Presentation of vox pop in public media broadcasts
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The goal of the project is to investigate the presence of “vox-pops”, sound-bites and fragmented interviews with “members of the public” in TV news broadcasts, as part of the tendency towards “conversationalization” of public discourse. The research aims to find out how the voices of the “public” are presented and represented in TV news broadcasts, what discourse and linguistic strategies are linked to such presentation, whether these strategies differ from those utilized for presenting voices of experts, politicians and other publicly known personalities, whether/how the presentation of public opinion differs between public service and commercial channels and whether conclusions can be drawn concerning its relation to the channels’ target audiences. In order to answer the set research questions, recordings of TV news programmes on selected channels are collected and qualitatively examined through the lens of discourse and conversational analysis. The linguistic and discourse strategies explored concern addressing and referring to the target audience, dialogic features present in the newsreaders’ and reporters’ speeches, introducing the fragmented interviews and the form of the fragmented interviews themselves, with special focus on the presence and character of questions, turn-taking, etc. With regard to the multimodal nature of TV news broadcasts, the visual aspect of the fragmented interviews as well as written elements present are also taken into account. Studies conducted so far as part of this project have examined mainly data taken from BBC News programme, an accompanying study was conducted using data from Czech news programmes. Preliminary results have pointed to the significance of the way the speakers are introduced and referred to and have outlined similarities and differences between the discourse strategies applied for involving “ordinary” speakers in contrast to other personalities. Currently, a comparison of BBC News data with news broadcasts on one of British commercial channels is planned. |
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