Abstract
In Values and Choices in Television Discourse, Piazza and colleagues seek to explain the choices that shape the nature and content of television discourse in its verbal, visual and aural aspects. The book assembles two complementary perspectives: while the seven chapters in Part 1 offer academic analyses of televisual products, Part 2 comprises 11 interviews with and reflections from practitioners from the TV industry. The book adopts a strong inter- and intra-national comparative approach that allows the individual chapters to tease out similarities and differences in the way various nationalities and cultures construct their media, avoiding the danger of a monolithic view of media culture.
The seven chapters in Part 1 carry out investigations of the linguistic and semiotic threads in TV. Bednarek and Caple (Chapter 1), for instance, analyse the promotional videos of four legacy news outlets in Britain and Australia to highlight the significance of branding within the changes in journalistic practices in the 21st century. In Chapter 2, Duguid conducts a thorough study of the language deployed by transnational English-language news channels from Qatar, France, Russia and China to position themselves in relation to traditional Anglosphere voices such as the BBC and CNN, arguing that these news providers construct a position ‘which is both defensive and attacking in a permanent dialogue with the other’ (p. 56). Less convincing, however, is the essay by Koga-Browes (Chapter 3), who looks at the different uses of camera angles in both British and Japanese new outlets. Taking an eye-level shot as an ideologically neutral frame, Koga-Browes puts forward different explanations as to why news outlets may use different variations of shot angles. Yet if readers were to question whether all eye-level shots in news are neutral (or whether eye-level shots are neutral in general), then Koga-Browes’ rather arbitrary distinctions between different shot angles open themselves to much criticism. In Chapter 4, Bonfigliolo analyses a corpus of Australian news footage to show that obese people are more likely to be portrayed without their head than others, which contributes to the negative and dehumanising portrayals of obesity in contemporary culture. Piazza’s Chapter 6 investigates the discourses of two British documentaries on traveller communities, arguing that the language employed in the voice-overs nuances the ideological positioning of travellers as the Other. For Piazza, empathy is encouraged in one documentary, whereas the other focuses on the stereotypical and exoticised aspects of travelling culture.
While the book pays detailed attention to the linguistics and visual semiotics of television, little discussion is made of the use of sound and music. Lorenzo-Dus, in her exploration of commemoration and collective memories on television news and documentaries (Chapter 5), acknowledges the need to analyse the aural aspects of TV discourse to fully capture its nature as an audio–visual medium. However, she only mentions ‘the use of poignant music when showing footage of the culturally traumatic event’ (p. 116) once without any elaboration. Likewise, in Chapter 7, in her analysis of different formats of MasterChef across America, Australia and Britain, Haarman writes of ‘non-invasive music’ (p. 161), again without further explanation of what that might mean. Other than these two examples, no other references towards the aural aspects of television is made in the book; more considerations towards the ways in which sound and music also contribute to television discourses would be much welcomed.
While Part 1 focuses on research conducted by academics, the second part of the book features industry interviews and reflections. These thoughts from the industry practitioners provide a valuable counter-perspective to academic analyses that, as the editors note, attributes intention to television discourses ‘with often limited direct knowledge and appreciation of the production processes, its practicalities and imperatives’ (p. xv). For instance, Bonfigliolo’s chapter is answered by investigative journalist Cathay Newman (Chapter 9), who suggests that the visual beheading of obese people in news media is simply due to legal restrictions that require permission to display a person’s face on TV. Likewise, in response to Piazza’s chapter, documentary filmmaker Olivia Lichtenstein (Chapter 13) suggests that the different attitudes adopted by the documentaries on travelling culture may simply be down to the channel they were shown on – a programme screened via a public service broadcaster would be very different in tone than one from a commercial channel. Through this counterpoint between media producers and the corresponding academic explorations, the volume offers an interesting and rounded account of the complexities of TV discourses.
Ultimately, this edited collection covers a multitude of qualitative, quantitative and reflexive methodological approaches to the study of discourse in news, documentaries and the MasterChef franchise. The individual chapters are clearly written with specialised academic language largely explained, resulting in a book that is accessible to readers of different disciplinary backgrounds and levels of knowledge who are interested in the roles that semiotics and linguistics play in the media.