Analysing media content why

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Analysing media content why?

• Media content
• Constructs versions of reality
• Selects/frames/combines events
• Shapes meanings and values
• Has consequences for practice (e.g. of consumers
  and citizens), as it triggers audience meaning
  repertoires.
• Media content analysis enables us to understand
  these processes.

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Case study of how media produce reality"Review
of the Year 1998"

• Selecting and omitting events
• Providing the visual and verbal lenses we use to
  make sense of the selected events
• The mediated version of reality (what happened in
  1998) becomes real in its consequences, through
  the BBCs authoritative agenda-setting in the
  public sphere.
• (video)

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Structuring the truth about 1998the road(s)
(not) taken

• Not chronology as structuring principle
• Not nation as structuring principle
• Metaphor as structuring principle the program as
  "multichannel universe of the digital age"
• 'themes' dressed up as TV-channels
  (Sports/Medical/Women's/Disaster/etc. Channel.
• Self-referentiality of the mediaU.S. politics
  not portrayed in its own terms but as 'Dallas'!
• (distortion or insight?)

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Content/textual analysis driven by

• Critical interest in the media's discursive
  shaping of
• Social power relations portrayal of social
  conflicts (war, politics, industrial action)
• Identities and roles portrayal of nation,
  gender, ethnicity, professionals, etc. (KHADER,
  ASMAA)

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Discursive 'bias'?

• Do news media discourses reflect or distort
  reality? Neither
• 'Re-presentation' of reality
• The discursive 'constitution' of reality
• Reality as (discursive) constraint on discourses
• Media discourses are constituted by and
  constitutive of social reality
• Social phenomena are 'italesat' through
  discourses, speaking X into existence
  ('articulation','creating in language')

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Media bias can be interesting in practice

• Glasgow Media Group Bad News (1976)
• Media portrayal of industrial conflicts
• Over-emphasis on the motor industry
• Factually not a truthful representation more
  strikes in other areas
• Symbolically highlights an important social
  transition from industrial to information society
  truthful?

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Quantitative content analysis (briefly)

• Role complementary to qualitative analysis
• Purpose to confirm or negate first impressions
  of media content (bias)
• Method systematic description of characteristics
  of "media discourses through numbers that express
  the frequency and prominence of particular
  textual properties" (Schrøder 2002102)

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Content analysis 'classic'

• "Content analysis is a research technique for
  the objective, systematic, and quantitative
  description of the manifest content of
  communication"
• (Berelson, 195218)

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Content analysis 'constructionist'

• "Content analysis is a research technique for
  making replicable and valid inferences from data
  to their context. () Meanings are always
  relative to a communicator".
• (Krippendorf 1980, 21-22)
• - Acknowledging the pervasiveness and
  inevitability of interpretation ('inferences')

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Content analysis Analytical recipe

• Choose category
• Choose important characteristics
• Define units precisely, count consistently not
  an automatic process
• Count and calculate

• 'protagonist'
• that carry a worldview (geo, gender, arena)
• 'protagonist' verbal and visual mention.
• 'politics'? 'gender'? 'entertainment'?
• Absolute numbers, percentages

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Findings the truth about 1998 what is
important to Britain

• Nation-focused (Brits 3 in 5)
• Politics dominates (almost 50)
• Showbizz is prominent (37) Sports more than
  half.
• Science is all but absent (2)
• Male dominance (75), esp. politics
• Female dominance in Entertainment (8 of 14)

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What the numbers don't show

• 3rd world represented through crises and natural
  disasters
• Politics is often shown through a lens of
  ridicule (Clinton, Duma, lewd British
  politicians)
• Everyday people victims or perpetrators of
  sensational crime
• - But Content Analysis can deliver useful
  overview mappings!

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Media discourse analysisa recipe derived from
the theory

• Checklist linguistic features that will
  probably repay close examination (Fowler 1985,
  68)
• Lexical processes (vocabulary), including
  metaphors, which a media text mobilizes
  concerning a given area of experience.
• Transitivity, the relation between verbs and
  nouns, creates a configuration of the
  participants and processes in a text.

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Checklist (cont.)

• Syntactic transformations passivization and
  nominalization may obscure agency
• Modality (modal verbs and adverbs), express
  speakers attitudes towards the events described
• Speech acts and turn-taking, sentence types
  versus communicative functions
• Implicature and presupposition What can be read
  between the lines, inferring what is really
  meant.
• Address and personal reference formality, naming
  conventions, pronouns (inclusive/exclusive 'we')

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Analysis of visual features

• Discourse analytical approaches focused on verbal
  aspects of mediated communication.
• Visual dimensions given secondary attention.
• Two main sources of theoretical concepts Barthes
  and Peirce.

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Barthes's concepts(not specific to visual signs)

• Denotation the innocent, factual meanings
  available to any observer irrespective of
  cultural background. Ex. photo of a car.
• Connotationthe meanings that a specific culture
  assign to the denotative message (not personal
  associations). Ex. Car as 'freedom'.
• Heuristic value for practical analysis, but not
  much beyond the commonsensical.
• Theoretically dubious non-cultural vs.
  Culturally invested meanings

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Peirce's concepts(not specific to visual signs)

• Based on the relation between signs and the
  objects they refer to ('reference')
• Symbol purely governed by convention (words,
  numbers)
• Icon related to referent through similarity
  (map, photograph)
• Index related to referent by existential or
  physical 'connection' (smoke/fire)

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Peirce (cont.)

• Not 3 kinds of sign, but 3 dimensions of any sign
  (in principle)
• Photo of The White House
• Iconic represents a building in Washington.
• Indexical represents the government of the
  United States.
• Symbolic represents the values conventionally
  associated with the United States
  (freedomdemocracy, coercive global policeman).

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Cossack Vodka ad

• Visual metaphor is iconic the visual sign is
  similar to (ex. straws snake tongue)
• Visual metonymy is indexical the visual sign
  points to (ex. straws two people)(Eiffel Tower
  Paris)
• Other visual signs
• snake index/metonym of Fall of Man (part of
  story) icon/metaphor of phallus symbol of
  deceit. Erotic.
• bottle icon/metaphor of phallus. Erotic.
• Straws icon/metaphor of vagina. Erotic.
• Drink (yellow) icon/metaphor of snake (yellow)

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Exercise discourse and visual analysis

• The BP ad, "Oil companies tend to invite
  criticism"(1991)
• What corporate image is BP trying to construct
  with this ad?
• Look at the verbal aspects, including choice of
  words (especially wordplay), use of pronouns
  (especially 'we' and 'our'), and the use of
  verbal tenses (past, present, future).
• Look at the photo(s) and its use of visual
  metaphor and metonomy.

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• Two ads from 2007, The Danish Health Board's
  alcohol information ad, and the job advertisement
  from Maersk contractors
• Look particularly at their visual
  characteristics, in the form of visual metaphor
  and metonomy, but also take a look at the way
  language is designed to create resonance in the
  reader.

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The Speedbandits campaign

• A campaign video from 2006, by the Danish Road
  Safety Council. Look particularly at the video's
  use of narrative genre and intertextuality.

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Interpretative repertoiresa concept from
discursive psychology

• Point of departure the situational contexts of
  language use
• Aim to account for the dialogical
  micro-mechanics of everyday life and social
  institutions (nationalism how we speak the
  nation into existence).
• concerned with speakers fact construction and
  their own positioning in co-constructing social
  reality
• their attempts to establish their own versions
  or accounts of social events as true and factual

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• When staking a claim for their own version,
  communicators, draw on interpretive
  repertoires'
• frameworks of understanding regarded as a
  practical resource, rather than an end product.
• "By interpretative repertoires we mean broadly
  discernible clusters of terms, descriptions and
  figures of speech often assembled around
  metaphors or vivid images. In more structuralist
  language we can talk of these things as systems
  of signification and as the building blocks used
  for manufacturing versions of actions, self and
  social structures in talk. (Potter Wetherell
  1996 89)

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Study of discourse and racism in New Zealand2
repertoires about Maoris

• Culture-as-Heritage
• - frames culture, almost in biological terms, as
  an endangered species, something to be preserved
  and treasured

• Culture-as-Therapy
• - conceives culture in psychological terms as a
  need, particularly for young Maoris, who need to
  rediscover their cultural roots to become
  whole again.

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Coexistence of repertoires

• the repertoires are not mutually exclusive.
• may coexist in an individuals discourse about
  race
• serving different rhetorical purposes in
  different situational circumstances
• interpretive repertoires are neither personal nor
  socially specific attitudes, as in much social
  psychology and survey research, but
• the concrete linguistic manifestation and
  exercise of communicative practices of
  discrimination

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Analytical usefulness of interpretive repertoires
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Research design The news/democracy nexus

• 1. Acquisition of
• Democratic prerequisites

Media discourses about politics Discourse
analysis
Citizens' discourses about politics Focus group
study
2. Definitional power over 'politics'
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Six interpretive repertoires about 'politics'

• The party political game - parliamentary
  democracy in action Politics is represented here
  from a positive perspective as party political
  negotiations with the government as the leading
  force. Politicians are represented as dynamic and
  full of initiative.
• The party political game - the other side of the
  coin political negotiations are represented as a
  democratically suspect game where horsetrading
  and even mafia-like methods are in use.
• Populism Politicians are shown as detached,
  arrogant and ignorant representatives of 'the
  system' and therefore as the cause of problems,
  while citizens are positioned as 'experts of
  everyday life' who have privileged knowledge
  based on their everyday experiences
  ('commonsense').

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• 4. Grassroots movements Grassroots organisations
  are presented as actors on the subpolitical scene
  in opposition to, and in cooperation with, the
  parliamentary system.
• 5. Politics of everyday life Everyday life is
  "politicised" through the attribution of
  transport problems to the individual consumer's
  failure to participate in environmentally
  responsible activities. The lack of participation
  is attributed to constraints on action, which
  emanate from everyday life.
• 6. Meta-discourse on politics. A reflexive
  detached stance is taken to the political field,
  with an analytical and critical focus on the
  dynamics of politics. The political system is
  evaluated from an outside position.