The “ordinary citizen” and the image of minorities and other nationalities in broadcast news’ sound-bites
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The present study deals with the discourse of broadcast TV news and its strategies of representing “ordinary citizens” and constructing minorities and other nationalities as different (or similar) to them. The role of mass media in shaping audiences’ understanding of the world is indisputable; it has the power to normalise or problematise phenomena, it can present and represent social actors as such that the audiences can identify with them, or highlight their divergence from the constructed “norm.” In correspondence to the tendency of conversationalisation, TV news broadcasts increasingly tend to combine elements of public and private discourse and include dialogic features and interview fragments with non-elite speakers. As previous studies have shown, these often act as representatives of a certain group of the “public” who are given floor to speak on the group’s behalf. Most often, the nationality and ethnicity of such non-elite speakers is that of the major part of audience. However, TV news include also non-elite voices that belong to social actors of other nationalities, citizens of other countries, or minorities within the country. As these groups represented by them are not the primary target audiences, it is worth exploring what image of them the news reports construct and whether they tend to be depicted as the “other” or whether rather common ground with the “domestic majority” representatives is highlighted. The material for this analysis includes sound-bites with nonelite speakers from Czech prime-time public-service and commercial news broadcasts, collected over the period of one month. The analysis takes into account mainly what topics the voices are invited to speak on, the linguistic tools of reference to the speakers’ identities, experiences, feelings or opinions used by both the reporter/voice-over for framing the sound-bites and by the speakers themselves, as well as the visual mode. |
| Related projects: |