Elite and mass attitude towards Europe in British, French, Italian and Polish TV news

The present study investigates the role of sources in British, Italian and Polish TV news reports through the analysis of three corpora consisting of transcripts of TV news programmes collected from February to April 2007. In particular, each corpus includes news bulletins from both public and commercial channels (respectively TG1 and TG5 in Italy, BBC one and ITV news in United Kingdom, ……in Poland) in order to carry out linguistic and discursive comparisons across the three languages and cultures analysed. The news stories included in the corpora have been divided into three categories: items related to the European Union affairs, European “international news” which generally refers to events reported in European countries, and other, both domestic news and international (non-European) stories.As stressed by Hartley (1982) news programmes have a very specific structure and the single reports which compose them usually contain “accessed voices” such as legitimated persons (LPs) -experts and public figures- together with ordinary people (VOXs). As described by Montgomery (2007) such voices play different roles in the reports, but they mutually affect the general reception of news by the audience, and in particular their use by broadcasters can hint at attitudinal stance. Starting from the assumption that a gap between the institution and European citizens exists, the study of such sources in TV news reports can shed much light on the perception of EU institution from citizens in the three countries. Our belief is that the role of LPs and VOXs differently affects the audience consumption and re-interpretation of news stories. LPs are authoritative sources due to their professional status and knowledge in providing the audience with details and background of the news stories (Montgomery 2007), but they convey a message which may be regarded as distant from the layperson. VOXs on the other hand are recognised as “one of us” and may lead to a more direct identification with the audience. In particular, people in the street are employed in news reports as giving their opinion about general issues but also as witnessing some events, reporting what happened in the event and “how it felt like as it happened” (Montgomery 2007: 168) providing the audience with a double focus, and thus affecting their interpretation of the news stories.The present study will mainly draw on the Appraisal System, with special regard to the role of attribution which is concerned with the linguistic expression of attitudes towards a referenced text, and the rhetorical effects deriving from such positionings (Martin & White 2005: 92). Although the language of attribution has been fully explored within the framework of the Appraisal System, our analysis will be limited to the investigation of attribution in utterances spoken by LPs and VOXs and not to the phenomenon as a whole. In order to carry out the comparison, the Intune TV subcorpus will be queried exploiting the XML annotation which allows for detailed comparisons between countries and within each country between state and private channels. A more quantitative analysis will make it possible to compare different uses of sources in TV news programmes when news items deal with the EU and European Countries vis a vis other topics in order to describe the way different forms of attribution are used when Europe related topics are dealt with. The quantitative analysis will be complemented with a more qualitative analysis of a news item available in all TV news programmes which will help shed light on the differences in attitude towards Europe across the three countries and between state/commercial broadcasters.