Reading News

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Reading News
critical analysis of news concepts and criteria
lecture Sean Phelan
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Analysing media content an overview of research
traditions
Can be most easily understood in terms of a broad
critical/administrative dichotomy

• American administrative tradition
• Empirical/commercial/practical in orientation
• Research agenda driven by the advertising needs
  of early media practitioners (1930s/40s) and the
  advent of new media like radio and television
• Self image as the science of human
  communication simple linear/cause effect
  models
• Early content analysis objective, systematic
  and quantitative (Berelson)

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• Limited effects thesis - a reaction to the
  Frankfurt School (Marxist) hypodermic or magic
  bullet thesis of media omnipotence
• Agenda setting research in the 1970s the media
  may not be successful in telling people what to
  think, but very successful in telling people what
  to think about
• Tradition criticised for its neglect of theory
  and an inadequate conception of power
• Attacked by critical theorists for its
  subservience to policy considerations and
  capitalist values
• Hermeneutic of trust towards the media
• US tradition still administratively led and
  largely industry funded

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• Critical tradition (ideological critique)
• Role of the media in propagating dominant
  ideological definitions and representations
  (Hall) now became central.
• News not a neutral product but a sequence
  of socially manufactured messages, which carry
  many of the culturally dominant assumptions of
  our society (Eldridge)
• Drew on qualitative, interpretative
  methodologies like semiotics
• Birmingham and Glasgow schools particularly
  important
• Drew on various Marxist strands
  (Frankfurt/Gramsci etc.) - which regard culture
  as one of the key means of legitimating and
  inculcating capitalist values
• Hermeneutic of suspicion towards the media
• Discourse analysis a part of that critical
  tradition

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key theoretical concepts
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(1) Early work in the critical tradition
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Ideology

• A key critical term
• Shared social systems of belief which incline
  individuals to act and react in certain ways
• Does not necessarily work at a conscious level
• Marxist tradition regards ideology as working at
  a subconscious or deep level - bound to
  capitalisms propagation of a false
  consciousness that serves to legitimate or
  naturalise existing social orders
• Often used a term of abuse as a label to tar
  the other with

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• Ideological critique
• what Scannell (1998) describes as depth theory
  analysis
• regards the surface appearance of news texts as
  potentially unreliable and deceptive
• maintains that there is an underlying structure
  (structuralism) in the presentation of news
  stories that, when found or illuminated by
  theory, will serve to explain their real form and
  content

• Marxism
• Critical tradition that we associate with the
  19th century social philosopher Karl Marx.
• Spawned many variants
• Common emphasis on the need for a class analysis
  of society and culture, the dismantling of
  capitalist structures and positive action on
  behalf of the oppressed

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• Hegemony
• Key concept (Gramsci) in the cultural
  studies/Marxist lexicon
• Refers to the ways in which social elites secure
  and maintain popular consent though their
  control of key cultural forms and institutions
  like the mass media.

• Semiotics
• Very influential in the field of media research
  - particularly to the work of the Birmingham
  school
• Halls encoding/decoding model
• Semiotics is, most simply put, the study of
  meaning
• The study of the signs and symbols (not just
  linguistic!) used to produce or code socially
  based meanings.

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• Signifiers
• Term used in semiotics to describe the meanings
  triggerred by particular signs and symbols.
• For example the linguistic sign september
  11th is no longer simply the mark of another
  date in the calendar, but a signifier of the
  terrorist attacks on America (the signified).

• News Frames
• Medias propagation of particular ways of seeing
  the world
• The principles of selection, emphasis, and
  presentation composed of little tacit theories
  about what news exists, what news happens and
  what news matters (Gitlin in Allan, 1998 120)

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(2) the post-modernist lexicon
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Post-modernism

• Post-modernism, in its broadest sense, is a term
  used to describe a broad movement in the thought
  processes of the humanities and social sciences
  characterized by
• a questioning, and in some instances rejection,
  of the modernist belief in reason its
  unproblematic conception of progress
• a rejection of all totalising discourses or
  meta-narratives, by which it means any
  philosophies which attempt to offer a closed,
  fully explained systematic critic of the social
  order (including some strains of Marxism!)
• an insistence on the need for linguistic
  reflexivity that is a heightened consciousness
  about ones own language use and the language use
  of others
• Science versus science!

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Critical theory

• Refers to those paradigms/disciplines/theories of
  social analysis that oppose existing
  paradigms/disciplines/theories because of what a
  critical perspective would regard as their
  uncritical acceptance of existing social
  structures, conventions and inequalities.
• Some of the more influential critical theorists
  of recent decades include Foucault, Habermas and
  Bourdieu
• The term nevertheless has its ironies
• Is it a brand label of its own?
• Can uncritical orthodoxy become as staid and
  unreflexive as the orthodoxy it sets out to
  challenge?
• Need for a critique of the critical!

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• Discourse
• Widely used term in the humanities and social
  sciences
• A variety of definitions (see Foucault)
• Can be understood as the social process of
  creating meaning through the use of language and
  other symbolic forms

• Polysemy
• Post modernist tenet which looks on texts as
  having multiple meanings - not just simple
  bearers of a singular and transparent meaning
  (i.e. open to multiple readings)
• Sign no longer seen as the fixed unproblematic
  signifier of a particular signified
• For example, Gandhi no longer simply the
  signifier of non-violent protest but a signifier
  of apple computers!!!
• Floating signifiers and post-mod circularity

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• Rhetoric
• Sometimes used in a limited sense to refer to the
  style and organisation of a text only
• Broader definition the use of words and symbols
  to form attitudes or to induce actions in others
  (See Burke).
• Rhetoric as persuasion (Aristotle) and
  rhetoric as identification (Burke)
• Like ideology, often functions as a derogatory
  term in popular discourse

• Hermeneutics
• Originally used to describe the work of biblical
  scholars
• Simply means interpretation or the act of
  interpreting

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• The other
• Term used by Lacan in Psychoanalysis
• Can be looked as the opposite/or shadow that
  informs the construction of a particular
  ideological attitude or disposition.
• Thus, for example, while being a nationalist in
  Northern Ireland might involve ones attachment
  to particular symbols (say the tricolour) or
  linguistic signs (the six counties), the
  nationalist attitude is also partly constructed
  through its otherness from the rival unionist
  tradition.
• Bound to questions of identity - a key post-mod
  concern

• Texts
• Not simply a reference to written texts only
• Polyphonic texts from a whole range of media

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(3) the contribution of linguistics
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• Critical linguistics
• Based on the principles of systemic functional
  linguistics
• Maintains that there is a causal relationship
  between semantic structures/language use and our
  cognition/mental experience of the world
• Assumes, as a working principle, that each
  particular form of linguistic expression in a
  text wording, syntactic option, etc. has its
  reason(s) (See Fowler, 1991 4)
• Criticised early ideological critique for its
  lack of textual analysis
• Sets out to show the ideological in various
  ways

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• Discourse Analysis
• commonly used name to describe what is an
  amalgam of, inter alia, critical linguistics,
  sociolinguistics and semiotics
• Also known as critical discourse analysis
• As with the term discourse itself, DA has been
  conceived of in a number of different ways, most
  of which suggest in-depth textual analysis
• Faircloughs definition a wide sociological one,
  appropriate to this module the attempt to show
  systematic links between texts, institutional
  discourse practices, and sociocultural practices
  (Fairclough, 1995 17)

• Discourse structure
• the narrative or event structure of a news text,
  encapsulated in the journalists shorthand of
  five Ws and a H who, what, when, where, why,
  how. (See Bell, 1998)

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(4) Textual analysis some key tools in the
critical reading of news
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• Agency analysis
• Basically concerned with the way in which the
  agents/agency behind particular actions are
  emphasied/de-emphasised
• A combination of who how questions
• Particularly important in newspaper headlines
• Contrast, for example, the headline (1)
  Argentinean police forces kill 20 protesters with
  (2) 20 dead in Argentina
• Or (1) 'Arafat is our bin Laden,' Israeli says
  amid fighting (USA Today Headline) (2) Three
  Killed as Israelis Move Into Two West Bank Towns
  (New York Times Headline)

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• Disclaimers
• Ideologically significant semantic moves (Van
  Dijk, 1998), where one clause/sentence expresses
  a proposition that is then rebutted by the next
  clause/sentence
• I have nothing against blacks, but.
• Of course I abhor and reject violence in all
  its form, but I nevertheless feel our Government
  has the right to use any means it chooses to
  defend itself

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• Lexical sets
• The cognitive structures or mental map suggested
  by the combination of particular vocabulary.
• For example, a lexical set of the phrases the
  six counties, the Dublin government and the
  unionist veto might suggest the ideology of
  Irish republicanism.
• Particularly helpful in understanding the
  structure of opinion pieces and the mental map
  of the author

• Metonym
• Essentialist reasoning/use of the part to
  represent the whole
• 50 people rioting in Nigeria subsequently
  reported as Nigerian riots.

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• Modality
• Term used to describe a writers attitude (what
  the government must do is.)
• Can also be used to describe the performative
  style of a TV and radio pundit
• Important element in editorials and opinion
  pieces
• Posture of certainty

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• Nominalisation
• Clause transformation whereby predicates (i.e.
  verbs and adjectives) are syntactically realised
  as nouns.
• An important journalistic device, understandably
  used to both summarise stories and cope with
  practical space restrictions.
• However, a critical reading would emphasise
  nominalisations inherent tendency towards
  metonymic reasoning
• For example, a small crowd of 30 Palestinians
  (and mainly children) celebrating the WTC
  attacks are forever immortalised as Palestinian
  celebrations.
• Also lend itself towards dehumanisation and
  abstraction.
• For example, the hundreds of homeless people (
  hundreds of individual stories!) on the streets
  of Dublin become abstracted as the problem of
  homelessness.

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• Noun phrases
• Phrases that function as an extension of nouns
  for example the Arab mindset is a noun phrase.
• Can have all sorts of simple or complex noun
  phrase structures
• 2 types are particularly common in news
  reporting
• Definite article modifier head (for example,
  the Sheedy affair) and
• Definite article head modifier (the threat
  of GM foods)
• The head is the term used by critical linguists
  to refer to the it of the noun phrase (see
  Fowler, 1991) what a critical analysis would
  suggest is the it of a more long term narrative
• Modifier the part used to semantically qualify
  the head (ibid 1991)

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• Overlexicalisation
• Term used to describe highly expressive and
  exaggerated use of language.
• Common rhetorical device employed by newspaper
  columnists and TV pundits, sometimes for comic
  effect, sometimes to effect indignation
• the sick, selfish and uncaring dogma of free
  market dogmatists,
• Castro loving, champagne socialists who want
  more money for the poverty industry

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• Transitivity variance
• Concerned with the different kind of processes
  designated by verbs.
• For example, the sentence Pat hit the dog
  designates a kind of action which has an effect
  on another entity, the dog, whereas the
  sentence Tom ran refers to an action which
  effects only the actor Tom.
• Transitivity as the foundation of
  representation, in that it shows us how the
  construction of different clauses will analyse
  the same events and situations in ideologically
  different says.
• For instance, contrast the different ideological
  interpretation of the same event in these
  contrasting newspaper headlines
• Labour wins bitter election with (2) Labour
  wins
• Israel kills 10 Palestinians including 5
  children with Israeli army kills Palestinian
  militants
• Transitivity variance can be studied in all
  sorts of complex ways, but watch out in
  particular for details of (a) participant 1 (2)
  predicate (3) participant 2 (4) circumstances

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• Syntactic analysis
• concerned with the position and sequence of
  elements within a clause - what critical
  linguists call clause transformation.
• One particularly important kind of transformation
  involves the use of the active and passive voice
• Critical linguists would argue that while two
  clauses might share the same propositional
  meaning, differing only in syntactic ordering,
  the choices are nevertheless of ideological
  importance.
• For example, contrast the headline (1) Garda shot
  man from 9 inches with (2) Man shot from 9 inches
  by Garda.
• A critical linguist might argue that clause 1
  emphasises a story about a Garda who has killed,
  while clause 2 emphasises a story about a man
  who has been shot

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• Universalisation
• Abstraction device
• Rhetorical strategies that favour generalisations
  over particulars.
• Universalising rhetoric lends itself to all sorts
  of ideological uses and effects
• For example, the American war on terrorism
  becomes the Russian/Israeli/Chinese/Indian
  wars on terrorism
• Catchy universalising phrase itself an
  abstraction, that conceals the local
  particularities of each of the different
  conflicts

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• Review
• critical/administrative dichotomy
• surface analysis versus depth analysis?
• discourse analysis and the showing of ideology

• Provisos
• Is there always a deep explanation?
• Critical readings by no means exclusively
  Marxist
• Critical and administrative traditions/methods
  not always mutually exclusive
• Need for quantitative qualitative content
  analysis
• Critical tools of little use without some
  understanding of a the circumstances of a news
  story
• Focus in on the most ideologically significant
  aspects