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прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - News Analysis

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TABLE 2.18

Schematic Categories in 12 Newspapers From First and Third World Countries

 

 

Main Event

Background

History

Context

Consequences

Reactions

Evaluations Expectations

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Los Angeles Times

x

x

x

 

x

x

x

x

2.

Die Burger

x

x

x

 

x

x

x

x

3.

Mainichi Shimbun

x

x

x

 

x

 

x

x

4.

Telegraaf

x

x

x

 

x

x

x

x

5.

Volkskrant

x

x

x

 

x

 

 

x

6. The Guardian

x

x

x

 

x

x

 

 

7.

Renmin Ribao

x

x

x

 

 

 

 

x

8.

Bangkok Post

x

x

 

 

x

 

x

9.

Daily Graphic

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10. Indonesias Times

x

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

11. The Statesman

x

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

12. Daily Times

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TABLE 2.19

Schematic Categories in the British Press Coverage on Sept. 15th and 16th

 

 

Date

Headline

Lead

Main Event(s)

Background

History

Context

Conseyuences

Reactions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Daily Express

15

x

 

x

 

 

 

x

 

 

 

16

 

 

x

 

 

 

 

2. Daily Mail

15

x

 

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16

x

 

x

x

 

x

 

 

3. Daily Star

15

 

 

 

 

 

 

16

 

 

x

 

 

 

 

 

4.

Morning Star

15

x

 

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16

 

 

x

x

 

 

 

 

5.

Daily Mirror

15

 

 

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16

 

 

 

 

x

 

 

6.

Times

15

x

x

x

x

 

 

x/

 

 

16

 

 

x

 

x/

x

x

7. Daily Telegraph

15

x

x

x

x

x

 

 

 

 

16

x

x

x

x

x

 

x

 

8.

Guardia')

15

 

 

 

 

16

 

 

 

 

 

x

x

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. STRUCTURES OF INTERNATIONAL NEWS

99

quality press has more schema categories, especially Background, Context, Consequences and Reactions, whereas the popular press tends to have Main Events and sometimes Consequences and Reactions. History and Context are especially absent in such newspapers.

These observations show that the majority of iiewspaper readers (or TV viewers, for that matter) only get to know the main event itself, and practically no r-7mation about history, context, or other backr,unds since they read the popular rather than quality newspapers in both the First World and Third World. The assassination itself is apparently sufficient as a news topic, which is in agreement with the negativity and violence criteria of the prevailing news values. Background information is the exception rather than the rule in most of the press if numbers of newspapers and readership are taken into account. Thus, foreign news for the majority of the press seems reduced to the enumeration of isolated events that satisfy the news value criteria, but which are not made intelligible. At most, they are fitted into ready-made frameworks or issues, such as Lebanon or the Middle East in this case. The assassination is no more than an instance of the overall topic of fighting or violence that dominates these frameworks. The quality press, especially in the First World, gives more background, but this also occurs within a standardized framework of specifying some context, previous events and history, more or less identical for each newspaper, and often copied from the agency dispatches. Whereas Third World newspapers have practically no correspondents in Beirut, the resulting stories in the quality press are nevertheless also structurally very similar to those in the First World press, although there tends to be somewhat less, and more fragmented background information. More dramatic, then, are the differences between the quality press in general and the widespread popular press. i.arge parts of the Western press has access to relatively rich information about the events in Lebanon but does not make use of it. This is quite different from not using information which you cannot get in the first place. This is one of the crucial differences between the press in the First World and the Third World.

LOCAL SEMANTICS

Introduction

We turn now to the study of so-called local or microstructures and begin with an analysis of local meanings, that is, with the semantics of words, sentences and sentence connections. At this microlevel, only a few examples can be analyzed. A precise account of the detailed meanings of hundreds of news texts is beyond current possibilities.

100

LOCAL SEMANTICS

Specification: What ICind of Details?

Global topics are derived from textual information by macrorules. They abstract from, or summarize sequences of propositions. To analyze how topics are realized in the text, inverse macrondes, which are forms of specification, are used. One aspect of a local semantic analysis of the news is to these specifications. Some newspapers hardly give more than the macropropositions (topics) themselves. Others may pick out a few themes and give local details at several levels of specificity and leave other topics unspecified. For instance, the topic about the controversial election of Gemayel may simply appear as a brief summary in the text saying, for example, that Moslem groups opposed his election. But the same topic may also be realized by a detailed account of the election event as it had appeared in the news media a few weelcs earlier. For the election event, attention may again focus on specific details, while leaving out others, for instance the fact that some parliamentary representatives were bribed ("financially persuaded") to vote for Gemayel. In other words, the topical realization in the text may talce place according to a few major criteria: (1) level of specificity (level of description); (2) degree of completeness at each level; (3) selection of details at each level; and (4) perspective or point of

view in selecting 1-3.

Table 2.20 presents some examples of the kind of specifications newspapers may use. Listed are some major topics as they appear in the New York Times front page article, and for each topic the type of specification is given. Specification is not arbitrary; the same types of specification tend to reoccur:

1.Numbers (time, location, dates, weight, etc.).

2.Identification of participants and their roles.

3.Contents (of declarations, reports, etc.).

TABLE 2.20

Specification and Specification Categories in the News Report

of the New Yorlc Times (Sept. 15, 1982)

1.Meeting of Gemayel at Party Headquarters

1.1.Number of attendants: 400. (Participants, Number)

1.2. Weeldy meeting

( Time)

2.Victims

2.1.Approximate numbers of injured and deaths ( Number)

3.Declanztion by Wazzan

3.1.Details of declaration ( Contents)

(continued)

2. STRUCTURES OF INTERNATIONAL NEWS

101

TABLE 2.20

(Continued)

4.Election of G.

4.1.Elected on August 23. ( Date/Time)

4.2.During a special session of parliament ( Circumstances)

4.3.Election boycotted by Moslem legislators ( Participants, Opponents)

...cause G. was considered an agent of Israel ( Reason 4.3.)

5.Who will be the new president?

5.1.Sarkis until September 23 ( Participant, Time)

5.2.New Elections ( Possible consequent actions)

6.Bomb explosion

6.1.Bomb exploded at 16 h 10 ( Time)

6.2.Bomb weighed 200 kilos ( Weight, Number)

6.3.How was bomb introduced into the building? ( Possible Manner)

7.Rumors about survival

7.1.Words of Cemayel (Specification of act, Contents)

7.2.Leg bruises ( Consequences of explosion)

7.3.These rumors carne from.. . (Source, Content)

7.4.G. walked away ( Component acts)

7.5.G. went to hospital ( Goal, Location)

8.Gemayel dead

8.1.After hours body found in rubble ( Time, Result, Location)

8.2.No announcements on media. . . (Absent Consequences, Reactions)

8.3.Declaration Wazzan ( Reaction, Contents)

9.Histonj of Gemayel. Previous attempts.

9.1.There were two previous attempts to kill G. ( Number, Comparison, Previous Events)

9.2.By a car bomb (Instrument, Cause)

9.3.First bomb on March 20, 1979 was defused ( Time, Result)

9.4.Second bomb ... ( Time, Circumstances)

9.5.His daughter Maya killed ( Result)

9.6.Attempts follow death of Tony Franjieh ( Time, Cause?)

9.7.T.F. is son of S.F. (Identification, Participants)

9.8.S.F. was head of . . . (Identificaton, Participant, Location)

9.9.Son was killed by . . . ( Cause, Agent)

10.G. had many enemies

10.1.Palestinian guerrillas ( Participant)

10.2.Leftist Militias ( Participant)

10.3.They opposed G. in civil war ( Role of Participants: Opponents, Period, History)

10.4.Christian foes . . . (Participant: Opponent)

10.5.G. accused of Idlling ... ( Cause, Act)

10.6.Own panty members found G. too soft ( Participant, Cause)

10.7.G. had announced ... departure of foreign troups (Plan)

11.Meeting at headquarters

11.1.Last meeting before . . . ( Time, Number)

11.2.Purpose of meeting: discussion to open bridge ( Purpose, Content)

11.3.Bridge between East and West Beirut on.. ( Location)

11.4.Some were opposed to this plan (Participant, Opponent)

11.5.Wazzan declared that bridge would remain closed (Content)

11.6.Discussion about private militias (Purpose, Content Plan)

102

4.Causes/reasons and consequences of acts.

5.Components acts of actions, and reactions.

6.Circumstances.

7.Goals and plans.

LOCAL SEMANTICS

These specification categories are used to fill in the details of a situation. The typical news rhetoric used to make stories more credible, however, pays specific attention to precise details, such as number of victims for each violent event or the quoted content of declarations. Moreover, participants are not only identified but also categorized into a few basic interaction categories that are politically relevant, such as friends or allies and enemies or opponents. Finally, details about the rumor of Gemayel's survival are not only arbitrary specification of acts but tend to select information that is vivid and concrete, including his much quoted alleged statement, "Thank God, that I survived this one.- In this way, the news item may give a lot of irrelevant detail t!- levertheless adds ' '-he concreteness of the scene description and hence to the credibility of the account.

Table 2.21 shows very similar specification relations in Granma: numbers, identification of participants and their categorization as ally or opponent, and especially a specification of the causes or conditions of the election and of the assassination. In this case, these conditions focus on the negative aspects of Gemayel's political position, such as the support by Israel made possible by the Israeli occupation, the opposition of Moslem groups and their reasons for opposition, and the reactions of Israel and the United States to his election. In other words, specification relations tend to focus on the political conditions of the position of Gemayel as presidentelect.

France Soir starts its specification in terms of evaluative comments about

TABLE 2.21

Specification Categories in the News Report of Granma

(Sept. 15, 1982)

1.Number, and (political) identification of victims

2.Sources of declarations and rumors about suivivalídeath of G.

3. Location and time of discovery of

body

4.Power (Number) of the bomb and how and what was destroyed

5.Identification of Gemayel and his father

6.Identification of political opponents and reasons for opposition

7.Identification of those killed by G. (opponents); numbers of victims

8.Participant Israel, type of relation (ally) with G.

9. Political conditions of

election (Israeli invasion)

10.Political commitments (plans) of G. during election period

11.Reactions of Israel and U.S. to election (participants)

2. STRUCTURES OF INTERNATIONAL NEWS

103

the actual situation in Lebanon ("Lebanon heading for new adventures, the most unstable country of the Middle East . . . lost its new strong man'', etc.). This is followed by the usual identification of participants, numerical details (dates of election, etc.), but also details about the possible consequences in Lebanon (confusion, risk of another civil war, revenge, etc.). Besides the usual specification relations that describe the details of the situ..:: ,..,ce Soir apparently pays more attention to evaluations, expectations, and other comments and, therefore, seems to be closer to a background feature article.

Note that many specifications of historical and political backgrounds need not be given within the hard news article itself. Thus, Dutch, NRCHandelsblad is fairly general about Gemayers personal and political history and the actual situation in the Middle East but makes up for this lack by a large background feature that places the event into perspective. Still another article is about the reactions in the Gulf States. Interesting is the fact that although many details are given, the reason for the opposition against Gemayel is merely described as "bloodbaths," without entering into the Icind of detail provided by the news agencies and the other newspapers about the Icillings of Tony Franjieh and the followers of Chamoun. Apparently, background articles have different Icinds of specification types. Instead of direct situation details such as time, place, participants, numbers, or component acts and their consequences, we find a specification of political relationships in such articles, often with evaluative comments, e.g., "Murder took place at a strategic moment,- -The Saudi's . . were enthusiastic about him,- and (since the Israelis will stay) "also the Syrians will have an alibi to keep their troops in Lebanon.- In other words, background news articles focus on the specification of causes, reasons, or conditions in general, often by recalling previous events, and by indicating possible consequences.

From these few examples, we may conclude that general specification types are used to detail overall topics. These include the usual dimensions of situation models we discussed earlier such as time, location, causes, consequences, component acts, and especially the identification of participants. For news, much attention is typically given to precise numbers, contents of declarations, and the political roles of the participants. Newspapers may differ in their points of view and the resulting choice of level of description, degree of completeness, or choice of details. Thus Granma mentions Gemayel's killings during the civil war and omits details about the two attacks against him, whereas France Soir does the opposite and merely summarizes his controversial past by the phrase "his politics of refusal of compromise and submission,- which is probably taken from the AFP wire because we find the same phrase in other Latin American newspapers that use the AFP wire. Similarly, only a few papers detail the fascist leanings of

104

LOCAL SEMANTICS

the Falangist leader Pierre Gemayel. In other words, whereas the overall topics and their ordering may be rather similar, newspapers may have small but significant differences in the choice of their details, and these choices can be accounted for at Ieast partly in terms of different political and ideological views on the Middle East events.

Local Coherence

How are propositions, as expressed in clauses and sentences, related in news discourse? Earlier, local coherence was defined in terms of (1) functional relationships between propositions (e.g., specification, generalization, contrast, explanation, or content of previously mentioned statements, etc.), or in terms of (2) temporal and conditional relations of the facts denoted by propositions (causes, reasons, consequences). Since news discourse is organized from top (general) to bottom (details) and the relation between general topics and microdetails is given by the specification relations previously presented, news stories should follow functional links of specification, rather than the cause-consequence links found in natural stories (the ". . . and then" chain).

Table 2.22 presents the results of the first few sentences of the New York Times story, indicating how each succeeding clause/proposition is linked with the previous ones. Thus, when it is said that Gemayel was killed "when a bomb shattered his headquarters," we have both a temporal relationship, as well as an implicit causal relationship. The causality is inferred on the basis of our knowledge of bomb explosions and their probable consequences: It is not likely that Gemayel died of a heart attack, say, because of the noise of the explosion. The temporal/causal link is explicity signaled by the adverb connector "when." Such surface structure expressions are the markers of underlying semantic coherence and define what is called the cohesion of the text (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). The most pervasive markers of local coherence are the pronouns and definite descriptions used to corefer to the same participant, in this case the continued reference to Gemayel and his opponents. We see that most of the links involve such condition and consequence relationships or the specification of details, such as the introduction of various participants. Note also that connections may be established with propositions that occur much earlier in the text.

Table 2.23 lists the first few sentences of Granma and shows that the coherence relations are very similar to these of the New York Times item. Indeed, there is the usual type of coherence for news discourse: cause/ consequence and specification relations. Yet, there are also some small but interesting differences. Whereas the Times says that Gemayel died "when"

2. STRUCTURES OF INTERNATIONAL NEWS

105

TABLE 2.22

Coherence Relations in the First Sentences of the News Report

in the New York Times (Sept. 15, 1982)

News Statement

Relation

 

 

1. President-elect Bashir Gemayel was killed Tuesday

 

2. when a bomb shattered the headquarters of his Lebanese Christian

Temporal

(Causal)

Falangist Party in East-Beirut.

 

3. The Government said he would be buried today.

Consequence (1)

4. Mr. Gemayel was said to have died

Specification (1)

5. as he was about to address 400 of his followers at a weekly meeting

Temporal/

Circumstance

6. ( G. was) 34 years old

Specification

7. who was to be inaugurated Sept. 23

(Participant) (a)

Temporal/

 

Specification

8. The state radio said the blast left at least 8 dead

(Participant) (a)

Consequence (2)

9. among them other Falangist leaders

Specification

10. and more than 50 wounded

(Participants)

Consequence (2)

11. No one took responsibility immediately for the bombing.

Consequence (2)

12. It raised widespread fears that it would be followed by new fighting

Consequence

between Lebanon's Christian and Moslem militias.

(1/2)

13. Mr. Gemayel was elected President Aug. 23 at a special session of

Condition (7)

Parliament

 

14. that was boycotted by many Moslem legislators

Specification

15. ( G.) who had been the commander of the Christian militias

( Circumstance)

Specification

16. To them, many other Moslems and some Christian groups he was an

(Participant) (a)

Reason (4)/

enemy and an agent of Israel

Specification

17. whose invading troups made his election possible.

(Participant) (a)

Specification

 

(Partic.: Israel)/

 

Condition (13)

 

 

a bomb exploded, Granma uses the explicit causal connection "as a consequence of', and whereas the Times mentions Gemayel's alliance with Israel as a possible reason for the election boycott of the Moslem groups, Granma does not explicitly mention this link.

A quite different coherence picture can be found in typical popular press stories, as in German Bild Zeitung. Here, the local ordering is not so much top to bottom, but rather temporal, as in natural stories. This narrative style enhances the spectacular nature of the bomb explosion, which is also found

106

LOCAL SEMANTICS

 

 

TABLE 2.23

 

 

 

Coherence Relations in the First Sentences of the News Report

 

 

in Granma (Sept. 15, 1982)

 

 

 

News Statement

Relation

 

 

1. Bechir Gemayel died today

 

2. as a consequence of the explosion of a bomb

Cause

3. that paz-hay destroyed the quarters of this rightwing organization in

Specification/

 

East Beirut

Result

4.

( G.,

who was) president elect of Lebanon

Specification

 

 

 

(Participant) (a)

5. and chief of the militaly forres of the Kataeb Party (falangist)

Specification

6. Further 19 persons also died

(Participant) (a)

Consequence (2)

7. induding 3 important leaders of Kataeb

Specification

 

 

 

(Participants)

8. and some sixty were wounded

Consequence (2)

9. the news agencies informed

Source (1-8)

 

(.

.)

Specification

10. Gemayel was 34 when he died

 

 

 

(Participant) (a)

11. ( G. was a) Christian Maronite

Specification

 

 

 

(Participant) (a)

12. and would become president next Sept. 23

Temporal

 

 

 

(Participant) (a)

(.

.)

 

 

13. G. was considered to be the principal ally of Israel among the various

Specification

 

right wing organization in Lebanon

(Participant) (a)

 

 

 

Reason (1)?

14. and his election as president of the country was considered a conse-

Explanation/

 

quence of the Zionist invasion

Condition (15)

15. (election) on last August 23

Temporal (14)

 

 

 

 

in the headline GIANT BOMB RIPS APART PRESIDENT OF LEBANON. RECOG-

NIZED ONLY BY HIS WEDDING RING. This descriptive concreteness about the results of the explosion comes back in the story "The 200 kilo bomb tore open the three-storied house from top to bottom and then collapsed: The rubble buried the newly elected president Bechir Gemayel (34)." Only on an inside page do two sentences give historical background, which, nevertheless, does not omit the detail that Gemayel's daughter was killed during an earlier attack against his life. In other words, this narrative style tends to focus on the violent details of the story, as well as on human interest and vivid types of description (he could only be identified by his ring), and fully neglects context, background, history, etc. (Spiegl, 1983).