The study of journalism has attracted the attention of many scholars with various academic backgrounds. It has proved to be a very intriguing field due to the significant role it plays in society, as a major textual system (Montgomery 2007) of contemporary culture, through the abundance of its news output which is constantly delivered to its audience, helping them to make sense of the world. Even though it has been argued (Gunter 1987) that the actual time viewers spend in front of TV news programmes does not essentially express the real amount of information the audience receive from them, broadcast news represents the dominant channel of news information and, as Harrison (2000: 45) affirms TV has been identified as the major source of news information for British people since 1950s. As also described by Montgomery (2007: 2), most of the studies about news have been concerned mainly with the processes of broadcast news production, organizations and the relationship between journalists and their sources (Schlesinger 1978; Gans 1979; Tuchman 1978), or rather on aspects of news content such as the interesting investigations carried out by the Glasgow University Media Group (1970s; 1980s), mainly concerned with content analysis of TV news stories to see whether the influence of powerful systems upon journalism resulted in an un/biased TV news output. Overall, notwithstanding the great value of such studies, it must be pointed out that they did not focus extensively on the language of news products, but rather only presupposed its linguistic aspects. While the study of the language of broadcast news has received less attention over the years, many more linguistic-based studies have been carried out on the language of newspapers, presumably due to the easier availability of printed data. Although Montgomery (2007) argues that broadcasting language is rather different from newspaper language and the observations carried out on the print journalism cannot be necessarily true for broadcast news, I believe that the findings of such studies can be successfully applied to the language of TV news, bearing in mind specific aspects of the TV news background (such as the use of visuals and the different reporting practices). Accordingly, the present chapter will focus on a broad range of approaches on media discourse upon which my study will be drawn. In particular, it will start from the definition of TV news as a genre, moving to the description of the most significant issues of TV news discourse such as the selection and the setting of news stories as well as the most important linguistic features of TV news language. Subsequently, the theoretical background about media discourse will be outlined. Last but not least, a historical development of the British broadcast system will be also sketched, also setting out the reporting practices of BBC and ITV news channels.
Evaluation in TV News Discourse: a Corpus-Based Study / Venuti, Marco. - (2009).
Evaluation in TV News Discourse: a Corpus-Based Study
VENUTI, MARCO
2009
Abstract
The study of journalism has attracted the attention of many scholars with various academic backgrounds. It has proved to be a very intriguing field due to the significant role it plays in society, as a major textual system (Montgomery 2007) of contemporary culture, through the abundance of its news output which is constantly delivered to its audience, helping them to make sense of the world. Even though it has been argued (Gunter 1987) that the actual time viewers spend in front of TV news programmes does not essentially express the real amount of information the audience receive from them, broadcast news represents the dominant channel of news information and, as Harrison (2000: 45) affirms TV has been identified as the major source of news information for British people since 1950s. As also described by Montgomery (2007: 2), most of the studies about news have been concerned mainly with the processes of broadcast news production, organizations and the relationship between journalists and their sources (Schlesinger 1978; Gans 1979; Tuchman 1978), or rather on aspects of news content such as the interesting investigations carried out by the Glasgow University Media Group (1970s; 1980s), mainly concerned with content analysis of TV news stories to see whether the influence of powerful systems upon journalism resulted in an un/biased TV news output. Overall, notwithstanding the great value of such studies, it must be pointed out that they did not focus extensively on the language of news products, but rather only presupposed its linguistic aspects. While the study of the language of broadcast news has received less attention over the years, many more linguistic-based studies have been carried out on the language of newspapers, presumably due to the easier availability of printed data. Although Montgomery (2007) argues that broadcasting language is rather different from newspaper language and the observations carried out on the print journalism cannot be necessarily true for broadcast news, I believe that the findings of such studies can be successfully applied to the language of TV news, bearing in mind specific aspects of the TV news background (such as the use of visuals and the different reporting practices). Accordingly, the present chapter will focus on a broad range of approaches on media discourse upon which my study will be drawn. In particular, it will start from the definition of TV news as a genre, moving to the description of the most significant issues of TV news discourse such as the selection and the setting of news stories as well as the most important linguistic features of TV news language. Subsequently, the theoretical background about media discourse will be outlined. Last but not least, a historical development of the British broadcast system will be also sketched, also setting out the reporting practices of BBC and ITV news channels.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
