Joanna Thornborrow

Branding and Discourse: The Case of Cosmopolitan

Like fast food and fizzy drinks, discourses are globally marketed by powerful multinational corporations. In this article we look at discourses about women which are distributed around the planet by the 44 different national versions of Cosmopolitan. These versions are localized, but still transmit the Cosmo brand, resulting in similarities between the versions. We apply a multimodal discourse analytic approach to understand this global branding, the type of analysis which is lacking in existing accounts of globalization, and ask, what exactly does remain the same across the localized versions? What this article offers is not an analysis of the magazine per se, but an analysis of the discourses that underpin it. We show how the magazine creates a fantasy world through the use of low modality images, which allow a particular kind of agency, mainly sex, to signify power. The multimodal realizations of Cosmo discourse enable women to signify their alignment with the Cosmo world through such things as the cafes they frequent, the clothes they wear and the way that they dance. Cosmo presents these not as real, but as playful fantasies, something which existing literature on womens magazines has missed. In these fantasies, women act alone and rely on acts of seduction and social manoeuvreing, rather than on intellect, to act in and on the world.

Lifestyle and the Depoliticisation of Agency: Sex as Power in Women's Magazines

Sex, due to its connotations of dangerousness and the non-traditional, has been used heavily in womens magazines and other mass media to signify core values of power and freedom as part of their brands. Through this process, other forms of agency for women have tended to be excluded. In these magazines women are shown to be assertive, powerful and independent, not through the political views that they hold, not through the way that they act upon society, but through the way that they seduce men and behave sexually. We show, using a number of examples, that for this to happen a fantasy space has to be created: a space where real-world obstacles and meanings are erased, allowing a repertoire of theatrical sexual play to operate. This is typical of the lifestyle society in which we now live. In this society, we define ourselves not on the basis of who we are, in an older sense of gender or social class, but in terms of what we do and the values we hold. The way we communicate these values is often through our use of consumer products, which allows us to align ourselves with the core values and meanings with which the products have been loaded. But while lifestyle itself may be a matter of choice, the choices available to us are often created to serve the interests and needs of large corporations, of consumerism. Sex is one such choice of which we must be very careful.

Special issue on personalization in the broadcast news interview

This special issue of Discourse & Communication brings together researchers working within different methodologies and theoretical paradigms - linguistic pragmatics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis - who share a common interest in the analysis of discourse produced by the broadcast media. The authors are all members of the Ross Priory Group for Research on Broadcast Talk, an international group of scholars distinguished by their interdisciplinary approach to the study of mediated communication; and their particular concern for this issue is with personalization in broadcast news.

Storying the news through category, action, and reason

From a sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic perspective, news stories have often been considered as operating within a similar structural framework to oral narratives (Labov, 1972), sharing formal elements with narratives produced in other contexts (although as Bell (1991) has demonstrated in relation to print news, these elements occur in temporal disorganization). In this paper, in line with other recent treatments of news stories, we suggest that news does not conform to this kind of “narrative” structure as such. Examining data taken from print and live-broadcast TV news through a Sacksian (1995) lens, we argue that it is possible to simplify the analysis of news structure by approaching the news as “stories,” where the story elements are organized around the notions of category, action, and reason rather than as a series of narrative clauses involving orientation, complicating actions, evaluation, and resolution (Bell, 1991; van Dijk, 1988).

The construction of conflicting accounts in public participation TV

Some of the recent work in the field of media discourse has been concerned with various levels in the organization and structure of audience participation programs on radio and television; other approaches to the analysis of talk in these settings have focused on the interactional frameworks at play in the talk. The aim of this article is to develop the interactional approach by looking at the production of narratives in a mediated context: specifically, the production of a story from two different, and conflicting, points of view. The stories I analyze occur within two different program genres (talk show and television court) where lay members of the public are often called upon to produce accounts of events which are then contested by another participant. This article discusses the significance of tense shifting in these second versions, from narrative past to conversational historic present, in the public construction of believable alternative stories. (Accounts, conversational historic present, conflict, discourse, interaction, television, narratives.)*

'Going public’: constructing the personal in a television news interview

In this article I examine how a ‘private’, inside story was constructed through an extended news interview (‘Tonight’ with Trevor Macdonald, ITV1) drawing on models of both the experiential and the accountable broadcast interview. The analysis, based on aspects of adjacency sequencing, question/ response design, and narrative organization, explores the ways in which a personal account is elicited about an event that had been highly prominent in the news. However, I also look at how ‘accountability’ emerges as an issue during the interview, and on how the tensions between these two types of interview are played out in its design and subsequent editing. Although the interview displays many of the characteristics identified by Montgomery (2007) as ‘experiential’, where the interviewee is positioned as ‘one of us’, with knowledge and experience of an event she is not to be held accountable for as a result of her high profile in the news coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis (in April 2007), Faye Turney had already become a public figure during the time she was held in Iran. Furthermore, she had already been positioned by the media as accountable for some of her actions during her captivity. I show that the personal dimensions of the interview as interaction are framed by the interview as documentary, thus producing a hybrid form in which both the experiential and the accountable can be managed.

Backstage activities as frontstage news

This article examines some of the discourse practices of contemporary television news reporting. Basing their analysis on BBC and ITV reports of the G20 summit meeting in London, April 2009, the authors investigate aspects of contemporary television news coverage. Drawing on Goffman’s work on backstage and frontstage regions and on footing, the authors focus specifically on the role of small talk, media self-referentiality and artfulness in visual and verbal synchrony as resources for personalisation and recontextualisation of private activities as public discourse.

Mediated Constructions of Crisis

Patrona and Thornborrow examine the discursive constructions of crisis on television evening news and current affairs programmes during the EU Parliament elections of 2014. They focus on the economic crisis referred to as ‘austerity’, and the political crisis caused by the rise of populist parties and agendas in member states. Adopting a discourse and conversation analytic approach, Patrona and Thornborrow examine how the tensions at work across Europe during the 2014 elections were discursively constructed in national news narratives and in mediated debate through diverse representations of crisis. These situated constructions of crisis variously framed the stakes of the elections with respect to the attribution of responsibility and blame in different national contexts, and also helped to legitimize, or, conversely, to downgrade, the European project.

Right-wing populism and the dynamics of style: a discourse-analytic perspective on mediated political performances

This article offers new ways of conceptualising style in right wing populist communicative performances, by foregrounding a structured and conceptually informed use of “style” that moves beyond the descriptive sense routinely employed in political communication. Specifically, it explores how a discourse-analytic approach to mediated populist discourse can inform and advance the current understanding of populist ‘style’ by analysing some contextually produced linguistic and discursive choices in populist rhetorical repertoires—i.e., the communicative strategies that are deployed in mediated contexts for right-wing populist political communication. Taking three illustrative examples of right wing populist party performances on TV news and current affairs broadcasts in Greece (GD), France (FN) and the UK (UKIP), the speakers’ use of a range of rhetorical devices is examined using models from socio-linguistics and discourse analysis: aspects of register shifts by GD in blame attribution speeches, interactional ‘bad manners’ in a French political debate, and Nigel Farage speaking ‘candidly’ in three different contexts of news reporting from the UK. In taking such a qualitative approach, it is argued that populist style cannot be defined in terms of one single feature, or set of features, common to all right wing populists and transferrable from one socio-cultural context to another, but more usefully as a set of motivated choices among alternative semiotic resources (linguistic/discursive, interactional and visual), which have social and cultural resonance. This focus on micro-level features of mediated interaction thus offers a more fine-grained understanding of style than is currently the case, as it shows how right-wing populist politicians’ performative styles are situated within specific (here European) socio-cultural and political communicative contexts; in this study, this is to say, the various television broadcasts in which they occur.

Hybrid Politics: Media and ParticipationIannelliLauraHybrid Politics: Media and Participation, SAGE: London, 2016; 129 pp.: £45. ISBN: 1473915787, eISBN: 9781473917712

ultimately ‘Facebook does not allow users flexibility in reshaping platforms interface’ (p. 116) and that all is ‘flattened out into homogenous metadata fields’ (p. 116) – a common concern across the study of social media. Overall, this book is a valuable contribution to scholarship on online countercultural, radical and activist communities. Lingel reminds us of the importance of detailed and focused work in the everyday and local contextual uses of digital technology, and that there is more to life than big data. This strength produces some concerns, for example, some unevenness between the case studies and despite some useful concluding thoughts on the implications for theory, a lack of broader social, economic and political contextualisation – the study remains largely in the terrain of identity and group politics and leaves alone the broader picture of political economy. In that sense, again it shares a lot with the more culturalist and anthological wing of media and cultural studies – by which it is clearly influenced – although it would be unfair to offer this as a major criticism given the book’s own rationale, which is well met.