Week12

Weican Feng                      

This paper mainly discusses 8 topics from both aspects of news press and TV stations. The authors use quantitative methods to collect ample cases to find there may exist some different expression in various media content, such as special terms or numbers. Here are the topics:

• Conflation of Forced and Economic Migration
• Threatening Numbers
• A Burden on Welfare and the Job Market
• Criminality, Threat, Deportation and Human Rights
• Need for ‘Immigration Control’
• The Benefits of Immigration
• Problems Facing Asylum Seekers
• The Role of the West in Refugee Movements and Economic Forces in Migration

When comparing the cases of news in the press and on the TV, some expression difference may be presented obviously. For example, when it comes to the asylum, how to define these groups of people may mirror the ideology or worth value of different media intermediary. The term ‘illegal immigration’ or ‘illegals’ occurs usually on the TV news broadcasts but not featuring at all in ITV Lunchtime News. However, this term is frequently used in the Express and other three private press from these collected cases, whereas from where UN stands it prefers to call these refugees as ‘undocumented immigrant’.

As the authors mentioned, ‘Emphasis on numbers was the strongest theme in the TV sample.’ (Greg, Briant and Donald, 2013:104). However, ‘The press sample was largely characterised by the use of superlatives.’ (Greg, Briant and Donald, 2013:106). They may focus on distinct points to gain the more attention from audience. Because in nowadays, according to the theory of ‘circulate of culture’ which is put forward by Stuart Hall, these production is deemed to be consumed. And audience is the target. Thus, different media methods use different way to show their worth and maybe this is the reason why TV station and news press do not select the same expression.  

From the module, discourse analysis is a method for systematically examining talk and texts. Discourse analysis is also a ways of representation-a special knowledge of a subject (Hall 1992, p. 290 in Tonkiss, 2004, p. 406). One of the main usage of ‘discourse’ is discourse as ‘social action and interaction, people interacting together in real social situations’ (Fairclough, 1995, p.18). And the other one is ‘a social construction of reality’, a form of knowledge’ (Fairclough, 1995, p.18). Discourse analysis is an analytic technique rather than a theory, and its popularity has arisen from the growing interest, starting late in the last century, in qualitative research and ways of analysing the data it produces. And when you use discourse analysis, you might focus on:

• The purposes and effects of different types of language,
• Cultural rules and conventions in communication
• How values, beliefs and assumptions are communicated
• How language use relates to its social, political and historical context

Conducting discourse analysis means examining how language functions and how meaning is created in different social contexts. It can be applied to any instance of written or oral language, as well as non-verbal aspects of communication such as tone and gestures.

Reference

Philo, Greg, Emma Briant, and Pauline Donald. 2013. “Case Studies of Media Content, 2011.” In Bad News for Refugees, 87–130. London: Pluto Press.

Tonkiss, Fan. 2004 “Discourse Analysis.” In Researching Society and Culture, ed by. Clive Seale, 405–423. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.