122049 PS Proseminar Linguistics 2 (2021S)

The task of news media is generally perceived to be – within the constraints of a news medium’s political inclinations - the reporting of facts in order to enable their audiences to form an opinion regarding important events in the world. However, similar to other forms of communication, media are a product of the journalists’ subjective assessments of what is important, just as journalism is influenced by the subjectivity of their news sources. Accordingly, the news will tend to foreground specific happenings as well as certain aspects thereof, while backgrounding or ignoring others. Hence, media engage in what is called “agenda-setting”, meaning that they show us what is important, while at the same time telling us how to think about these issues by a process called “framing”. For example, in making the topic of refugees salient, the media set an agenda by highlighting this topic, and then they might go on to frame the topic by discussing the issue in terms of national security rather than, e.g. from a humanitarian perspective. The analysis of frames in media discourse is an important field within critical text analysis and is based on a strong theoretical foundation, the goal of which is not only to search news texts for structural hints of frames, but also for linguistic hints such as metaphors, lexical choices or catchphrases, all of which taken together evoke – explicitly or implicitly – a certain frame. Frame analysis also aims to identify so-called reasoning devices, which attempt to prescribe a certain line of arguments or causal relations in events. In this course, we are interested in the analysis of media discourse applying tools from frame analysis and thematic analysis and in doing so will attempt to put the discourse on a variety of topics into a broader social, cultural and political context, seeing the discourse as essentially a product thereof, bound to favor certain perspectives dominant within that context while excluding others. Our goal is to learn to identify frames in news texts by looking out for framing devices such as text population, presuppositions, metaphors or evaluative meanings, and in particular to focus on what is obscured by favoring one particular frame over others.

Goals:
- critical approach to media texts
- raising awareness that media always favor particular perspectives on events in the world
- developing the skills necessary to identify news frames, to question them, and to think alternatives

Methods:
- Teacher input
- Text analysis
- Reading assignment of relevant texts
- Class discussions of reading and video assignments
- documentary and video viewings