Disputing While Covering a Dispute on Television News: Discursive Devices and their Interpretation by Viewers

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3 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper discusses the potential of semantic, pragmatic and grammatical devices used in the Israeli television news coverage of a dispute to promote one agenda, negate a contradictory one and position the correspondent as a participant in the dispute. Moreover, I argue that viewers of news identify at least some of these devices and attribute an argumentative role to them. To support this, I analyze questionnaires in which native speakers relate to a specific news item, focusing on the three most common devices interpreted: implicatures, emotionality and textual planning. The discussion sheds light on dialogical interactions between, first, correspondents and their addressees; second, between the correspondents’ words and their co-texts, contexts and other occurrences of these words or their synonyms in public discourse. The corpus includes 19 items on a struggle between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews in Israel broadcast in 2009 on Israel’s Channel 2 television news.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)208-233
Number of pages26
JournalLanguage and Dialogue
Volume3
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2013

Keywords

  • Covert messages
  • Discursive devices
  • Dispute
  • News discourse
  • Otherness
  • Questionnaires
  • Ultra-Orthodox (Haredim)

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Cultural Studies
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language
  • Literature and Literary Theory

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