Representational Discourse in TV News Preludes in Kenya (original) (raw)

The International Journal of Humanities & Social Studies

Media is a social and discursive institution which plays the role of regulating and organizing social life as well as producing social knowledge, values, and beliefs through linguistic means (Dijk, 1993a). Since there are many news outlets competing for the same audience, they aim at distinguishing themselves from one another through appealing to the public. What is often overlooked about the news is that the agencies producing them constitute businesses (Fowler, 1991). They too, promote and sell a product (that is the news) to the customers. A critical look at media discourse is necessary, considering that the increasingly influential role of the mass media does not necessarily pave way for more objective reporting. There is pressure that often influences choice of language that satisfies the desires of different social actors within the media. This pressure often manifests itself in the texts that appear in TV news preludes. The views expressed in them may reflect the political ideologies that the owners of the media house subscribe to. Fairclough (1995) observes that the media plays an active role in mediating and constructing discourse. It is therefore unrealistic to suppose that the media is neutral in its rendition of news as they would have their audience believe. The actual position is that the media exercises significant power in the social-political scene and seeks to regulate legitimacy issues. The power the media possesses is symbolic power in the sense that it can only influence its audience through persuasion. As Van Dijk (1995) observes, the media exercises a certain amount of mind control on its audience through its persuasive tact and suggests that mind control by the media is particularly effective when the media users do not realize the nature or the implications of such control. The persuasive power of the media is seen when the audience change their minds on their own free will, as when they accept news reports as true or journalistic opinions as legitimate or correct. News texts have great ideological significance in contemporary societies and this significance is vested in their production and dissemination by the media and their consumption by audiences (Thompson, 1995). It is for this reason that this paper focuses on the discursive strategies employed in news preludes to uncover the stances that point to bias in representation of reality. News preludes orient the story in a specific direction and form the lens through which the rest of the story is viewed. To do this, preludes make use of vocabulary that may be ideologically colored and other features of linguistic structure. The "spin" in the news preludes is meant to influence the way the viewers will view the rest of the news. They are presented in a way that will grab the listeners' attention and keep them glued to the station. Depending on the nature and newsworthiness of a news item, the prelude or the introductory commentary is formulated to express views that may variously reflect ideological stances of the news editors, TV station owners, the government or the political class. Here we find the application of one of the major persuasive to poi, commonly used in advertising, by which the message is validated, aimed at gaining favour of the audience. The discursive strategy of using everyday language mixed up with rhetorical figures of speech, linguistic devices such as word plays is a means of influencing public opinion-a persuasive media function. By implementing methodologies that influence and manipulate