EDITORS: Thomson, Elizabeth; White, Peter R.R. TITLE: Communicating Conflict SUBTITLE: Multilingual Case Studies of the News Media PUBLISHER: Continuum YEAR: 2008
Laura Filardo Llamas, Department of English, Universidad de Valladolid, Spain
SUMMARY This book consists of eleven chapters, in all of which two aspects are covered, namely the portrayal by the media - particularly journalism - of some kind of conflict - either physical or political -, and the use of the appraisal framework as the point of departure for the analysis (Martin 2000, White 2002, Martin & White 2005). These similarities are closely connected to the objective of the book, which can be summarized as an analysis of 'objectivity' in hard news stories across cultures.
Given that all the chapters collected in the book depart from the same theoretical framework, the key aspects of appraisal theory are explained in White & Thomson's chapter, ''the News Story as Rhetoric'', which opens the collection. The notion of objectivity and the hard news report genre are defined by relying on previous studies about the structure of news items in English (Iedema 1997; White 2000). This covers two main aspects of news stories, namely evaluation and means through which this can be transmitted, and textual structure and its connection to evaluation.
Half of the chapters in the book are not only methodologically but also thematically connected. That is the case of chapters 2, 3,4, 5 and 7, which deal with different representations of the Iraq conflict. In particular, in almost all of them - except chapter 3 - we have an analysis of evaluation about the handover of power by the Americans to the provisional Iraqi government in June 2004. In chapter 3, the analysis of evaluation is also related to the Iraq war, but it is focused on the scandal about the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Cafferel and Rechniewski's chapter is the first one dealing with the Iraq war, and it covers the analysis of three articles from the French press. The main objective is to see how the government handover was ''presented in very different ways in the world's media, according to the legitimacy assigned to the war and the subsequent American occupation'' (25). In order to do so, they rely on three features of the text: appraisal, attribution and transitivity. Their results show the importance of doing this type of analysis as a means of uncovering ideological position, which, as the authors show, can be uncovered in hard news even if one of their features is their claimed ''impartiality''.
The notion of 'objectivity' reappears in Hong Van and Thomson's chapter, where they investigate how opinion can be conveyed by indirectly invoking the 'voices' of other authoritative sources. For this reason they analyze a Vietnamese online article published in the _Nhan Dan Daily_. Context proves to be important once again, as Vietnamese anti-Americanism seems to underlie the hard news story, something which can be explained by relying on Van Dijk's description of 'group knowledge' (2005: 78). One interesting aspect brought up by this article is the, at least apparent, different patterns of evaluation used by 'reporter voice' (Martin & White 2005) in Vietnamese and English.
In chapter 4, Thomson, Fukui and White do not only rely on the appraisal framework to analyze evaluation of the handover of power in Iraq in two Japanese newspapers, but they combine it with Generic Structure Potential analysis (Hasan 1996). The importance of structure is justified by the textual organization of editorials in Japanese. This is motivated by the 'three readings' practice, which allows readers to choose between three reading options ranging from skimming the headlines to reading the whole of the article. These authors show that even if there is a similar structure and the 'reporter voice' is employed in each of the analyzed articles, there is a difference in how evaluation is transmitted, mainly because of the employment of a different 'engagement strategy' in each of them.
The same context - portrayal of the handover of Iraqi sovereignty by the Japanese press - appears in Sano's chapter, whose objective is to examine the commonalities in the persuasive strategies that are used in four Japanese editorials. In order to do so, three main aspects are looked at: textual organization, semantics, and evaluative expressions. The results show that the four writers advocate their ideological positions by following the same textual structure, which includes three obligatory elements: inducement, empathetic construction, and position. These are consistent with the three readings that can be made of any Japanese editorial, and they are characterized by a prosodic shift among them. This study completes the previous one by incorporating the idea of 'homologization' which the author uses to explain how the authors deal with conflict, and how they try to maintain the co-existence of different members of a culture within one single textual practice.
There is a contextual shift in chapter 6, where McDonald analyzes the use of scare quotes to see how the issue of Taiwan is treated in the _China Daily_. According to this author, scare quotes are one of the rhetorical weapons used by Mainland Chinese media to delegitimize Taiwan's existence as an independent entity. Thus, through the reiteration of certain verbal formulae - particularly the use of a highly evaluative headline, the appearance of a historical mode, and the use of morality to support China's legitimate claims and Taiwan's illegitimate ones - symbolic control is reiterated, and a self- contained rhetorical universe characterized by the triumph of the good is obtained.
The handover of power in Iraq reappears in chapter 7, where Lukin analyzes how this event is treated in a Spanish newspaper and an Argentinean one. To do this, she departs from the Systemic Functional Grammar notion of 'tenor' (Halliday & Hasan 1985)., and, accordingly, similarities and differences between the two news pieces are explained by relying on the kind of situation in which they are produced and the kind of reporting which they instantiate. Thus, the author argues that variation between the two texts is explained if three contextual parameters - tenor, field and mode - are taken into account. Besides, she considers that the analysis of journalistic voices can be improved by taking into account registral variation and its connection to social contexts.
Knox and Patpong's objective in chapter 8 is to analyze how the same event is constructed in different languages and from different ideological positions. They focus on a conflict between Thai protesters and Thai armed forces in southern Thailand, and they compare two online articles - one in Thai and one in English - by looking at their rhetorical structure and the means that are used to spread evaluation. The results show that different rhetorical structures are used and that they can be used as different means for evaluating events. Besides, those different ideological structures are combined with diverse uses of the same appraisal resources; something which can be connected to the transmission of the ideological position of the publishing institution. It shall be noted that one of the key aspects argued in this article is that using certain linguistic tools allow us to ''systematically describe the means by which institutional authors can reconstrue events'' (198) as part of a subjective and social process. In chapter 9, Kitley looks at the construction of the kidnapping of journalist Ersa Siregar in Indonesia, and he departs from the hypothesis that ''much of what we see or read in the mass media about military conflict is a highly managed version of events'' (204). For that reason, he looks at the language used in headlines published between July and December 2003, and he finds that frequently a 'middle voice' - i.e. one which distances the national Indonesian forces from any negative action - is employed to portray things as a state of affairs. Besides, he analyzes how this middle voice can be combined with the typical structure of hard news stories as a strategy for journalists to survive under circumstances which ''are stacked against their professional practice'' (223).
In chapter 10, Hoglund analyzes how evaluation can be transmitted through language choices in news reporting, and he focuses on the political conflict created after the appointment of a new chief executive officer in the only Swedish-language newspaper in Finland. He studies attitudinal evaluation through monoglossic (with only the reporter voice) and heteroglossic (with more than one voice) utterances in three articles. It shows that evaluation is transmitted through the combination of the reporter voices - intravocalized manifestation - and the interviewees' voices - extravocalized explicit quotes. In that way, the reporter may subscribe to a given opinion, which is emphasized with the help of headlines and structural organization.
The focus of the final chapter is not so much on the language used, but on the transmission of evaluation through naturalistic photos. Economou looks at how the photos that accompany daily hard news stories are 're-instantiated' (Martin 2006) in new review feature stories. All the photos are about the issue of asylum-seekers, and the author compares how this topic is treated in Australian and Greek broadsheets. To fulfill the objective, she adapts the appraisal framework to the analysis of photos and identifies two types of visual voices (or visual keys) (257): Visual record key - for photos with a strong ideational profile -, and visual interpretation key - for those with a higher evaluative profile. The author finds differences in the uses of photos in both contexts. In Australian texts, photos recall the commercial film genre and they interact with the headline, which results in a distancing effect from the reality that is represented. On the contrary, in Greek texts, the photos try to tell a story and create some kind of empathy and emotional involvement between the reader and the local reality represented.
EVALUATION This book is a good resource for researchers dealing with newspaper journalism, and the existing differences and similarities between reporting in different cultures and languages. That is closely connected to one of the main of objectives of this collection of essays, which mainly focus on the analysis of reporter-voice - and hard news textual organization - as a means of advancing a particular value position while at the same time backgrounding the writer's attitudinal role. It is for this reason that one of the key positive aspects of this book is that it can be considered an introductory research to the area of comparative analysis of news reporting across cultures. Nevertheless, the organization of the book - and therefore that comparative aspect - would have probably improved if the editors had included a final summary chapter reviewing the different kinds of variation among the attitudinal arrangements at work in journalistic cultures, and how that could lead onto further research.
In terms of thematic and content organization, there are some positive aspects that need to be mentioned. All the articles in the book follow the same theoretical framework - appraisal framework in combination with Systemic Functional Grammar. This allows the reader to follow all the analyses without having to consider - and shift between - different theoretical approaches to the analysis of discourse, and at the same time it increases the book cohesion. Additionally, the book also follows one thematic line, as all the chapters included in it deal with some kind of 'conflict'; something which increases its value as a resource for the study of evaluation in news items.
As we can infer from reading this book, one of the main advantages of the appraisal framework is that it provides a tool for the analysis of evaluation in a situation in which finding the linguistic tools through which it can be transmitted is essential, given that most journalists and / or reporters claim to be 'objective' (Iedema et al., 1994). However, it could be argued that one of the drawbacks of this type of analysis is connected to the notion of context, as explained in Van Dijk (2005). Most, if not all, of the articles included in this book contextualize the analysis that are carried in them, in relation to the place in which they are produced (France, Vietnam, Japan, etc), and/or in relation to the situation that is being portrayed (Iraq, Taiwan, Finland, etc). Nevertheless, in some of the articles the contextual information is not considered at the time of trying to explain how the reporter voice is used within each given situation, even if it could be inferred from the contextualization sections. It is for this reason that when reading this book, one could slightly miss the connection between the findings about the use of the reporter voice in each given situation and the complex set of beliefs and portrayal of the social worlds that are held not only within the actual location in which the text is produced, but also within the newspaper in which it is published. This is a necessary aspect when looking at discourse across cultures which could be more comprehensively explained by incorporating within the appraisal framework some of the notions of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough,1989), including the connection between discourse, the evaluation transmitted by it, and its possible effects in given social practices. This is even more necessary if we consider that all the analyzed discourses are related to some notion of 'conflict', and that conflict can be, at least partly, considered the outcome of (the representation of) different world views.
REFERENCES Cloran, Carmel, David Butt & Geoff Williams (1996) _Ways of Saying, Ways of Meaning_. London: Cassell.
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ABOUT THE REVIEWER Laura Filardo-Llamas is a lecturer of English at the University of Valladolid, Spain. Her main area of research is political discourse analysis, in particular from a linguistic perspective. She applied both topics in her PhD thesis, entitled _Language and Legitimisation. Political Discourse Analysis in Northern Ireland after the Agreement. 1998-2004._ About these topics, she has published in Ethnopolitics and Peace and Conflict Studies.
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