Wednesday, March 12, 2008
News in Danish: Velkommen i taletanken
A rhetoricians' think tank, a collaborative blog devoted to everyday rhetorical criticism, has opened at http://taletank.wordpress.com/. So - if your Danish skills allow it - please drop by and think aloud.
Challenge the Straw Man #1: Still more informants become narrators
So is it really still controversial for reporters to make use of the first person or to get otherwise personal in their writing style?
In their recent article on image-evoking language constructions in written news (which appeared in Nordicom Review) Ebbe Grunwald and Jørgen Lauridsen have a pretty clear statistical answer to the 'otherwise' part of my question:
It is a premise of their investigation that as soon as a reporter creates an image ("the faces of our creditors look more and more disbelieving") instead of making a general or abstract statement ("the credit-worthiness of the country has deteriorated"; this is Grunwald and Lauridsen's example), the reporter becomes an active narrator rather than simply an informant. When you invent an image like that you have obviously made an interpretation, selected and emphasised certain aspects of the material at the expense of others. As a consequence, the journalist's presence and her function as a rhetorical decision maker becomes visible, and readers begin to form an opinion about the journalist and her credibility.
Grunwald and Lauridsen conclude that exposures have in fact found their way into Danish news journalism, but the frequency varies from one paper to the next (the most image evoking news journalism is found in Politiken and Ekstra Bladet).
So the traditional paradigm of news journalism is still powerful - the straw man is not all straw - but our journalistic informants do seem to become still more willing to explicitly adopt the role of narrators.
As for the force and impact of these linguistic exposures as an indicator of increased narrator activity, Grunwald and Lauridsen have studied that too. I'll get back to that part in a later episode of Attack the Straw Man.
In their recent article on image-evoking language constructions in written news (which appeared in Nordicom Review) Ebbe Grunwald and Jørgen Lauridsen have a pretty clear statistical answer to the 'otherwise' part of my question:
Parallel to [...] relatively rapid changes in the newspaper medium itself, new writing and narrative forms have appeared. The known genres, e.g. news journalism, constructed within the frames of the 'inverted pyramid' now often appear as hybrid forms. This means that personal styles of expression more frequently find their way into newspaper articles where they challenge the anonymous writing style of traditional journalism. (p. 93-94)Grunwald and Lauridsen are mapping the use of exposures, a.k.a. linguistic image constructions, a.k.a. showing as opposed to telling, in five Danish national papers to discover how frequently such techniques are used.
It is a premise of their investigation that as soon as a reporter creates an image ("the faces of our creditors look more and more disbelieving") instead of making a general or abstract statement ("the credit-worthiness of the country has deteriorated"; this is Grunwald and Lauridsen's example), the reporter becomes an active narrator rather than simply an informant. When you invent an image like that you have obviously made an interpretation, selected and emphasised certain aspects of the material at the expense of others. As a consequence, the journalist's presence and her function as a rhetorical decision maker becomes visible, and readers begin to form an opinion about the journalist and her credibility.
Grunwald and Lauridsen conclude that exposures have in fact found their way into Danish news journalism, but the frequency varies from one paper to the next (the most image evoking news journalism is found in Politiken and Ekstra Bladet).
So the traditional paradigm of news journalism is still powerful - the straw man is not all straw - but our journalistic informants do seem to become still more willing to explicitly adopt the role of narrators.
As for the force and impact of these linguistic exposures as an indicator of increased narrator activity, Grunwald and Lauridsen have studied that too. I'll get back to that part in a later episode of Attack the Straw Man.
Monday, March 10, 2008
Men-of-Straw We Live By
Many research projects take a conventional truth as their starting point: "It is often said that...", "It is widely believed that..."- and then the researcher goes ahead and challenges this truth. The approach makes sense, of course, but sometimes these truths that we're up against are presented in a somewhat distorted fashion. Our supposed opponents are shaped as a caricature suited to serve as a foil to our own claims.
(Note how I'm saying 'we', as I'm just about to challenge my very own straw man.)
Well, whenever I have introduced my PhD work I have been claiming that, surprisingly, it is still possible for print reporters to cause a stir by using the first person singular. Teachers and handbooks of journalism still advise against it; readers still react strongly to it as they write letters to the editor expressing their love or hate for reporters who make the rhetorical choice to enter the stage themselves at the expense of the story they were supposed to be covering; and the recent (afore-mentioned) debate at WriterL proves that the first person singular in reporting remains (again: somewhat surprisingly) a narrative form that quite a few people, even among feature journalists devoted to long narrative forms, still take a strong and general stand against: Don't do it! Don't say I! It's too hard to do it well, and remember, as another objection goes, that you're a reporter, not an artist.
But the times they are a-changin', of course, and as professor Martin Eide wrote in a review of my dissertation (Rhetorica Scandinavica 41/2007):
In the coming posts, I'll make an effort to discover how much of a gallop we're talking about and how much straw should be pulled out of my straw man.
Input is welcome:
Do reporters (and note that we're not talking about columnists and commentators) get personal in the papers you're reading - and does it make you raise an eyebrow at all?
(Note how I'm saying 'we', as I'm just about to challenge my very own straw man.)
Well, whenever I have introduced my PhD work I have been claiming that, surprisingly, it is still possible for print reporters to cause a stir by using the first person singular. Teachers and handbooks of journalism still advise against it; readers still react strongly to it as they write letters to the editor expressing their love or hate for reporters who make the rhetorical choice to enter the stage themselves at the expense of the story they were supposed to be covering; and the recent (afore-mentioned) debate at WriterL proves that the first person singular in reporting remains (again: somewhat surprisingly) a narrative form that quite a few people, even among feature journalists devoted to long narrative forms, still take a strong and general stand against: Don't do it! Don't say I! It's too hard to do it well, and remember, as another objection goes, that you're a reporter, not an artist.
But the times they are a-changin', of course, and as professor Martin Eide wrote in a review of my dissertation (Rhetorica Scandinavica 41/2007):
Is it not a galopping norm these days that journalists must "put themselves on the line?"
In the coming posts, I'll make an effort to discover how much of a gallop we're talking about and how much straw should be pulled out of my straw man.
Input is welcome:
Do reporters (and note that we're not talking about columnists and commentators) get personal in the papers you're reading - and does it make you raise an eyebrow at all?
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