CASE: THE VIEWERS’ TV NEWS

CASE: THE VIEWERS’ TV NEWS

News is presumably an important resource for the political awareness and action of the audience-public. It is for this reason, in part, that the issue of representational accuracy and the problem of propaganda have been debated so fiercely at different historical times and in different cultural settings. However, it is not clear that the news media as currently organized and operated facilitate any significant participation by the public in political processes. Whereas much previous research has examined news with

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reference to its institutional origins, the biases of its contents, and its impact in terms of basic recall of information or voting decisions (for a survey, see Jensen, 1986, Ch. 6), drawing on the reconceptualization of audience research it becomes possible to examine whether the audience’s reception of news items confers any political relevance on the information received. This is by and large an empirical question, and the answer has far-reaching political and ideological implications.

Design. The study summarized here examined viewers’ decoding and evaluation of Danish television news (see Jensen, 1988). Television, in Denmark and several other countries, over the last two decades has grown to become a cultural common denominator or a forum (Newcomb and Hirsch, 1984) for consideration of national and international political issues and events. Taking as the point of departure a randomly selected broadcast from the autumn of 1985 in what was still a one-channel public-service system, the study conducted thirty-three in-depth individual interviews about the program within a 24-hour cycle. The respondents, who had watched the program in their home and were subsequently interviewed there, had been selected by a polling firm with the aim of procuring a range of respondents from different age, sex, and socioeconomic groups and from different regions of the country. Though responses could not be considered representative of these groups in the population at large, the specific lines of reasoning can suggest differences in the modes of reception which may then be examined in further, qualitative as well as quantitative research.

The interviews followed a semi-structured guide, focusing on the ten stories of the program. In each case the respondent was asked to recount the subject matter of the story, which was identified by the interviewer with a cue word. Only then did the interviewer begin to probe for specific items of information, and in conclusion respondents were asked for their general assessment of the relevance, bias, and presentational form of each story and later of the program as a whole. Verbatim transcripts of all the interviews as well as of the news program were subjected to a linguistic discourse analysis.

Discourses of news. Leaving out here most of the discourse-analytical detail (see Jensen, 1988:282–6), the present account focuses on the themes of news content and their reception. It is through reference to certain unitary themes that both journalists and viewers are able to

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arrive at a global understanding of a news story. One important conclusion of the study was that there may be major differences between the journalists’ and the viewers’ themes referring to a given story. Journalists, in order to establish a “peg” or coordinating principle in a story, tend to draw on a relatively fixed repertoire of issues, events, and actors. Much previous research has shown how a particular conception of news thus grows out of specific journalistic practices and criteria (see Gans, 1979; Golding and Elliott, 1979; Tuchman, 1978 and in this volume). The journalistic pegs are comparable to the notion of theme in linguistics, and were established in a discourse analysis of the news content. The list of ten stories in the broadcast studied, as characterized in standard journalistic terms (Table 7.1), suggests the kinds of political and economic themes (apart from a final, “cultural” feature) that are carried by the agents, issues, and events reported in the news.

Table 7.1 The journalists’ news stories

Note: DK indicates a domestic story. In this context, it is of special interest to note the potential

variation of themes in two stories which may serve as examples. In the story about El Salvador, reporting an exchange of hostages between the government and the insurgents, it probably was of added news value from the journalistic perspective that one of the hostages was the president’s daughter, whose release was depicted in the visuals. Thus, there were both political and personal dimensions to the story. Both these dimensions were in evidence in the decodings as themes, so that the respondents either emphasized that this was

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“an exchange of hostages,” or they characterized the event as “a reunion” of family members. Most interesting, perhaps, is a third theme which some respondents identified, namely social privilege or class difference. Explaining how the exchange came about, one respondent noted that “when it’s people high up, things can always

be arranged.” Here, a highly generalized theme of class difference serves to explain the concrete case by linking the personal level of one family’s reunion with the political level of a national conflict over social privileges. Class difference may be a familiar aspect of viewers’ daily life which, through reference to the news discourse, relates politics to the everyday.

A second, domestic story addressed a proposal by the Danish National Bank to move its production entity, The Royal Mint, abroad. Whereas statements on the concrete dispute by politicians, the National Bank, as well as an employee are included, respondents organize their interpretation around the two more general principles at stake in the dispute. The Mint may be seen as a private enterprise, which, unless it can operate most efficiently at home, should be allowed to move abroad. Or, the Mint may be treated as a public institution affiliated with the National Bank that is responsible for the stability of the national economy as a whole, and hence it should not be allowed to lay off workers and contribute to unemployment. It can be noted in passing that some viewers here engage in sophisticated reflection about issues of national economic theory, while others note the symbolism of surrendering the national currency to a foreign producer. Again, a third, highly generalized theme is introduced by some respondents who see the Mint, above all, as a source of jobs for its employees. For them, (un)employment, being a real threat to many viewers, becomes the focus of the story as received, even to the exclusion of the principles of economic policy:

…it’s terrible. They are closing down a place of work, you know, and moving because they want it to be cheaper, you know, and leaving a lot of people unemployed, and that seems crazy—that people who have been happy with their job for many years suddenly haven’t got anything.

The themes of the two stories, El Salvador and The Royal Mint, are presented in Table 7.2.

144 A handbook of qualitative methodologies Table 7.2 The viewers’ news stories: two examples

Super themes. Both “unemployment” and “class” are examples of what will be called super themes. Table 7.3 notes the occurrence of five different super themes in the sample, and indicates their relevance for the ten news items. They may be conceptualized as interpretive procedures which are employed by the audience for the reconstruction of meaning in the news genre. In discourse-analytical terms, a super theme can be defined as a proposition entailed by a set of propositions summing up a news story (or another text) from the recipient’s perspective, thus resembling the psychological schemata found by some other studies of news (Graber, 1984; van Dijk, 1988a; but see Crigler and Jensen, forthcoming, on distinctions). As such, super themes, rather than being structuring features of news as formulated by journalists, may be considered as characteristics of the very process of reception. In sum, super themes represent an example of how qualitative research, starting from the respondents’ conceptual

Table 7.3 The super themes of news reception

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categories, may identify certain general processes which are constitutive of mass communication. The systematic study of discursive structures of reception, accordingly, offers a promising approach to theory development in communication research.

The super themes also hold implications for politics and policy. The preliminary findings suggest that respondents with a relatively shorter education are more likely to rely exclusively on super themes in their understanding of news items, whereas respondents with a longer education may reproduce the political themes of the journalistic discourse on a concrete case alongside the super themes. For a politics of reception, then, it is important not to romanticize super themes and audience activity generally. On the one hand, super themes are useful mechanisms for understanding news content because they establish a meaningful relationship between the world of politics and the world of everyday life. On the other hand, the fact that some groups of viewers may be unable specifically to associate the generalized themes with the pros and cons of a particular political case is a real problem, not least since these viewers, in referring to super themes such as class, unemployment, and social cutbacks, begin to identify fundamental political and economic conflicts in society. Unless the news empowers the audience to reflect and act upon such conflicts, it falls short of the implied promise to provide a social resource in the form of politically applicable information. In this respect, in-depth studies like the present one can bring forward the audience’s perspective on how well media institutions fulfill a public-service mission in the sphere of political information. Similarly, such studies can provide new insights into processes of communication and reception which are important for curriculum development as media literacy increasingly becomes a central element of modern education (see Masterman, 1985; also Chapter 12 in this volume).

For media policy, finally, qualitative research may also become increasingly significant. It can be mentioned here that the study was conducted jointly by the University of Copenhagen and the Media Research Department of the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, which at the time of the study operated the only national television channel in Denmark, being a public-service institution comparable to the BBC. Such studies appear to be of interest both for product development by media practitioners and for long-term planning of image or house style (Ellis, 1982:219) by upper management. Indeed, at a time when new terrestrial and satellite television channels are being introduced

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in Denmark and elsewhere, research that examines the audience experience and uses of television content may be especially relevant for policy issues. An alternative concept of television news, employing super themes that are linked explicitly to specific political issues in a more integrated visual and verbal narrative, could provide meaningful information and hence could also have significant audience appeal in the more competitive media environment of the future. Reception analysis, thus, addresses a strategically important aspect of mass media at a time when these must legitimate themselves in relation to audiences by serving a complex, negotiated range of interests and needs. The negotiation and social construction of reception raise important issues both for the politics of communication and for further research.