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Abstract
Packaging messages from different times and places, combining cognitive stimuli that would not otherwise be found together, journalists work discursively on various dimensions of distance to make the reality they (re)construct and (re)present more relevant and emotionally engaging for the audience. The present article makes a claim that such journalistic ‘work on distance’ and the resulting impression of ‘co-presence’ are central to the potential of television news discourse to affect cognitive–affective attitudes of the audience. The process of reducing the distance is discussed under the term proximization and linked to the semiotic properties of the medium itself and to the news, understood both as a process and as a product. The data analysed come from the CNN news coverage of the Horn of Africa crisis in 2011.
Additional information
Monika Kopytowska, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor in the Department of Pragmatics, University of Lodz. Her research interests revolve around media discourse and the pragma-rhetorical aspects of the mass-mediated representation of conflict, ethnicity, and religion. She has published internationally in linguistic journals and volumes and is now working on the dynamics of proximization in the news discourse. She is the co-editor of Lodz Papers in Pragmatics (De Gruyter) and the associate editor of CADAAD Journal.