ê.ô.í. Øèíãàðåâà Ì.Þ., ìàãèñòðàíò Ðûñêåëäèåâà À.À.
Ðåãèîíàëüíûé ñîöèàëüíî-èííîâàöèîííûé óíèâåðñèòåò
Political discourse in the media as a term
Political discourse in the media is a
complex phenomenon: it is institutional discourse, media discourse, and mediated
political discourse. As institutional discourse, it differs from everyday
conversation in being subject to institutional goals and procedures. As media
discourse it is different from other types of institutional discourses by
being, above all, public discourse addressed to a mass media audience.
“Political
discourse in the media” as a term is ambiguous in its referential domain: it
can refer to the discourse of political agents in the media, or the discourse
of journalists with politicians in the media, or to the discourse of
journalists about politics and political agents in the media. Discourse of politicians or other political agents
like spokespersons are for instance speeches on important issues and occasions,
e.g. in parliamentary debates, at party conferences, summit meetings, etc.,
also statements, press conferences and the like. Discourse with politicians and
other political personnel are dialogic speech events in which political
representatives interact with journalists in interviews. Focusing again on the broadcasting media, such
interviews can take place in radio and television news, in news magazines or in
talk shows, or they can be an event in their own right. They can be conducted
on a one-on-one or a panel/debate basis (Clayman & Heritage 2002).
In
comparison with everyday discourse, institutional discourse is therefore often
looked upon as something artificial which adheres to its own regularities and
discourse practices. From an analytic
viewpoint, however, institutional discourse and everyday communication share
all of the fundamental pragmatic premises for felicitous communication, but
differ with respect to their instantiations in context. This holds for the
conversation-analytic concepts of sequentiality and turn-taking (Fetzer &
Meierkord 2002), for the interpersonal-communication concepts of face and
footing (Brown & Levinson 1987), for speech-act theory’s felicity conditions
and the overarching pragmatic premise of intentionality of communicative
action, with its subsequent differentiation between what is said and what is
meant (Grice 1975). The meaning of an
interlocutor’s contribution may thus go beyond the level of what is said in
both types of discourse. In both types of discourse, participants may flout
conversational maxims in order to trigger conversational implicatures and to
express conversationally implicated meaning (Grice 1975), and in both the
communicative meaning of what speakers intend to communicate needs to be worked
out by the addressees. Yet in institutional contexts, this meaning may not be
freely negotiable due to constraints on possible participant roles and on the
number of participants, as well as on the kinds of contributions, the
turn-length and the kinds of sequencing expected or allowed.
Furthermore, the strategies of coding and
interpretation are not just dependent on the type of institution, but also on
the type of genre or activity type engaged in. This raises a problem for all
general pragmatic principles, including Grice’s (1975) system of conversational
logic, for which Levinson (1983: 376) offers two basic solutions for
discussion:
The
most consequential feature of media discourse is that it is addressed to an
absent mass audience and not to a group of co-present participants. The fact that media discourse is produced for such an
audience influences both its content and its form. In the case of dialogic
interaction being broadcast, the audience may be directly addressed by the
journalists and, in rare cases, also by their studio guests. As a rule,
however, it will be in the position of a ratified overhearer (Goffman 1981), as
for instance when journalists and politicians talk to each other in order to
display their discourse to the audience. This has consequences for the way in
which such discourse is constructed, as has been demonstrated for the news
interview by analysts working within the framework of conversation analysis. In refraining from
giving feedback to their interviewees, interviewers indicate that the
interviewees’ answers are not addressed to them but to the audience (Clayman &Hertitage
2002: 120).
Turning
at last to political discourse in the media, we have seen that it is institutional,
mediated discourse collaboratively produced for the major part by the
interaction of the representatives of two macro-institutions of modern
societies, of the institution of politics and of the institution of the media.
It is the presentation of politics, not its production.
From a
pragmatic angle, political discourse in the media can be conceived as
communicative action (Fetzer & Weizman 2006). As in all types of persuasive discourse, and thus for
the analysis of how politicians interact with the media, the contrast between
perlocutionary act (Austin 1962) and perlocutionary effect (Searle 1969)
deserves particular attention. The distinction is one of intended versus achieved
effects, and between the audience as a whole, and subsets of hearers and
audiences as its parts. The relevance of the intention/effect duality is
explicitly highlighted by Chilton and Schaffner, who draw the connection
between a pragmatic approach to political discourse and media studies by
pointing out that the concept of perlocutionary effect “is of crucial importance
in political discourse analysis in particular, because it points to the
potential discrepancy between intended effect (that is, effect that some
hearers may infer to be intended) and the actual effect on the hearer"
Here lies a particular challenge for
political discourse analysis in that the heterogeneous audiences in mass-media
discourse may comprise not only different national and international targets,
but also different ideologically defined groups. This requires research on both
the sides of the communicative process - of the practices of both production
and reception. On the reception side, this means discourse analytic audience
reception research, which is still in its infancy. What we can look for on the
production side is the discursive traces of politicians’ and journalists’
orientation to multiple addressees with different, if not conflicting,
interests and affiliations on the one hand, and with different (sub-)cultural
backgrounds, on the other.
Just as
other discourses of a society, the discourse of politics, and its ways of
interacting with the discourse of the mass media, is subject to constant
change. Such changes manifest themselves
through the hybridization of its communicative genres - by incorporating
features of one genre into another, and/or by a blending of generic styles, or
by drawing on other or more discourses than before, e.g. by incorporating
elements of economical, ecological and scientific discourse into political
discourse (Fairclough 1995). The contemporary political interview in the
Anglo-Saxon media is a particularly clear case of this happening. A particular
kind of change has been triggered by a change in the participant structure of
the political interview, or rather, in the status of the participating
politicians. The arrival of grass-roots political movements and the appearance
of their representatives in the public sphere have introduced a new type of
politician to public interaction whose expertise may lie more in the fields of
science and eco-technology than in politics. In dealing with professional
politicians who have all present-day commodities and any possible personal and
technical support at their disposal, and with professional interviewers who
have the media know-how at their fingertips, they may be assigned therefore the
status of partial experts, if not lay persons, and be treated accordingly. Present-day
political discourse in the media thus has become hybrid in that it articulates
together the orders of discourse of the political system (conventional,
official politics), of the media, of science and technology, of grassroots
sociopolitical movements, of ordinary private life, and so forth - but in an
unstable and shifting configuration. (Fairclough 1995: 146.)
Literature: