Ordinary Citizens Mediated by Professional Journalists - Essay Example

? Ordinary Citizens Mediated by Professional Journalists Ordinary Citizens mediated by professional journalists Introduction According to Mayr’s introduction to power, discourse, and institutions, media is a production industry that produces content for commercial purposes and in so doing, the media disseminates content that conveys dominant ideologies about its function as a reflection of societal believes, values, and principles, among other things (Mayr, 2008). On the other hand, Talbot’s introduction to Media and Discourse portrays media as rooted in people’s daily lives and interactions so that through shared understanding, mediated texts are interpreted as conveying ideas concerning a particular person’s social or professional positions (Talbot, 2007). In this regard, the media plays a crucial linkage role between the social institutions through various genres and narrative styles. This paper will consider the purpose of a specific newspaper article as an example of media discourse to establish the kinds of institutional procedures and practices that may have influenced why the contents of the article may be deemed newsworthy. In addition to that, this paper will examine whether or not any of the article’s contents explicitly refer to the media’s role as a communication medium and how language style and specific instances of terminology have been used to convey the story, among other things. Section One The newspaper article that is under consideration due to its purpose as an example of Media discourse is by Calmes Jackie, and is titled “The First Lady Refuses to Let a Heckler Go Unscolded” (Calmes, 2013). This newspaper article appears in the New York Times Politics column of June 6, 2013; it is important to identify the source publication details of this article for cross reference purposes, to determine validity of the news item content in the source publication. In addition to that, credibility of the newspaper article’s source publication gives the newspaper article credibility that provides a justifiable framework for making value judgment concerning the newsworthiness of the newspaper article. The contents of newspaper articles may be deemed newsworthy due to the influences of certain kinds of institutional procedures and practices; in this particular case, the newsworthiness of this article may have been influenced by the practical and financial concerns. Institutions are shaped by discourse, and they in turn have the capacity to create and impose discourses (Mayr, 2008); in this regard, it cannot always be guaranteed that the news media will be obliged to provide an impartial and balanced coverage of important social and political events that shape the global landscape. Like all other institutions, the news media’s attempt to create a universal image of impartiality and balanced news coverage is always constrained by practical and financial realities such as the need for sustained efficiency. For instance, the news media is often under pressure to increase revenue for shareholders; in this case, the profit motive determines the kinds of events that are considered newsworthy and because of this, newspapers have been accused in the past of trivializing important issues (Reah, 1998). The news media procedures and practices eventually determine what news becomes, thus the news media only offers a partial view of the world that suits the interests of the socially and economically powerful (Bielsa and O’Donnell, n.d). The content of the article explicitly refers to the media’s role as a communication medium because it is deliberately structured by rhetoric and inclusive language that encompasses emotional and moral loading (Timucin, 2010), i.e. through scaffolding, or structuring of sentences and paragraphs to affect readers’ responses. Overall, the article mediates between meaning and socio-cultural reality, for instance, this article seeks to mediate reality by and through language (Talbot, 2007); such encoding is necessary for the purposes of communication especially because specific social and cultural conditions characterize the producers and audiences’ perceptions of meanings. Contexts function as cultural frames within which meaning can be decoded from texts such as the news article (Carpentier and De Clean, 2007); the news media selects certain aspects of a perceived reality to make salient in a communicating text. Such framing is achieved through rhetorical language, language that is used to persuade the hearer towards certain viewpoints (Byrne, n.d), i.e. concerning problem definitions, causal interpretations, moral evaluation, or recommendations for mitigation; however, texts are produced in institutional contexts, shared knowledge frameworks, and professional norms that are different from those of the audiences (Fairclough, 1989). In this regard, it cannot be assumed that texts mean the same thing to both the producers and the audiences due to the differences in the social processes involved in decoding meanings from the text. Section Two The article by Calmes Jackie, “The First Lady Refuses to Let a Heckler Go Unscolded” reports the US First Lady, Michelle Obama’s face-off with a heckler (Calmes, 2013); this incidence occurred during a recent Democratic Fund Raiser at a home in North West Washington. The article reports that when the first Lady was roughly halfway through her speech, a woman at the front of the crowd of about 200 people started protesting for gay rights; the gay rights activist was shouting for President Obama to issue an executive order barring workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. The heckler, identified as Ms Sturtz, identified herself as a lesbian in search of liberal equality before her death and was concerned that contractors in the US were discriminating against their employees based on their sexual orientation. The article further provides information confirming the woman’s identity as given by Heather Cronk, a co-director of a group that advocates for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals known as GetEqual. Apart from Ellen Sturtz, Heather Cronk also revealed that three other activists of the GetEqual group had been at the function whose entry tickets were ranging from $ 500 to $ 10,000 (Calmes, 2013). According to the article, President Obama has been accustomed to such interruptions in the various speeches he has made before and would wait patiently for the protestor to stop; thereafter, President Obama would perhaps respond to such protests with an acknowledgement of the complaint made by the heckler. Conversely, the First Lady, perhaps less accustomed to such interruptions chose a direct confrontation approach to dealing with the situation by leaving the lectern moving towards the heckler. The First Lady expressed her dissatisfaction with the heckler, but not before acknowledging her inexperience in handling interruptions of that nature to a loud applause from the audience. Unlike President Obama, who would wait and respond to the heckler’s concerns, the First Lady did not hesitate to scold the heckler by asking her to leave or take the microphone and address the crowd in her place. The First Lady went ahead and asked the audience to decide who should leave, but the audience yelled in protest for the heckler to leave and for the First Lady to remain; for instance, one woman standing next to the protester told her to leave and attendees escorted the protesting woman out of the room. Once the heckler had been escorted out of the meeting, the First Lady proceeded to make the point she was making before being interrupted by the heckling. The First Lady continued to make her remarks in support of children rights policies by the Obama administration and encouraged the donors to remain engaged politically even in years that have no presidential election activity. The First Lady urged everyone to champion for the children’s rights in and out of presidential election’s periods, and in addition to that, she cited the government’s initiatives on climate change, gun violence, gay rights and immigration, among other key policy issues (Calmes, 2013). Section Three The producers of news often relay their stories through a variety of language styles in different contexts; similarly, the story of how the First Lady scolded a heckler has been conveyed through a variety of language styles and specific instances of terminology. The use of various language styles and particular instances of terminology is critical to the process of decoding meaning from the news article and forming value judgments concerning institutions in the society (Phillips et.al, 2004). In this regard, the audience relies on the correct interpretation of the various language styles and instances of terminology used to relay a story to decode its meaning correctly. Firstly, the article’s news headline “The First Lady Refuses to Let a Heckler Go Unscolded” (Calmes, 2013) presents the newspaper’s peculiar language style; the news headline provides a summary of the story of the newspaper article (Flyer, n.d). The headline is not a complete sentence because it is written in a way that deliberately omits certain words such as articles, auxiliary verbs, and possessive adverbs among others, to attract readers’ attention to the newsworthiness of the story relayed in the news article. The impact that is intended by the news producers is to impose an aspect of newness to the reader i.e. the headlines are designed so the readers can think that the story of the news article is happening in real time-now (BBC World Service, n.d), rather than in the recent past. Apart from giving a summary of the news article, the news headline provides the elements of appraisal i.e. the newspaper’s attitude towards the story it presents, thus working to influence the readers’ attitudes as well. The article has a lead paragraph that provides the article’s primary abstract of the story (Bell, 1991), for instance, the lead paragraph clearly provides the main points of the story i.e. Michelle Obama faces off with a heckler protesting over gay rights during a fundraiser before party supporters escorted out the protesting woman. From this lead paragraph, it is clear what the story is about and the reader can already form value judgments on the newsworthiness of the newspaper article. What is evident in this lead paragraph is the communicative function of the newspaper article- it seeks to inform through a narration of facts, without any explicit commentary and whatever evaluation given in the content of the news story is purely implicit and unemotional by rule (General notes, n.d). The phrasing of sentences in the news article reveals further peculiarities concerning the language of the news article; firstly, the article makes use of complex sentences with a vast system of clauses. For instance, consider the sentence: “When Mrs Obama was roughly 12 minutes into her 20-minute remarks at a home in Northwest Washington, a woman at the front of a crowd of about 200 people began shouting for President Obama to issue an executive order barring federal contractors from discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity…” (Calmes, 2013)” The language is also characterized by verbal constructions and verbal noun constructions, like in the case of “…the protesting woman, shouting for gay rights, was escorted out by party supporters…”(Calmes, 2013). In addition to that, the news article reveals that there is a specific word order in the one-sentence news paragraphs, known as leads; journalistic practice has led to the fixed 5-wh word order that more or less determines the structure of initial sentences in longer news items. For instance, the lead sentence in this news article reads as follows, “Michelle Obama had a rare face-off with a heckler at a Democratic fund-raiser on Tuesday evening…” (Calmes, 2013). A close examination of this construction reveals the strict five-w-and-h-pattern rule (who-what-why-how-where-when), otherwise known as the 5-wh rule. The article shifts between several language styles i.e. the journalist’s, the First Lady’s, the protester’s, the spokesperson’s and the interviewee’s language style, and this greatly impacts on the process of decoding meaning from the story of the text. For instance, the sentence “Heather Cronk, a co-director of GetEqual, a group that advocates for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals, later identified the heckler as one of its activists, Ellen Sturtz…” (Calmes, 2013) presents the journalist’s language; this influences the reader’s sense of impartiality of the news article under consideration. Michelle Obama’s language is represented through the sentence “One of the things I don’t do well is this…listen to me, or you can take the mike, but I’m leaving. You all decide. You have one choice….” (Calmes, 2013) This language is full of emotions that influence the readers decoding of meaning because it portrays the First Lady as a sympathetic victim and the protester as a villain of the story. Overall, the different language styles presented impact on the way different readers decode meaning from the text and this leads to various interpretations of the text because different readers may not perceive the content of the text in similar ways. There are various visual languages used in newspaper articles and these comprise majorly of captions, headlines, and by-lines and these too influence the readers’ perceptions concerning meaning of the text (Flyer, n.d). For instance, the headline for the news article “The First Lady Refuses to Let a Heckler Go Unscolded” (Calmes, 2013) summarizes the key focus of the article as noted earlier on. The brevity of this article gives it some element of ambiguity that seeks to distance the statement and its originator, while attracting readers to the news article; the headline also influences meaning because it carries the newspaper’s attitude towards the story of the news article. Many captions have been presented in the text as well, and these provide knowledge of the speakers and their utterances; this influences meaning of the text because an understanding of the different speakers enables readers to discern meaning because each one of them is using a different language style. For instance, many captions of the utterances made by the First Lady have been provided in the text; the language style of captions is highly emotional and biased (Ingram and Henshall, 2008) - the First Lady extensively uses direct addresses and the second person as in the case of “…listen to me, or you can take the mike, but I’m leaving. You all decide. You have one choice….” (Calmes, 2013) Conclusion Ultimately, the media as a production industry produces content for commercial purposes, alongside disseminating content that conveys dominant ideologies regarding its role as reflecting social values, believes and principles. Media is deeply rooted in the social lives and experiences of people that that through shared understanding, the media links the different social institutions through news coverage- the process of mediation. The various social institutions such as the church, the government, the courts, and the news media, among others are shaped by discourse; nevertheless, such institutions have the capacity to influence their discourse through deliberate processes and procedures. Like in the case of news media, which constantly strives to disseminate content that conveys its role as a partial and balanced reflection of reality in social contexts; however, role of news media as a source of balanced and partial reflection of social values and principles is always constrained by practical economic considerations. For instance, the article in the New York Times newspaper article of June 6 by Calmes Jackie reveals the story of the US First Lady’s encounter with a heckler protesting over gay rights at a Democratic Fund-raiser; however, the news worthiness of this article may have been influenced by the practical economic considerations such as profit motive. The newspaper article has been presented through a variety of language styles and specific instances of terminology that have a direct influence on how meaning is decoded from the text of the article. News headlines provide a summary of news articles, and are stated in brief incomplete sentences that deliberately omit certain classes of words; this makes headlines eye-catching and memorable. In addition to that, headlines provide the appraisal component of the newspaper such as the journalist’s attitude towards the news story in the news article. References Calmes J., (2013), The First Lady Refuses to Let a Heckler Go Unscolded. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/us/politics/michelle-obama-confronts-heckler-at-fund-raiser.html?ref=politics Reah, D., (1998). The Language of Newspapers. London: Routledge Mayr A., (2008). Language and Power: An Introduction to Institutional Discourse. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Talbot M., (2007). 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Retrieved fom Hsc.csu.edu.au. http://hsc.csu.edu.au/english/advanced/critical/2471/Rhetoric.html Ingram P., and Henshall P., (2008), Chapter 10: Language & style basics. Thenewsmanual.net. Retrieved from http://www.thenewsmanual.net/Manuals%20Volume%201/volume1_10.htm Read More