Media and communication constantly develop, vary and, whence, modify texts and types of text. Daily mass-media news coverage is also subject to this process of change. In the case of television news, different patterns of news presentation and the practice of their implementation pertinent to certain cultural spaces can be identified. The differences apply not only to the international comparison of television news they relate to other constellations as well, such as the products of different television stations within a country (public vs. commercial vs. regional).
"Media and communication constantly develop, vary and, whence, modify texts and types of text. Daily mass-media news coverage is also subject to this process of change. In the case of television news, different patterns of news presentation and the practice of their implementation pertinent to certain cultural spaces can be identified. The corresponding cultural context is a specific one.In spite of any international standardisation in news selection and production (for example, news values in topic selection, multimodal design conventions, infotainment concepts), the German type of public news presentation can be distinguished from the Polish counterpart. It is characterized by various factors, i.e. governmental and media systems, or journalistic cultures, but also by the expectations of the target groups. The differences apply not only to the international comparison of television news they relate to other constellations as well, such as the products of different television stations within a country (public vs. commercial vs. regional).Against this background, this lecture addresses central aspects of the comparison of a culturalist text, exemplified by television news. In the first part I concentrate on the 'television news' text type. I discuss its characteristic features and expressions. Subsequently, I refer to appropriate suitable approaches to the 'culturality' of types of text. In the second part of the talk, I conduct and demonstrate contrastive analyses of newscasts from public broadcasting stations in Germany and Poland (ARD / TVP1) as well as commercial ones in Poland (TVN, Polsat), respectively.The emphasis is on aspects such as text function, text intention, thematic development in the news and staging a news reality. They are discussed in German and Polish television news on the basis of the multimodal design, which combines the verbal, nonverbal and paraverbal means into a functional whole in the text design."
