In my talk I will analyze the coverage of the same event by two different TV news shows with a focus on multimodal resources that are used to stage closeness or distance to the reported event. I will then relate the result of my analysis to key dimensions of journalistic culture.
Genre conventions of media texts produced by the journalistic staff of a TV news show can be interpreted as indicators of values and norms of (journalistic) culture. At the same time, however, the texts are also the place where journalistic culture originates: through them, corresponding norms are established, passed on and, if necessary, changed; through them, culture and thus reality are produced. The "culturality" of media texts thus always refers to this self-affecting interdependence (see Linke 2016). In my talk I will analyze the coverage of the same event by two different TV news shows (“20 heures” of France 2 and “Tagesschau” of the German speaking Swiss TV station SRF, both public stations) with a focus on multimodal resources that are used to stage closeness or distance to the reported event. I will show how closeness can be related to local, temporal and emotional aspects and how language, footage and sound are used to bring the audience close to an event – or how the event is depicted in a more distanced way. Here the use of tenses, temporal adverbs, emotional vocabulary, intonation patterns, but also background sounds, shot sizes, video editing, etc. come into play. I will then relate the result of my analysis to key dimensions of journalistic culture (like market orientation, empiricism, objectivism, see Hanitzsch 2007), arguing that the aspect of staging closeness is a crucial analytical aspect that reflects key journalistic norms and values – and is at the same time a place of their origin. Hanitzsch, Thomas (2007): Deconstructing Journalism Culture: Towards a universal theory. In: Communication Theory 17: 4, S. 367-385. Linke, Angelika (2016): Einführung: Kommunikation und Kulturalität. In: Ludwig Jäger et al. (eds): Sprache - Kultur - Kommunikation. Ein internationales Handbuch zu Linguistik als Kulturwissenschaft. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, S. 351-368.
