Paper for the 4th International Symposium of Critical Discourse Analysis, Language, Social Life and Critical Thought, Athens, 14-16 December, 1995.
Second Draft, March 1996
Opinions and Ideologies in Editorials
Teun A. van Dijk еип 66
Vandijk?discourse-in-society.Org (replace ? by @)
во введение! Актуальность темы
1. Introduction
Many phenomena of everyday life tend to be ignored by scholars. Thus, historically, among many types of discourse, everyday conversations were studied systematically much later than less mundane genres such as poetry, drama and novels. The same was true for such pervasive everyday texts as news reports in the media which began to be studied systematically and from a discourse analytical point of view during the last decade (see, e.g., Fairclough, 1995; Fowler, 1991; van Dijk, 1985, 1988a, 1988b, 1991).
Editorials are no exception. Each day we find them, usually at the same page and at the same location, in our daily newspapers. For those people who read them, they help to make up their mind about the events of the world, even if often by critical opposition against them. Given this prominent function of editorials in the expression and construction of public opinion, one would expect a vast scholarly literature on them. Nothing is less true: There are virtually no book-length studies, and rather few substantial articles, on the structures, strategies and social functions of editorials. They are taken for granted as so many of the ordinary types of text and talk in society and culture (but for some discourse analytical studies, see, e.g., Bolivar, 1994; Bonnafous & Fiala, 1984; Hackett & Zhao, 1994; Love & Morrison, 1989; Tirkkonen-Condit, 1987; van Dijk, 1989, 1992, 1995a).
Most work on editorials is practical and anecdotal, and written by (former) journalists (Fischer & Fischer, 1990; Rystrom, 1994). Scholarly studies are often journalistic, and about how the press dealt with a specific historical issue (mostly in the USA), such as the civil rights movement (Bagdikian, 1968), foreign policy (Chang, 1989; Myers, 1982a, 1982b), bias and the editorial endorsement of presidential candidates in the USA (Fedler, Smith, & Counts, 1985; Merron & Gaddy, 1986; St. Dizier, 1985, 1986); political leadership (Sinclair, 1982). There is also some psychological and other work on the influence of editorials on the readers (see, e.g., Alvarado, 1990; Cacioppo, Petty, & Sidera, 1982; Fasold, Yamada, Robinson, & Barish, 1990; Gruner, 1989; Krueger & Fox, 1991).
Against the backdrop of this lack of explicit theorizing about editorials, this paper can only contribute to our insight of one prominent and characteristic feature of editorials, viz., the formulation of opinions and the expression of ideologies. After a brief account of the notions of 'opinion' and 'ideology', we shall therefore focus on some of these discursive properties of the manifestation of evaluative beliefs of newspaper editors.
The approach of this paper fits into a broader framework in which the relations between discourse and socially shared mental representations are being investigated, with special attention to the discursive manifestation of ideologies. In the present stage of this long-term project, especially the cognitive and discursive aspects of these mental representations are being investigated (van Dijk, 1995a).
It is however obvious that opinions and ideologies also have prominent social, political and cultural functions. Thus, in our case opinions and ideologies are expressed in the socially and culturally relevant genre of newspaper editorials. They play a role in the formation and change of public opinion, in setting the political agenda, and in influencing social debate, decision making and other forms of social and political action. When expressed in editorials, opinions and ideologies are being produced by journalists and other writers, who both as professionals and as other social group members (e.g., men, whites, conservatives, etc.) exhibit their shared social representations, and participate in the complex processes of newspaper production and reception as well as in intergroup interaction and institutional reproduction.
О фреймах, сценариях - связь медиадискурса с когнитивной лингвистикой! Отсюда использование в качестве импликатур, в качестве инструментов воздействия архетипов, стереотипов, предрассудков.
To close the discourse-cognition-society circle (or rather triangle), we assume however that these various sociocultural functions, structures and processes are in turn based on socially shared mental representations: In the same way as the mind is part of society, also society is again 'part of' the mind. Social actors manage their social actions and act within social contexts as a function of their personal as well as socially shared interpretations or representations of their social environment. Mind and society mutually presuppose each other, and theories need to explain these interdependencies, without however reducing the one to the other.