Unveiling the Other - the Pragmatics of Infosuasion

• Authors: Monika Kopytowska
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The present paper, starting from the assumption that television news is "the main source" (Robinson and Levy 1986) and a key player in the democratic process explores the media-politics interface, along with the ideological conditioning and cultural embedding of the news discourse, understood both as a process and as a product. The objective behind it is threefold. Firstly, it is to examine the media mechanisms accounting for the process of ‘infosuasion’, i.e. persuading the viewers under the guise of delivering information in the form of neutral and balanced reporting, thereby shaping their perceptions of the self and the "Other". Secondly, it is to demonstrate the dialectics between the news media and political elites, visible in the CNN representation of Iranians and its contingency on the anti-nuclear discourse of the Bush Administration. Finally, it is to maximize the validity of an eclectic approach, combining pragmatic and semiotic perspectives, in the domain of news media discourse along with the processes within this discourse and the practices behind it.

Keywords

EN

Discourse; implicit meaning; entailment; presupposition; implicature; infosuasion; news; representation

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2010
• Volume: 6
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 249-282

Dates

published

2010-01-01

online

2011-02-03

Contributors

author

Monika Kopytowska

• University of Łódź

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10016-010-0013-y