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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter Mouton July 8, 2017

Text bite news: the metapragmatics of feature news

  • Tom Van Hout

    Tom Van Hout is Assistant Professor and Academic Director of the Institute for Professional and Academic Communication at the University of Antwerp. He is also affiliated with the Center for Linguistics at Leiden University. He studies journalism, workplace discourse and other forms of professional communication from the perspective of linguistic ethnography. Recent work has appeared in journals such as IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Discourse, Context & Media, Journal of Pragmatics, and in various edited volumes.

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    and Peter Burger

    Peter Burger is Assistant Professor in the Center for Linguistics at Leiden University. He applies rhetorical perspectives to journalism, narrative folklore and social media discourse. His recent publications include the chapter “Mediatization and the language of journalism” in the Oxford Handbook of Language and Society (with Tom Van Hout, 2016).

From the journal Text & Talk

Abstract

Drawing on a weekly news feature of recontextualized public discourse, this paper examines journalists’ uptake of political (mis)communication. We label such mediatized speech events text bites. Text bites present us with eye-catching bits of reported speech about the main characters: the politician whose words are being quoted and the journalist captioning the quote. Rather than speak for themselves, the quotes speak through recontextualization – that is, through the inflection of prior discourse with new meanings. Our data are taken from a corpus consisting of news quotes by politicians published in De Standaard, a Belgian news site. Drawing on the linguistic anthropology of intertextuality, we analyze how the journalistic responses evaluate the reported politicians, their statements and their communicative performance. Findings show how a media logic conditions what politicians can and cannot say, to whom and about whom, and how journalists portray politicians who do not comply with this logic. Evaluations of the moral and verbal merits of what politicians do with words evince an appreciation for colorful characters, self-deprecatory humor, plain language and stylistic craftsmanship. Media criticism is generally rebuffed: text bites do boundary work, demarcating the professional territory of journalists and politicians. Text bites address a highly media-literate readership of news consumers who recognize the “characters” in the plot line of political communication.

About the authors

Tom Van Hout

Tom Van Hout is Assistant Professor and Academic Director of the Institute for Professional and Academic Communication at the University of Antwerp. He is also affiliated with the Center for Linguistics at Leiden University. He studies journalism, workplace discourse and other forms of professional communication from the perspective of linguistic ethnography. Recent work has appeared in journals such as IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Discourse, Context & Media, Journal of Pragmatics, and in various edited volumes.

Peter Burger

Peter Burger is Assistant Professor in the Center for Linguistics at Leiden University. He applies rhetorical perspectives to journalism, narrative folklore and social media discourse. His recent publications include the chapter “Mediatization and the language of journalism” in the Oxford Handbook of Language and Society (with Tom Van Hout, 2016).

Acknowledgments

We thank the guest editors as well as three anonymous reviewers for their pertinent comments and helpful suggestions. All remaining inaccuracies are ours. We also thank research assistant Lore Mijnendonckx for compiling the corpus.

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Published Online: 2017-7-8
Published in Print: 2017-7-26

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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