Media discourse

Attitudes towards confessional and sexual minorities in the discourse of the media in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland from a historical perspective

Key reading: Coleman & Ross 2010, Machin & van Leeuwen 2007, Richardson 2007, Fairclough 1995, Fowler 1991, Van Dijk 1983 (van Ginneken 2003)
Chapters: Thornborrow 2004, Cotter 2008

This project investigates data coming from the discourse of the media, which include the printed press, television, radio and the Internet. Most critical approaches to discourse analysis of the media recognize and emphasize their role in creating certain perceptions of the world that reinforce the positions of particular social groups:
“The mass media have become one of the principal means through which we gain access to a large part of our information about the world, as well as to much of our entertainment. Because of this, they are a powerful site for the production and circulation of social meanings, i.e. to a great extent the media decide the significance of things that happen in the world for any given culture, society or social group. The language used by the media to represent particular social and political groups, and to describe newsworthy events, tends to provide the dominant ways available for the rest of us to talk about those groups and events” (Thornborrow 2004: 56).

The following brief overview of approaches to media discourse has been adapted from Cotter (2008).

Two vantage points for approaching media texts:
(1) that of discourse structure or linguistic function.
Here,
- Bakhtin's notions of voicing (1986),
- Goffman's concept of framing (1981),
- Bell's work on narrative structure and style (1991, 1994, 1998), and
- Tannen's positioning of the media as agonists and instigators of polarized public debate (1998)
have led to valuable insights into discourse structure, function, and effect – and have characterized the very significant role the media play in the shaping of public, as well as media, discourse.

(2) according to its impact as ideology-bearing discourse.
In this view, the interdisciplinary framework of critical discourse analysis (CDA), including
- Fairclough's deployment of social theory and intertextuality in the illumination of discourse practice (1992, 1995),
- Fowler's critical scan of social practice and language in the news (1991), and
- van Dijk's work on the relation of societal structures and discourse structures, particularly as this relation implicates racism (1991)
has created the foundations of the field of media discourse studies thus far.

Either view assumes an emergent, dynamic mechanism that results in the unique display of media discourse over time, culture, and context.

This project adopts the second vantage point. For an example of analysis of spoken media discourse departing from the first vantage point, see O’Keeffe 2006. 

Thus, here, media discourse is examined for its ideology-bearing properties, for “the power of the media to shape governments and parties, to transform the suffering of the South (rooted in exploitation by the North) into the entertainment of the North, to beam the popular culture of North America and western Europe into Indian agricultural communities which still depend upon bullock-power. The power to influence knowledge, beliefs, values, social relations, social identities” (Fairclough 1995: 2).
“Many journalists and most audiences tend to assume that the media are nothing more than a mere “window” on the world, or a “mirror” of the world, and that it is usually rather obvious which events are objectively important and which are not, or even which events the public feels are subjectively important and which not. This is not the case. News is, just like other forms of knowledge, a social product” (van Ginneken 2003: 55).
No matter if they are aware of it or not, “the vast majority of influential journalists are being recruited from a very small segment of society – like the rest of the global elite. Their age and gender, their ethnic group and social class, do not correspond to a “representative sample” of the world’s population. Also, they often have a similar education and career, and acquire similar views about the nature of their trade” (van Ginneken 2003: 57).
This means that dominant group members “get a lot more speech than others” (Gelber 2002: 86), that “the media is also a field that is constituted by processes of social distinction and strategies of class control” (Myles 2010: 12). Coleman & Ross remind us that the public is “always a product of representation”, unable to represent itself. There is a paradox here, as we have just seen that media producers do not constitute a representative sample of the society (=public). As a result, “the public is invoked through processes of mediation that are dominated by political, institutional, economic, and cultural forces” (Coleman & Ross 2010: 3). “The public’s voice is far from being entirely absent from the contemporary media, but where it does appear it is highly managed, bounded all round by a journalistic lens which frames our/their words in particular ways” (p. 45).

Van Ginneken presents the following list of questions that could be helpful in analyzing media discourse (2003: 56-59):
1. What is news? What is considered “nothing new”?
2. What are the most influential media?
3. Who become journalists, and how do they work?
4. Who is speaking in and through the news, and what are the major sources?
(politics of loud and whispering voices)
5. When does something become news?
(related to the implicit construction of historical continuities and rupture points)
6. Where does the news come from? (social geography of news flows)
7. How is reality described to us?
8. How is the world shown to us?
9. What are the effects of such media reports?
These questions could be used as a checklist for analyzing media discourse as a sociocultural practice, along with its “economic, political (concerned with issues of power and ideology), and cultural (concerned with questions of value and identity” aspects (Fairclough 1996: 62).

When it comes to the analysis of media texts, Fairclough explains which features may be investigated in the search for answers to the question of “how the mass media affect and are affected by power relations within the social system, including relations of class, gender, and ethnicity, and relations between particular groups like politicians or scientists and the mass of the population. (…) Representations, identities and relations are of relevance to answering this question: the ideological work of media language includes particular ways of representing the world (e.g. particular representations of Arabs, or of the economy), particular constructions of social identities (e.g. the construction in particular ways of the scientific experts who feature on radio or television programmes), and particular constructions of social relations (e.g. the construction of relations between politicians and the public as simulated relations between people in a shared lifeworld” (1995: 12). Methodologies of critical and historical discourse analysis listed earlier give us specific tools for investigating these features.

Another important point to make about media discourse is that “the analysis of media language should be recognized as an important element within research on contemporary processes of social and cultural change” (Fairclough 1995: 2). Undeniably, the concept of sociocultural change is relevant to studying sexual minorities. Kuhar writes that "traditional patterns of everyday life, while trying to resist these changes, are giving way to new modes of living, new lifestyles and—maybe most importantly—new identities" (2007: 35); against this backdrop, "each coming out story of a single non-heterosexual person calls into question not only the heteronormative suppositions of people one comes out to, but also the heteronormativity of society and its institutions" (p. 36). On the other hand, "the anxieties regarding visibility of homosexuals can be viewed as responses to processes of social and cultural change" (Gruszczynska 2007: 107).
Also the development and change of media discourse are a part and a reflection of larger sociocultural processes. An example could be the tension between information and entertainment – media discourse genres that used to be separate but are now gradually merging together into a sort of “infotainment”. Conversationalization of media discourse, bridging the gap between public production and private consumption of the media (Fairclough 1995: 10), is a symptom of tension between the public and private domains, already mentioned here.
This tension is associated with another indicator of social change, namely the tension between collectivism and individualism, typical of “post-modern” societies. Both tensions are reflected in the development of computer technologies. Social networking sites, such as Facebook, may be seen as hybrid, public-private platforms of media discourse. They also enable individuals to form networks that do not depend on spatial proximity or face-to-face interaction, but that still contribute to their social capital (“networked individualism”, Coleman & Ross 2010: 104).
This hybridity of Internet discourse is also relevant for sexual minorities - it combines "the connected sociality of public space with the anonymity of the closet" (Woodland 2000: 418). For more, see Gruszczynska 2007.

Project methodologies

Attitudes towards confessional and sexual minorities in the discourse of the media in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland from a historical perspective 

HISTORICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Foucault’s genealogical discourse analysis is a methodological approach used to study discourse in order to reveal power/knowledge networks (Carabine 2001: 275). “Genealogy is concerned with describing the procedures, practices, apparatuses and institutions involved in the production of discourses and knowledges, and their power effects” (p. 276), as well as with tracing the developments of the power/knowledge/discourse triad from a historical perspective. It is based upon the following assumptions: power operates and circulates at every level of a society; normalization [discursive construction of norm] is one of the ways of deploying power; power/knowledge/discourse are intricately intermeshed; social context and relations have to be accounted for in order to situate the power/knowledge realm; discourses are constitutive; discourses have a normalizing role and regulatory outcomes; discourses are uneven, contradictory and contested; knowledge, truth and discourse are socially constructed and historically specific (Carabine 2001: 280). Doing genealogical discourse analysis involves identifying themes, categories and objects of discourse, looking for evidence of an inter-relationship between discourses, identifying the employed discursive strategies and techniques, looking for absences and silences, looking for resistances and counter-discourses, and identifying the effects of the discourse, all against the background of historical context (p. 281). 
Foucault's approach to discourse analysis and his theory of sexuality (1990) have inspired an analysis of media discourse on homosexuality in an Eastern European country - namely, in Estonia (Kurvinen 2007). This study follows the development of discourse on homosexuality from medical discourse (discussion concerning AIDS, homosexuality as a disease) to sexualized discourse (sex and homosexual, especially lesbian, relationships as a "trendy" topic).
Applied to: parliament discourse since 1991 (spoken political discourse); press discourse (newspapers) since 1991 (written media discourse).

Reisigl & Wodak’s (2009) discourse-historical analysis is a three-dimensional approach: after (1) having identified the specific contents or topics of the discourse under investigation it analyses (2) discourse strategies employed in it. Next, (3) linguistic means (as types) and the particular context-dependent linguistic realizations (as tokens) are examined (p. 93).
Discourse strategies that this strand of DHA is interested in include:
1. referential strategies – how persons, objects, phenomena, processes, events and activities are named, incl. metaphoric depiction;
2. predicational strategies – what qualities are assigned to them;
3. argumentation strategies – presenting conclusions as resulting from facts;
4. pespectivation strategies – negotiating perspectives or points of view;
5. intensification/mitigation strategies – overt/covert articulations of opinions.
In DHA, an important role is played by the temporal aspect of socio-political context: specific periods of time relating to important discursive events must be identified (for example, in an analysis of climate change discourse – international summits or publications of reports by IPCC, p. 98). Data coming from these specific periods of time may then be compared diachronically.
Applied to: diachronic analysis of texts from three distinct historical periods: shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the negotiations with the European Union, and during the world-wide financial crisis after joining the EU.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Fairclough’s interactional critical discourse analysis identifies social problems mediated in discourse (Fairclough 2001: 236). It consists of 1) linguistic/semiotic analysis of text, 2) interdiscursive analysis of interaction, and 3) social analysis of interaction (p. 240). Text analysis covers, for example, whole-text language organization – the narrative, argumentative, etc. structure of the text – and grammatical and semantic features of the text, such as transitivity, representations of agency, mood, modality, voice, choice of vocabulary, collocations, metaphors, etc. (2001: 242; 2003) as means of representing, relating, identifying and valuing. Interdiscursive analysis identifies genres and discourses that are drawn upon in the text and analyses how they work together, are mixed and locally transformed (2001: 243). Social analysis investigates social interests or purposes of the text, e.g. “sustaining relations of authority between elites or experts and the rest of society, or producing social divisions which might facilitate strategies of domination” (2001: 238).
Applied to: articles in the press (weeklies, monthlies); Internet material.

Koller’s (2012) critical analysis of collective identity is an example of a three-level analysis of texts. Micro-level is the text itself, meso-level is the discourse practice context, and macro-level is the social context (see the figure below).
The micro-level (linguistic and semiotic) analysis might include the following parameters:
- social actor representation (after van Leeuwen 1996): What groups and individuals are referred to and how? Are social actors included or excluded, genericised or specified, activated or subjected? (p. 23)
- processes: What process types are ascribed to social actors?
- evaluation: What qualities are associated with groups and individuals and how are they evaluated?
- modality: What does the author perceive a social group to be like in the past, present and future? What possible developments are constructed for them (epistemic)? How would the text producer like them to be (deontic)?
- intertextuality and interdiscursivity (after Fairclough, e.g. 2003): What other concrete texts are incorporated into the data at hand? What other genres and discourses do authors align themselves with? Which do they refute? (pp. 24-25)
Questions to consider on the meso-level of analysis: Who is involved in the discursive practices around the text, and in what role? What genre does the text instantiate? Question to address on the macro-level of analysis: What social factors impact on the text and on discourse practice? (p. 27)
Applied to: articles in the press (weeklies, monthlies); Internet material.

In both Fairclough’s and Koller’s frameworks, an important part is played by semiotic analysis. Semiosis is “meaning-making through language, body language, visual images, or any other way of signifying” (Fairclough 2001: 229). In addition to discourse it thus contains, among others, “visual features such as gesture, facial expression and body posture (for spoken interactions), or images, colour, layout and type font (for written texts)” (Koller 2012: 25). Semiotic modes may “reinforce, supplement or contradict” (p. 26) discursive (verbal, linguistic) input, for example in the press, television, Internet.
Examples of studies using the semiotic approach include multimodal analyses of EU informative publications (Caliendo & Magistro 2009), multimodal analysis of mediated suffering (Chouliaraki 2006) and multimodal analysis of fascist music (Machin & Richardson 2012).
Key reading: Van Leeuwen & Jewitt (eds.) 2001, Kress & van Leeuwen 1990, Hodge & Kress 1988. 
For an alternative approach, see the analysis of newspaper photography in Myles 2010, based on Bourdieu's sociology of photography as a "middle-brow" art, recognizing its importance for social and cultural classification (1990).
Applied to: visual material (films, Internet websites, posters, etc.)

Gelber’s (2002) validity claims model derived from the theory of communicative action by Habermas (1984). In Gelber’s own words, “this model enables an assessment to be made of the validity claims raised by speakers in uttering hate-speech-acts, and also provides a framework for suggesting how a communicative response might begin to address those claims” (p. 8).
When an utterance is made, the speaker raises claims regarding the truth of an objective world (claim to objective truth), the rightness of intersubjective norms and values (claim to norms and values), and the sincerity of the speaker’s subjectivities (claim to subjective sincerity). Checking whether the first two claims (the third one is impossible to be read off a speech act) raised in an utterance are valid may help to determine whether the utterance belongs to discriminatory discourse or not, and what is its intent and impact.
[As a side note, Gelber argues that this model may solve the conflict between legal measures against hate speech and the principle of free speech. First, hate-speech act is understood as a social act, hence behaviour. Second, it is interpreted primarily as an act of discrimination, dealt with by applying separate legal measures.]
Applied to: Internet discourse (websites, forums, blogs, comments).

Positive discourse analysis may be used to investigate counter discourses, especially in the media, where they manage to contest the main, central, predominant (mainstream, hegemonic) frames for reporting the news (Macgilchrist 2007: 74). PDA is based on one of the central claims of critical discourse analysis – that discourse is the site of constant struggle over meaning (p. 75). However, instead of focusing on hegemonic discourses of the elites, PDA investigates marginal discourses. Macgilchrist lists the following examples of alternative media where such discourses may be found: local gay-oriented newspapers, journals of the homeless, British radical press (p. 76).
Macgilchrist’s PDA investigates the following counter-discursive strategies: inversion, parody, complexification, partial reframing and radical reframing. Tannen defines frames as “structures of expectations on the basis of which one organizes knowledge about the world and uses it to predict interpretations of new events” (1993: 16). Reframing, in turn, “can be defined as shifting an issue away from its conventional ‘location’ within one set of shared assumptions and reconstruing it within a different set of knowledges” (Macgilchrist 2007: 80). 
Examples of parody as a counter-discursive strategy abound on The Onion website, for instance: Deformed Freak Born Without Penis; see also this article on Washington Post.
Applied to: discourses of the minorities.

Van Dijk’s (2005) contextual knowledge management theory is concerned with “the way knowledge in discourse production and comprehension is managed as a function of context” (p. 72). Knowledge is defined here “in terms of shared beliefs satisfying the specific (epistemic) criteria of an (epistemic) community” (p. 73). A speaker may possess personal, interpersonal, group, institutional (organizational), national and cultural knowledge (pp. 77-80).
Van Dijk offers a framework of assumptions that speakers use to manage knowledge in interaction, called K-strategies (p. 80).
Applying the CDA perspective to an analysis of knowledge management, e.g. in the news, shows that “what are presupposed truths for one epistemic community, nation or newspaper, may be at best a euphemistic, incomplete or otherwise biased “version” of the facts from another perspective.
We thus see that our theory of contextual knowledge management not only accounts for many aspects of text processing, but also explains several structures of important genres such as news reports” (p. 97).
Applied to: television and press news reports.

Fairclough and Wodak's (1997: 271–80) main tenets of CDA may function as a summary for the above overview: 
1. CDA addresses social problems. 
2. Power relations are discursive. 
3. Discourse constitutes society and culture. 
 4. Discourse does ideological work. 
5. Discourse is historical. 
 6. The link between text and society is mediated. 
7. Discourse analysis is interpretative and explanatory. 
8. Discourse is a form of social action.

Yes, but is it discourse?

Attitudes towards confessional and sexual minorities in the discourse of the media in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland from a historical perspective

There is no short answer to the question What is discourse? Monographs have been written about it, countless collective volumes, journals, special journal editions and conferences dedicated to it. The handful of quotes below only reflect the understanding of discourse adopted in this project.
Examples of discourse-related journals: Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, the Journal of Language and Politics, Discourse and Communication, Visual Semiotics, CADAAD (Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis across Disciplines - online journal).
[See this post for more introductory information and this post for more on discourse and social reality]

1. There are three basic understandings of discourse: 
(1) anything beyond the sentence, 
(2) language use, 
(3) a broader range of social practice that includes nonlinguistic and nonspecific instances of language (Schiffrin, Tannen & Hamilton 2008). 

2. Four main approaches to discourse (classification in Taylor 2001: 7): 
(1) focusing on the variation and imperfection of language as a system. 
[corresponds to 1.(1) above] 
Example reading: Abraham, Givon & Thompson (eds.) 1995; Aijmer & Stenstrom (eds.) 2004; Bernini & Schwartz (eds.) 2006; Miller & Weinert 1998. 
(2) focusing on the activity of language use, rather than the language itself. 
[corresponds to 1.(2) above] 
For example conversation analysis (CA) - Atkinson & Drew 1979, Heritage 1984.
(3) looking for patterns in the language associated with a particular topic or activity.
[at the intersection of 1.(2) and 1.(3)?]
For example institutional/workplace discourse analysis - Drew & Heritage 1992, Koester 2006.
(4) looking for patterns within much larger contexts of society and culture. 
[corresponds to 1.(3) above] 
For example Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), see below.

In my view, the most important keyword above is the word patterns. I see discourse analysis as the study of patterns in language use - and as it is a critical approach, I focus on investigating where and how these patterns originate, develop and change. 
Patterns in language use are shared by the society. One of the most important features of discourse is that it is part of social reality, a social practice. A consequence of this understanding is that with discourse we actually do something (practice = activity).
This was originally an idea of John Austin, the author of the influential work How to Do Things with Words (1962) and precursor of the speech act theory later developed by Searle (1969). I dare say that Austin also set the scene for what we know as critical discourse analysis today, because this framework depends on the idea that people do things with what they say, that speech can create social realities, not only represent them. Austin initiated research of performative speech acts, which has inspired e.g. Bulter's performativity theory (1990) and Gelber's "speaking-back" theory (2002).

Fairclough writes: “language is an irreducible part of social life, dialectically connected with other elements of social life, so that social analysis and research always has to take account of language (…) This is not a matter of reducing social life to language, saying that everything is discourse – it isn’t. Rather, it’s one analytical strategy amongst many” (2003: 2). 

“Discourse has been theorised as a form of social practice (Fairclough 1992) and “the sort of language used to construct some aspect of reality from a particular perspective, for example the liberal discourse of politics” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999:63)” (…) A ‘discourse’ is perhaps seen most simply as a recognisable way of seeing the world” (Sunderland & Litosselliti 2002: 9). 

“Describing discourse as social practice implies a dialectical relationship between a particular discursive event and the situation(s), institution(s) and social structure(s) which frame it: the discursive event is shaped by them, but it also shapes them. That is, discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned – it constitutes situations, objects of knowledge, and the social identities of and relationships between people and groups of people. It is constitutive both in the sense that it helps to sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it contributes to transforming it. Since discourse is so socially consequential, it gives rise to important issues of power. Discursive practices may have major ideological effects – that is, they can help produce and reproduce unequal power relations between (for instance) social classes, women and men, and ethnic/ cultural majorities and minorities through the ways in which they represent things and position people“ (Wodak 2002: 7-8, quoting Fairclough & Wodak 1997: 258). 

In this project, discourse is understood as a social practice and a specific way of seeing and representing the world. But it is also a historical process (“accumulated existence of discourse”, Foucault 1989: 25): 
“Michel Foucault's (1972) view of discourses as historically contingent cultural systems of knowledge, belief, and power does not require close attention to the details of linguistic form. Discourse analysis within a Foucauldian framework tends to consider instead how language invokes the knowledge systems of particular institutions, such as medical or penal discourse. This post-structuralist definition of discourse is inadequate for many discourse analysts, although some believe that Foucauldian "discourses" (culturally and historically specific ways of organizing knowledge) can and should be incorporated into the analysis of linguistic "discourse" (contextually specific ways of using language)” (Bucholtz 2003: 45). 

“Discourse is the socially meaningful activity – most typically talk, but non-verbal actions as well – in which ideas are constructed over time. When we speak of a discourse, we refer to a particular history of talk about a particular idea or set of ideas. Thus when we talk about a discourse of gender, or varied discourses of gender, we refer to the working of a particular set of ideas about gender in some segment or segments of society” (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2003: 42). 

The following checklist for recognizing discourses (Parker 1992) works also as a summary of the points made so far: 
 1. a discourse is realized in texts 
2. a discourse is about objects 
3. discourses contain subjects 
4. a discourse is a coherent system of meanings 
5. a discourse refers to other discourses 
6. a discourse reflects on its own way of speaking 
7. a discourse is historically located 
8. discourses support institutions 
9. discourses reproduce power relations 
10. discourses have ideological effects.