Entering the liminal zone

Abstract

On 2 December 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik attacked a Christmas gathering in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and wounding 22. On 4 December, the news media were granted access to the couple’s home by the landlord. The ensuing news scrum entering the house was broadcast live to air, with reporters in the house identifying objects. In this paper, we use Membership Categorisation Analysis and particularly categorial inferencing to examine the way journalists, on being granted access to the house for the first time, and under pressure to produce news live on air, resorted to various forms of speculation and assumptions to generate news within the liminal zone. In particular, we examine how objects found in the home were used to occasion newsworthy discourses through categorial reasoning around why and how these objects were used and what they might indicate about the people and events. It is through these routine social categorial reasoning practices that it is possible to examine journalists’ routine work as displaying a “news-culture-in-action” whereby individuals and their actions are rendered as news relevant categories and articulated through categorial inferred reasoning practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Live news broadcasting
• liminal zone
• Membership Categorisation Analysis
• categorial inferencing
• occasioned objects
• news-culture-in-action

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Previous versions of this work have been presented at Orebro University, University of Lausanne, University of Macau and the Ross Priory Broadcast Talk Seminar. We wish to thank those who have provided comments on earlier versions of the paper and also wish to thank the reviewers their insightful and clinical comments.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Journalists in the house: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmRDe3LcPR4.

2 It is worth noting here that while a critical reader potentially could find grounds for finding various forms of media “bias” or “ideology” in the categories and courses of action and reasoning that are selected by the journalists from available possibilities, we make no evaluative claims here with regard to the “objectivity” or “neutrality”, or otherwise, of the chosen categories (see Jalbert 1995).

3 The Stolen Generations were the children of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were deemed “half caste” or of mixed race and who were removed from their families by the Australian Federal and State government agencies and church missions, under acts of their respective parliaments between approximately 1905 and 1970. In 2008, The Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd, presented an official apology to the indigenous population.