News as Narrative?

1. News as Narrative? Mads Damgaard, Ph.D.-student at Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Engerom, HUM Topoi and Tense in Corruption Tales:

2. Theoreticalgap Social theory Media studies (mediatizationtheory) Narratology, poetics, etc

3. Exceptions: Frames, Mediascapes and Mediatization Possible reasons for methodological gap: • Media studies are more interested in readers • Media studies are working with quant. content analysis • Media studies are really about institutions and formats How can the textual level – the media content proper – be ignored? 3 exceptions:

4. image-centered, narrative-based accounts of strips of reality, and what they offer to those who experience and transform them is a series of elements (such as characters, plots, and textual forms) out of which scripts can be formed of imagined lives...” (Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large, p. 35).

5. ...mediatisation may be understood as the process by which collective uses of communication media extend the development of independent media industries and their circulation of narratives, contribute to new forms of action and interaction in the social world and give shape to how we think of humanity and our place in the world.” (Schofield Clark, Lynn (2011) “Consideringreligionandmediatisationthrougha case studyofJ+K's big day (The J Kwedding entrance dance): A response toStigHjarvard”, CultureandReligion, vol. 12 (2), p. 170)

6. [framing] essentially involves selection and salience. To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described.” Robert Entman (1993)”Framing. TowardsClarificationof a FracturedParadigm” in JournalofCommunication, vol. 43, (4), p. 51-58.

7. Whybother with narratology? “the aim of textual analysis is not to account for the process of writing, but for the conditions of the process of reception. The distinction emphatically does not imply that the one layer exists before the other. How is it that a narrative text comes across to the reader in a certain manner?“ (MiekeBal (1997) Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, p. 38)

8. Possibleentry points: Textuallevels Mieke Bal's three levels of narratological analysis Text : The concrete text, grammar, choice of words, quote sourcing, Story : The deployment of events, the alignment of characters and events to make a point Fabula: The abstract thrust of events, chronology, the qualities and attributes of actors Chronology – event – emplotment - causality In news, these are to a high degree constructed through the use of tense

9. The Overtemporalization: Example 1 O presidente da Câmara dos Deputados, Eduardo Cunha (PMDB-RJ), disse nesta terça-feira (3) que irá provar no Conselho de Ética que não faltou com a verdade. A declaração foi dada horas após o conselho instaurar processo para investigar se Cunha cometeu quebra de decoro parlamentar por não ter declarado à Justiça Eleitoral ter contas bancárias na Suíça atribuídas a ele e a parentes. Segundo a Procuradoria Geral da República, documentos enviados pelo Ministério Público suíço confirmam a existência dessas contas. Em depoimento à CPI da Petrobras, em março, Cunha negou ter qualquer conta no exterior. (http://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2015/11/eduardo-cunha-diz-que-provara-ao-conselho-de-etica-que-falou-verdade.html)

10. Example 1: Verbsemphasized O presidente da Câmara dos Deputados, Eduardo Cunha (PMDB-RJ), disse nesta terça-feira (3) que irá provar no Conselho de Ética que não faltou com a verdade. A declaração foi dada horas após o conselho instaurar processo para investigar se Cunha cometeu quebra de decoro parlamentar por não ter declarado à Justiça Eleitoral ter contas bancárias na Suíça atribuídas a ele e a parentes. Segundo a Procuradoria Geral da República, documentos enviados pelo Ministério Público suíço confirmam a existência dessas contas. Em depoimento à CPI da Petrobras, em março, Cunha negouter qualquer conta no exterior. (http://g1.globo.com/politica/noticia/2015/11/eduardo-cunha-diz-que-provara-ao-conselho-de-etica-que-falou-verdade.html)

11. Example 1, brokendown (A): • Future (the object of the statement given) O presidente da Câmara dos Deputados, Eduardo Cunha (PMDB-RJ), disse nesta terça-feira (3) que irá provar no Conselho de Ética que não faltou com a verdade. • Immediate past (the statement as speech act): A declaração foi dada horas após o conselho instaurar processo para investigar se

12. Example 1, brokendown(B): • Possible past #1 (the object of the coming investigation – was it breach of decorum? If he had the bank accounts, the answer would be affirmative):... se Cunha cometeuquebra de decoroparlamentarpornãoterdeclaradoàJustiçaEleitoraltercontasbancáriasnaSuíçaatribuídas a ele e a parentes. • Confirmed past (the bank accounts): Segundo a ProcuradoriaGeral da República, documentosenviadospeloMinistérioPúblicosuíçoconfirmam a existênciadessascontas. • Possible past #2 (Cunha denies the above version of the past):Emdepoimentoà CPI da Petrobras, emmarço, Cunha negouterqualquerconta no exterior.

13. What plot has been told?

14. Topos: The Non-places of the News In contrast to the tempi, the topoi, meanwhile, sit more uneasily in my material, apparently not relevant or not news-worthy in Brazilian corruption scandals. Why? Is it because Brazilian (corrupt) politics necessarily occurs behind closed doors? Perhaps it is (also) a discursive phenomenon – that politics, or the backstage of politics, could be a cliché, an Augeannon-place?

15. Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in this sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, cliches, They are the opposite of Michel de Certeau's non-place. Here the word does not create a gap between everyday functionalityand lost myth: it creates the image, produces the myth and at the same stroke makes it work” Marc Augé (1995) Non-places. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London: Verso

16. Brasília: The Capital of Modernitypar excellence?

17. Teun van Dijk: Critique of News Narratives • 1. The actual 'real' sociopolitical events of corruption: kickbacks, etc. • 2. The ways these are represented mentally (in Episodic Memory, part of Long Term memory by different participants: the corrupt persons, the police, the judge, the general public, etc. In cognitive psychology calls these today: mental models (organized by a conventional schema to represent events: Spatiotemporal Setting, Participants (and their current Identities, Roles and Ralations), an Event or Action (and its Intentions and Goals or Purposes). These mental models are personal and subjective, and unique for each event. A journalist writing about a corruption event expresses his or her mental model of the event. And since models are subjective and personal, each journalist has his or her own model, and that explains why different "stories" of the "same" event are also different. The event models of journalists (or readers) are not only influenced by the "real" events (which they usually know about indirectly, namely through other discourses (of other media, witnesses, police reports, the internet, etc.) but also by their socially shared, more general attitudes about corruption, and these (and other attitudes may be based on the fundamental professional (journalistic) and sociopolitical ideologies (e.g., neoliberal, socialist, nationalist, etc.) of the journalists.

18. Teun van Dijk: Critique of News Narratives II • 3. The various discourse types or genres expressing these subjective models, for instance in everyday conversational stories, in news reports, editorials, columns, background articles, opinion articles, letters to the editor, reportages, and other media genres. These are different discourse genres, and only some are narratives (like conversational stories, novels, soaps and sometimes in columns - i.e. structures consisting of an Orientation, Complication, Resolution, Coda (categories of famous sociolinguist William Labov - for details see the book by Anna de Fina & Georgakopoulou). News "stories" do NOT have this schematic story of a narrative, but their own news schema (see my book News Discourse of 1988). These different discourse genres are based on (i) subjective mental models of the (corruption) events and (ii) the mental model of the communicative situation, the context model, like all models also consisting of a Setting, Participants (speakers, writers, readers, etc) and an Action (communicative, verbal). This context model is needed to explain why all these different (media and other) discourse genres are different: one talks/tells about corruption very different in a daily story, a news report, an editorial, a column, a police report or a sentence of a judge. It is theoretically very muddy and vague to call all these genres "stories". It is still a bit more complicated, but these are the basic and essential distinctions you must make in order to avoid confusing levels or dimensions of analysis.