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Abstract
The analysis of journalistic discourse and its social embeddedness has known significant advances in the last two decades, especially due to the emergence and development of Critical Discourse Analysis. However, three important aspects remain under-researched: the time plane in discourse analysis, the discursive strategies of social actors, and the extra- and supra-textual effects of mediated discourse. Firstly, understanding the biography of public matters requires a longitudinal examination of mediated texts and their social contexts but most forms of analysis of journalistic discourse do not account for the time sequence of texts and its implications. Secondly, as the media representation of social issues is, to a large extent, a function of the discursive construction of events, problems and positions by social actors, the discursive strategies that they employ in a variety of arenas and channels “before” and “after” journalistic texts need to be examined. Thirdly, the fact that many of the modes of operation of discourse are extra- or supra-textual calls for a consideration of various social processes “outside” the text. This paper aims to produce a theoretical and methodological contribution to the integration of these issues in discourse analysis by proposing a framework that combines a textual dimension with a contextual one.
Notes
1. Richardson (2007) combines a strong theoretical foundation with a wealth of empirical examples of how the CDA programme can be applied to the discourse of newspapers.
2. The goal is not to make claims in the general field of CDA as the focus here is on the analysis of media(ted) discourses only. Many of the debates on CDA as a whole are therefore relevant for the present discussion but the reverse is not necessarily true.
3. As noted by van Dijk (Citation2001), CDA has counterparts in “critical” developments in the social sciences (e.g. Birnbaum, Citation1971).
4. Earlier, Fowler et al. (Citation1979) had already set out the “critical linguistics model”.
5. Cf. Flowerdew (Citation1999) for a response.
6. Part of the reason for the levels of public opposition to the Iraq war in European countries and elsewhere may be the relative “desintermediation” of communication of the views of different social actors brought about by the internet.
7. Some works on environmental policy-making have provided interesting insights into these issues. Hajer (1995) has referred to discursive mechanisms as processes through which discourse works.
8. Hajer (1995) uses the expression “discourse mechanisms” to refer both to what I have designated as discursive strategies (see below) and to effects, therefore not individuating agency in discourse. His category of “discourse mechanisms” includes a variety of intra- and extra-textual (and even extra-discursive) aspects, from “positioning” to “sensory experience”.
9. Hajer (1995) claims that discursive hegemony is attained through discourse structuration and discourse institutionalization (cf. Berger and Luckmann, Citation1991 [1966]).
10. The term “extra-textual” is preferable to “extra-discursive” (cf. Foucault's, Citation1984, notion of extra-discursive dependencies), given that institutions are, in some respects, a product of discourses.
11. In journalistic terms one can think of news pegs: what events or issues does a particular article “originate” from?
12. van Leeuwen (Citation1996) provides a complex “sociosemantic inventory” of ways to represent social actors.
13. Compare with the notion of “source”. Some of those actors may have functioned as sources for the author of the article while others have not.
14. This understanding of actors differs from Fairclough's “voices”, which refers to “those speaking or whose speech is represented” (1995, p. 80) in the media.
15. This is also related to issues of access to the media.
16. Of course, rhetorical analysis can be much more encompassing than what is suggested here: for an introduction see, for instance, Gill and Whedbee (Citation1997).
17. Wodak defines “strategies” in discourse as “plans of actions that may vary in their degree of elaboration, may be located at different levels of mental organization, and may range from automatic to highly conscious” (1999, p. 188).
18. In Durham's article framing is seen as reduction(ist) practice undertaken by journalists to make sense of reality in a systematic attempt to identify a single meaning for events (that are often complex and multi-dimensional).
19. Compare with Halliday's (1978) interpersonal function of language, and the relational function of discourse mentioned by Fairclough (1995).
20. This does not mean that there is a logical priority of ideologies over texts. Ideologies are produced by texts and “guide” the production of texts.
21. van Dijk's understanding of ideology (1998b, 1998c), as of discourse, is inextricably linked to cognition.
22. Cf. Fairclough's sociocultural practice (1995).
23. Durant et al. (Citation1998) and McComas and Shanahan (Citation1999) are among the few examples of researchers that have tried to understand the evolution of media discourses on a given subject over time. Focusing respectively on frames in biotechnology and in climate change (meta)narratives (as derived from content analysis of texts in various periods) in the United States, their analyses are predominantly quantitative. In consequence, their work offers little detailed analysis of the discursive means of meaning.
24. Cf. Fairclough's chain relations (1995).
