How the Imagined Audience Is Involved and Represented in TV News Broadcasts
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
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| Description | My study focuses on the way imagined audience is addressed in TV news reporting and on the representation of the voices of selected representatives of such audience. In conformity with the trend to conversationalize the news broadcast and to appeal to the viewers, the discourse of the news programme often addresses the imagined audience directly and within the monologue of a news presenter or a reporter, the audience is involved. Unlike in the case of interviews between speakers present live on the show, in this monologic “speech of distance”, the addressed viewers are not given the opportunity to react. They are often addressed and asked as if they were present in a dialogue with the speaker, but their response is missing. On the other hand, the imagined viewers and their possible responses are often represented by voices of chosen ordinary people who are given space in the news broadcast to respond to reporters’ questions, which, unlike in the monologic newsreading, usually remain unheard to the audience. This study uses data collected from prime-time TV news broadcasts on three most popular Czech channels in the period of one month and observes by what language means the imagined audience is involved in the newsreaders’ and reporters’ monologues and how the voices of the absent viewers are represented. The analysis focuses on the use of personal pronouns and questions in the news anchors’ and reporters’ discourse and the inclusion of short responses of ordinary people, questioned e.g. in the street, in the news broadcast as a means to represent the possible viewers’ response. The aim is to identify typical features of these components of news broadcasts and to find patterns which are repeated in the news programmes of the individual channels. |
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