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Election nights in media discourse cross-cultural analyses
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. This sets it apart from the discourse of other
institutions, such as medicine, the law, or education. As mediated political
discourse, it is the outcome of the encounter of two different institutional
discourses - those of politics and of the media. Just what constitutes the
goals and purposes, subtypes, genres and discursive practices of this hybrid
discourse, is the question pursued in political discourse analysis.
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, 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 [1, p.120].
Election
night broadcasts are well suited for comparative analysis. Like royal weddings
or funerals, they are important national media events, but unlike such very
culture-specific happenings, and in spite of national differences in political
systems and mass media regulations, they are highly ritualised
cross-culturally. Like all television spectacles, and in times of increasing
audience fragmentation, they generate a unified mass audience[2, p. 415]. For national and
international channels alike, they are sites of competition for that audience.
Election night broadcasts have similar goals, deal with similar topics, use
similar types of discourse strategies and a similar variety of media formats
and genres to realize them. Due to the fact that they are broadcast live, they
provide good data for a comparative analysis not only of scripted but also
unscripted yet routinised discourse practices. Through these practices, the
privileged reading positions for the event and the culturally specific
identities and relations for the media, for politics, and for the public are
constructed. Since there is so much similarity in the social and discursive
frameworks of such broadcasts, it will be interesting to find out where the
differences in terms of culturally specific realizations lie and where
homogenisation processes of a global television culture may be at work.
In
addition, these election night broadcasts are special in another way. They are
probably the only news format in which the viewers are not merely unseen
witnesses or overhearing audience. Also, unlike tomorrow’s newspaper or next week’s news magazine,
television is on the spot, broadcasting live on the results of the election as
and when they are announced. But this is only the basis for realizing a cluster
of further important functions that television fulfils on election night.
Election
night programmes provide the arena in which politicians, experts, and
representatives of the powerful social institutions can engage, under the direction
of the presenters, in the conflictual negotiation over what the results of the
election mean. They provide a stage on which (and stage directions according
to which) the participants involved can transform the numerical election
results into social facts. By offering its forum to a multitude of voices,
television offers a multitude of explanations of the election results from
which viewers can construct their own.
These
explanations concern prospectively what follows from the numerical results in
terms of who are the winners and losers, in terms of who will be the next
President, Prime Minister or Chancellor, in terms of which party or parties
will form the next Government, what policies to expect in the next legislature
and what they will mean for different parts of the electorate and the
individual viewer. Similarly, television analyses retrospectively voter turnout
and voters’ movements, and provides an arena for the exchange of different
opinions on the strengths and weaknesses of the election campaigns and party
platforms, on the allocation of credit and blame.
In
sum, by staging the multi-voiced discourse of election night, television offers
the spectacle of a battle of interpretation over what the elections results
mean for the voters, for the country at large, and for international relations.
Stiehler [3, p.109], writing from a political communication perspective, argues
that research on what happens in the media after an election is over has been
neglected in favour of studying what happens before, i.e. during election
campaigns. He claims that it is, however, only this final review of the outcome
of the election that concludes an important act of political participation, and
that this review is well worth our analytical attention.
From
a more specifically discourse-analytic perspective, TV election nights are
different from other media events like for instance cup finals, in that they
are not broadcast live from one location. During the broadcasts, politicians
are in their constituencies all over the country, awaiting the declaration of
their results (in Britain) or in their home states (in the US). The national
channels, and to a lesser extent also the international 24-hour news channels,
have correspondents and camera teams in the important places to bring the news
from these outside locations into the studio.
It
is the task of the presenters of such programmes to construct, for the television
audience, a comprehensible and coherent whole from these many simultaneous
events in different locations. They do this by commenting on live events like
declarations of results, by introducing live reports by correspondents, or by
interviewing newsmakers on outside locations. But the complexity does not stop
there. The anchor, as the central person in the studio, interacts with
participants in the studio as well. Presenters talk to experts and interviewers,
may themselves interview politicians in the studio, may talk to studio guests,
possibly a studio audience and, mainly in the case of things going wrong, to
members of the production team, all of this for the benefit of an overhearing
audience. But they also, particularly in the opening stages of the night and in
announcing media genres like reports and interviews, talk to the television
audience directly. Presenters have to be able to change their footing
constantly, not only from one interlocutor to another, but also between talk to an audience to talk
for an audience.
It
is the discursive practices of presenters: the practices with which the
presenters construct and organize the broadcasts and orchestrate the multitude
of voices that make up the discourse of election night.
The
study of discursive practice in the domain where transnational media culture
interacts with local ways of doing things promises to add new insights to our
understanding of media discourse.
Bibliography:
1. Clayman,
S. and Heritage, J. 2002. The News Interview.
Journalists and Public Figures on the Air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2. Gurevitch, M.
and Kavoori, P. 1992. “Television
Spectacles as Politics.” Communication Monographs 59 (4): 415-420.
3. Stiehler, H.-J. 2000. “‘Nach der Wahl
ist vor der Wahl’: Interpretationen als Gegenstand der Me- dienforschung” In Wahlen und
Politikvermittlung durch Massenmedien, H. Bohrmann, O.
Jarren, G. Melischek and J. Seethaler (eds), 105-120. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher
Verlag.