Discourse Analysis of Media

Dec 3, 2000 - © Prof. Hemant Joshi

It is becoming more and more difficult to analyse discourses in modern times, as the
contradictions and the complexities have grown many folds. The complexity of discourse
is to be understood in terms of the complexities of the societies, their cultures and their
polity. The discourses of Mass media are even more difficult to analyse. The Mass media
came into being as the fourth estate of the modern democratic state i.e. to support the new
order against the old feudal hegemony. Today, we are living with the contradictions of
the time where it largely continues to support the status quo, though it is forced to support
the crusaders against the same status quo in the name of Democracy.

The ideologies in the media discourse have many perspectives. The first of them is the
paradigm of Left, Right and Center. The other is that of status quo and anti status quo,
male chauvinistic and feminist. India has one more that of Savarna and Dalit.
Interestingly, these paradigms are also not that straight as they appear. There will be
numerous discourses within each of these categories.

American scholars have talked about Right, Left and Center paradigm to explain the
generation of media discourse, which is claimed to be objective and neutral. Jeff Cohen
in his paper Propaganda from the Middle of the Road: The Centrist Ideology of the News
Media says:

There is a notion -- widely believed in the mainstream media -- that while there is
propaganda of the left and propaganda of the right, there is no such thing as propaganda
of the center. In this view, the center doesn't produce propaganda, it produces straight
news. Mainstream journalists typically explain: "We don't tilt left, we don't tilt right.
We're straight down the middle of the road. We're dead center." When mainstream
journalists tell me during debates that "our news doesn't reflect bias of the left or the
right," I ask them if they therefore admit to reflecting bias of the center. Journalists react
as if I've uttered an absurdity: "Bias of the center! What's that?" It is a strange concept to
many in the media. They can accept that conservatism or rightism is an ideology that
carries with it certain values and opinions, beliefs about the past, goals for the future.
They can accept that leftism carries with it values, opinions, beliefs. But being in the
center -- being a centrist -- is somehow not having an ideology at all. Somehow, centrism
is not an "ism" carrying with it values, opinions and beliefs.

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Cohen further talks about the role of ideology in relation to journalists in America and
their portrayal of terrorist. He writes:
Good Guys Caught Between Left and Right Besides consistently promoting peace and
democracy overseas, according to centrist propaganda, the U.S. also consistently supports
the good guys abroad. Not surprisingly, the good guys are always "centrists" on the
political spectrum. At least that's what the media make them out to be. And there's
another media cliche one hears about our good guys, the centrists: They are perpetually
hemmed in by the bad guys of left and right.

Media discourses have created a kind of cynicism in our society. Even the intellectuals
are also not able to keep guard against such tendencies where they are ready to crucify
any kind of political debate by declaring that politics is a game of scoundrels. Many
Indian intellectuals also talk of the abundance of political discourse in media and
specially the dangers of it due to the emergence of television. I can only speak in
vyanjana and could ask why the media across world is interested in spreading the
message of mysticism and people’s incapability to shape their destiny. While watching
Indian and world television, one could find a number of such occasions. The news of
Ganesha drinking milk would be flashed or a film about the murdered wife of a man
would help her husband and take the revenge or vice versa would be shown. Sometimes
back, the news of a statue of virgin Mary weeping the tears of blood in Italy was
prominently covered.

The problems of media discourses are to be tackled not with cynicism, but with a cap of
critical discourse analysis. The convergence of views of left or radical right, in India,
about the process of globalisation is to be studied carefully to find the differences of
meaning. The discourse is to be understood in relation to the epistemological frame work
i.e. the waltensung and can never be understood in terms of the lexical or syntactical
entries alone.

A few days back on March 10, there was a picture of the rally of women in many
newspapers. The women in the picture were carrying a placard that said:

Nabalig larakiyon ke sath balatkar karana ghor aparadh hai.

It’s heinous crime to rape (non adult) girls.

Now, if we try to analyse the gramaticality of this discourse we would not reach the
meaning. At a higher semantic level,

level, we could ask do we mean that "one could rape the adult girls" or "raping an adult is
a lesser crime". There can be many interpretations of this message but the discourse if
understood in its “global dimension” would only have one meaning i.e. rape is heinous
and should not take place. However, it is also a fact that the women discourse itself is not
all that homogenous. . The Centrist discourse of media is to be critically analysed to find
out the ideologies they propagate in the garb of non-partisanship. This leads us to discuss
the general principles of news selection. The criteria for selection signal a construction of
reality on an ideological basis. Hall et al. (1978) point out that the content of the news
constructs 'social maps' which assume that society is fragmented into definite areas (such
as politics, economy and sport) and concerned with individuals who have control of their
destiny. The broadcaster's social map also assumes that society is hierarchical, with some
events more 'newsworthy' than others are, and 'that this hierarchy is centralised both
socially and regionally' (Hartley 1982: p82). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the
maps assume that society is consensual, with all in agreement that the current society is
the best possible.

In recent years, there has been a spate of researches and thinking on analysis of Media
discourse, semiotics of Advertising, radio and television and even of Internet. The
structural linguistics, which began studying grammar of narrativity, provided deep
insights for those interested in discourse analysis. The development in this area could be
traced back to Vladimir Propp (1928) to Etienne Souriau, Rolland Barthes and Tzvetan
Todorov. A.J.Greimas finally gave the grammar of narrativity a definite shape. Recently,
T. V. Dijk has made significant contribution in this field but also in the area of media
discourse.

Mass media, democracy and mass culture are so closely interrelated that no one can
theorize about discourse in mass media without talking about the role of ideologies in
encoding and decoding of media messages. The grammaticality does have a role to play
in analysing the discourse, but it has been widely accepted that the analysis of discourse
has to do with the socio-cultural context and this situational context is what generates the
ideology. Ideologies as were understood in the classical period of Marxist Theories have
lost their relevance and the postmodern theorist are concerned with the subaltern
ideologies, they

they are talking about the gender and marginal existences. In the area of theories of Mass
Communication, John Fiske, John Hartley and others have made a significant
contribution. John Fiske has based his work on the language, linguistics and semiotics
and similarly John Hartley has made a critical study of Television in his book Reading
television. From such kind of efforts, we have come to a new approach, which is named
as the Critical Discourse Analysis. Ruth Wodak, writing in Language, Power and
Ideology, defines her field as "critical linguistics". It is "an interdisciplinary approach to
language study with a critical point of view" for studying "language behavior in natural
speech situations of social relevance."

Brett Dellinger (1995) says that

“Emphasis on both the structure and the social context of media texts can provide a
solution which enables the media critic to "denaturalize," or expose the "taken-for-
grantedness" of ideological messages as they appear in isolated speech and, when
combined with newer ethnographic studies and newer methods of discourse analysis,
create a broader common ground between structuralists and those who see the media as
manipulators.”

He further asserts that the critical use of discourse analysis (CDA) in applied linguistics is
leading to the development of a different approach to understanding media messages.
Many scholars have studied television and they have again talked of the individual’s
ideology that becomes the context of the text under study. Mark Peace, in his paper In
what ways is watching TV an active process of interpretation rather than a passive
process of 'assimilating information'?, writes:

Sitting down in front of the television at the end of a hard day, it is easy to assume the
attitude that the we are simply sponging up the information emanating from the television
set without analysis or any other complex conceptual process – 'couch-potato syndrome',
as it were. The problem with this essentially 'bottom-up' viewpoint is that is disregards
the complex and significant, though sometimes subtle, processes which are generally
accepted to occur within perceptual tasks. Television as a form of media, and as such a
transmitter of information (both visual and aural), must be considered within this
perceptual framework and viewed from a 'top-down', constructivist stance.

He further says:

"Behind everything we do throughout our lives, we have a hidden agenda made up of

objectives, super objectives and goals. These will, inevitably alter how we understand
what we are watching. Similarly, we have different moods a

emotions, and this will effect our interpretation of what we are seeing". (Mark Peace,
1995)

A number of modern day thinkers have been focusing their attention to the problem of
Mass Media and ‘Mass Culture’. Adorno, for example, suggests that the term ‘Mass
culture’ should give way to ‘Culture Industry’. Scholars are again talking in terms of
“Knowledge societies’ (as if till such time the societies were living in utter darkness). It
would be worth concentrating on these two terms alone as they could bring forth the
complexities of the Modern day media discourse. He who advocates the term Mass
culture would also be advocating the term Knowledge society. On the contrary, no one
who goes along with Adorno may draw the same meaning by the term Knowledge
society.

To conclude, I would like to say that the Mass Media discourse above all is to be
understood in terms of its capability of exercising power and the political power i.e. the
ideology is the highest form of such power. When studying this contextuality of
Discourse, one would have to borrow heavily from the insights of thinkers like Marcuse,
Chomsky, Faucault and even Toffler. I wish to mention at this point about a student of
3rd year of Communication theory in Institute of Communication Studies, University of
Leads, Steven Green who has written an excellent paper on Foucault’s theory of Power
and Mass Media. Steven Green writes, "Foucault's central thesis that power is
everywhere expressed in a multitude of individual discourses offers freedom from the
inevitability of determinate power and allows us to see the mass media as a site of power
and resistance where the outcome (while prejudiced by a coalescence of power) might
well allow resistance as a necessary condition of the exercise of power."