Given and News : Media discourse and the construction of community on national days

National anniversaries such as independence days demand precise coordination in order to make citizens change their routines to forego work and spend the day at rest or at festivities that provide social focus and spectacle. The complex social construction of national days is taken for granted and operates as a given in the news media, which are the main agents responsible for coordinating these planned disruptions of normal routines. This study examines the language used in the news to construct the rather unnatural idea of national days and to align people in observing them. The data for the study consist of news stories about the Fourth of July in the New York Times, sampled over 150 years and are supplemented by material from other sources and other countries. The study is multidimensional, applying concepts from pragmatics (speech acts, politeness, information structure), systemic functional linguistics (the interpersonal metafunction and the Appraisal framework) and cognitive linguistics (frames, metaphor) as well as journalism and communications to arrive at an interdisciplinary understanding of how resources for meaning are used by writers and readers of the news stories. The analysis shows that on national anniversaries, nations tend to be metaphorized as persons having birthdays, to whom politeness should be shown. The face of the nation is to be respected in the sense of identifying the nation's interests as one's own (positive face) and speaking of citizen responsibilities rather than rights (negative face). Resources are available for both positive and negative evaluations of events and participants and the newspaper deftly changes footings (Goffman 1981) to demonstrate the required politeness while also heteroglossically allowing for a certain amount of disattention and even protest - within limits, for state holidays are almost never construed as Bakhtinian festivals, as they tend to reaffirm the hierarchy rather than invert it. Celebrations are evaluated mainly for impressiveness, and for the essentially contested quality of appropriateness, which covers norms of predictability, size, audience response, aesthetics, and explicit reference to the past. Events may also be negatively evaluated as dull ("banal") or inauthentic ("hoopla"). Audiences are evaluated chiefly in terms of their enthusiasm, or production of appropriate displays for emotional response, for national days are supposed to be occasions of flooding-out of nationalistic feeling. By making these evaluations, the newspaper reinforces its powerful position as an independent critic, while at the same time playing an active role in the construction and reproduction of emotional order embodied in "the nation's birthday." As an occasion for mobilization and demonstrations of power, national days may be seen to stand to war in the relation of play to fighting (Bateson 1955). Evidence from the newspaper's coverage of recent conflicts is adduced to support this analysis. In the course of the investigation, methods are developed for analyzing large collections of newspaper content, particularly topical soft news and feature materials that have hitherto been considered less influential and worthy of study than so-called hard news. In his work on evaluation in newspaper stories, White (1998) proposed that the classic hard news story is focused on an event that threatens the social order, but news of holidays and celebrations in general does not fit this pattern, in fact its central event is a reproduction of the social order. Thus in the system of news values (Galtung and Ruge 1965), national holiday news draws on "ground" news values such as continuity and predictability rather than "figure" news values such as negativity and surprise. It is argued that this ground helps form a necessary space for hard news to be seen as important, similar to the way in which the information structure of language is seen to rely on the regular alternation of given and new information (Chafe 1994).

Conditionally One of 'Us' : A Study of Print Media, Minorities and Positioning Practices

This study deals with how ethnic minorities and immigrants are portrayed in the Finnish print media. The study also asks how media users of various ethnocultural backgrounds make sense of these mediated stories. A more general objective is to elucidate negotiations of belonging and positioning practices in an increasingly complex society. The empirical part of the study is based on content analysis and qualitative close reading of 1,782 articles in five newspapers (Hufvudstadsbladet, Vasabladet, Helsingin Sanomat, Iltalehti and Ilta-Sanomat) during various research periods between 1999 and 2007. Four case studies on print media content are followed up by a focus group study involving 33 newspaper readers of Bosnian, Somalian, Russian, and 'native' Finnish backgrounds. The study draws from different academic and intellectual traditions; mainly media and communication studies, sociology and social psychology. The main theoretical framework employed is positioning theory, as developed by Rom Harré and others. Building on this perspective, situational self-positioning, positioning by others, and media positioning are seen as central practices in the negotiation of belonging. In support of contemporary developments in social sciences, some of these negotiations are seen as occurring in a network type of communicative space. In this space, the media form one of the most powerful institutions in constructing, distributing and legitimising values and ideas of who belongs to 'us', and who does not. The notion of positioning always involves an exclusionary potential. This thesis joins scholars who assert that in order to understand inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms, the theoretical starting point must be a recognition of a decent and non-humiliating society. When key insights are distilled from the five empirical cases and related to the main theories, one of the major arguments put forward is that the media were first and foremost concerned with a minority actor's rightful or unlawful belonging to the Finnish welfare system. However, in some cases persistent stereotypes concerning some immigrant groups' motivation to work, pay taxes and therefore contribute are so strong that a general idea of individualism is forgotten in favour of racialised and stagnated views. Discussants of immigrant background also claim that the positions provided for minority actors in the media are not easy to identify with; categories are too narrow, journalists are biased, the reporting is simplifying and carries labelling potential. Hence, although the will for the communicative space to be more diverse and inclusive exists — and has also in many cases been articulated in charters, acts and codes — the positioning of ethnic minorities and immigrants differs significantly from the ideal.