2018

Le mercredi 31 octobre 2018, 13h15-15h00, Anthropole, salle 3128

Entrée libre, conférence de Tom Van Hout, University of Antwerp & Leiden University.

Infotaining the imagined audience. How journalists recontextualize elite discourse.

Conférence présentée dans le cadre du séminaire de Marcel Burger "Médiatiser des identités publics en contexte polémique".

In an era of proliferating news discourse and growing distrust of establishment institutions, journalists face a double bind: they need to embrace the digital world to maintain and attract audiences and keep up to speed with news flows across social networks, while at the same time they must work to distinguish their profession, their product, and their outlets from knowledge rivals. To live up to this challenge, journalists employ a range of discursive techniques. One such technique, usually reserved for campaign coverage but increasingly used in business-as-usual coverage, focuses attention on the linguistic performance of people in the news and associates types of language use with types of speakers. To illustrate this claim, I discuss journalists’ uptake of political (mis)communication.

My data consist of recycled snippets of reported speech taken from a Belgian news site. These snippets present us with what journalists consider worth using (and re-using), revealing, and thus infotaining, bits of reported speech about the main characters: the quoted politician and the journalist captioning the quote. Rather than speak for themselves, the quotes are recentered to speak through recontextualization and double-voicing. I argue that such journalistic metadiscourse formulates acceptable and unacceptable interactional styles and linguistic performance in the public sphere. Findings show how a media logic conditions what politicians can and cannot say, to whom and about whom, and how journalists assess politicians who do not comply with this logic.

Affiche_VanHout  (389 Ko)

Le mercredi 25 avril 2018, 10h15-12h00, Anthropole, salle 5157

Entrée libre, conférence de Marta Zampa, Haute Ecole des sciences appliquées de Zurich, ZHAW.

News Values in argumentative interaction

Conférence présentée dans le cadre du séminaire de M.A. en linguistique française "vers une ethnolinguistique des médias".

In this lecture, we will explore how decision-making leading to editorial choices functions from the perspective of argumentation theory. We will start from a case study at Corriere del Ticino, where the design of a multimodal feature is discussed in an editorial conference. Then we will move to the categories and criteria developed in news sociology, journalism studies and argumentation theory to understand what guides newsroom decision-making. 

Zampa, M. (2017). Argumentation in the Newsroom. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Zampa, M., & Bletsas, M. (2017). On the production of a multimodal news item: an argumentative approach. Semiotica. doi:https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2017-0149

Partagez: