with culture-specific and media-specific modes of linguistic realization. The results point to cultural differences in the communicative styles adopted by British and German politicians. In the final chapter of Part III, E. Weizman, I. Levi and I. Schneebaum explore interviewers’ discourse patterns of challenge and support in TV news interviews. The data consist of news interviews broadcast on the Arabic channel Al-Jazeera and on Israeli television. In all the interviews, one journalist interviews two politicians representing opposing political views. The authors identify and analyze the following discourse patterns: (a) topic introduction in the openings, (b) explicit comments, and (c) elaborative reformulations in the course of the interviews. Their analysis yields interesting differences in the interviewing styles of the two interviewers, which, according to the authors, may suggest that neutrality is not a universal value in news and that ‘‘cultures may differ in terms of their perception of the interviewer’s role’’ (p. 221). Part IV (‘Media events: from public address to election nights’) consists of three chapters, which adopt a more encompassing outlook and seek to explore the multi-modal nature of media events, focusing on the interplay of language and other semiotic (audio, visual) modalities which go into the production of media outputs. In his contribution, C. Sauer focuses on the multi-modal quality of televised Christmas Messages by royal and elected heads of state in nine European countries. His theoretical framework is informed by functional pragmatics, critical discourse analysis and multi-modal discourse theory. As the author observes, Christmas Messages are characterized by ‘‘a kind of secondary literacy, an overt reoralization of a written text’’ (p. 234), which needs to be adjusted to the features and the semiotic resources of the medium. His analysis reveals differences in the way the Christmas Messages of the nine European heads of state are adapted for television audiences, which, depending on the combination and the type of semiotic resources employed, range from a ‘‘documentary and multimedia style transmission’’ to ‘‘a sermon-like speech’’ transmission (p. 268). The latter is found to be the style most commonly adopted in the messages of the European representatives examined. R. Schieß’s chapter explores the boundary between entertainment and information in election night broadcasts in Britain, Germany and the USA, focusing, in particular, on the visual components of these programs. Being part of the same research project (and making use of the same data) as Scheithauer’s, Becker’s and Lauerbach’s studies, it seeks to examine to what extent the visual style of entertainment programs is intertextually appropriated by news programs in order to attract viewers’ attention. More specifically, the author looks into four elements of election night broadcasts: (a) the title sequence, (b) the studio setting, (c) the graphics and (d) the visual management of outside broadcasts. The results show that television stations resolve the dilemma of entertainment vs. information differently and to different extents. However, some elaboration on the categories of variety, light-heartedness, interestingness and catchiness, which the author sees as constitutive of entertainmentoriented communication, would have been welcome as it is not clear how these categories relate to the visual features of the broadcasts under examination. Moreover, as the author himself acknowledges, there is a one-sided emphasis on entertainment, whereas little attention is paid to the notion of information and the interplay between the two. G.E. Lauerbach’s chapter presents a comparative analysis of the presenting practices of election night television programs in Britain, the United States and Germany. Drawing upon Goffman’s concept of frame and conversation analysis, the author investigates the discursive and framing practices employed by presenters in order to orchestrate the multitude of voices that make up the discourse of election night programs and in order to construct the broadcasts as a coherent and comprehensible text for the audience. Her data consist of the opening sequences of the election night programs of both national (publicservice and commercial) and international channels (see above). Her analysis reveals differences among national television stations at the level of sequential generic patterning, which extend to the international channels as well. In contrast, no culture-specific profile could be established at the micro-level of linguistic realizations as the findings point, rather, to differences between the public-service and commercial television stations, on the one hand, and between national and international ones on the other. All in all, Political Discourse in the Media brings together papers that focus on a neglected area of research, that is, the crosscultural analysis of mediated political discourse, which can yield valuable insights into the workings of politics and the
Book review
2603
media through the comparative study of their practices in different cultural contexts. Within this perspective, a vast array of cultural contexts is examined, including ones which are not so widely known (see, for instance, Weizman, Levi and Schneebaum’s paper on journalists’ interviewing styles on Arab and Israeli television). In addition, drawing upon different theoretical frameworks (such as systemic functional linguistics, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, discourse analysis and pragmatics), the volume covers a wide spectrum of topics, which reflect current interests in the analysis of mediated political discourse. The contributions in Part IV are particularly telling in this direction as they explore the multimodality of media outputs, an object of study which only in the last 20 years or so has attracted the attention of researchers. Therefore, I believe the volume can be a useful complement not only to discourse analysts and sociolinguists, but also to researchers in media and cultural studies with a particular interest in the study of political and media discourse. Lena Gialabouki got her PhD in 2008 (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Department of Linguistics). Her dissertation, entitled Intertextuality and Journalistic Discourse, discusses the polyphonic constitution of the discourse of journalists and offers a critical reading of the way the discourse of others (discourse representation) comes to be reported and utilized in television news. Her research interests include sociolinguistics, pragmatics, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and media discourse.
Lena Gialabouki Institute for Modern Greek Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece E-mail address: [email protected]