Yu.M. Semantic Structures of Television News

The authors aim to explain how news on television is constructed and presented, applying some related methods to the study of discourse and the message. The methodology consists of analyzing TV news programs trying to determine which kind of thematic recurrence strategies are being used in nowadays news. The authors identify narrative categories that are necessary to transform events and situations as fragments of reality into the text of news on television. In the analysis of semantic structures of news stories on construction topics, the technology of creating heroes and antiheroes is substantiated. In the course of two revisions of the article, the authors clarified the analysis methodology, research apparatus and conclusions from the research done. The article shows how in the television discourse the official style is mixed with the journalistic one, and the responsibility for the word on the air is eroded. The relevance of the topic raised is due to the search for a new format of television news and the search for research optics to consider news media texts. First of all, the authors strive to delve into the properties inherent in television journalism as a mass medium, in addition to other traditional invariants and functions. For analysis, the authors take an array of news stories (322 media texts in total) aired by the three leading television companies of Crimea and Sevastopol (Crimea 24, NTS - Independent Television of Sevastopol, First Sevastopol) during a ten-day period. The authors selected 20 reports according to the subject-thematic principle, devoted to the problems of construction in Crimea and Sevastopol. This issue is extremely important for the media of the peninsula, since it is associated with federal purpose-oriented programs and the fate of officials responsible for the implementation of these programs. The narrative analysis revealed the peculiarities of covering the topic of construction on the Crimean peninsula, replacing the narrator with an official document, five typical plot moves, a kind of chronotope, archetypal characters (inspector, good builder and bad builder, member of the public), and recurring conflicts of an economic, environmental and other nature. The study revealed a mix in the news media texts of fundamentally different discourses and the belittling of the author (in some cases, the disappearance of the author) with the erosion of responsibility for the word on the air between the government, the construction business and the TV channel. Such an analysis technique can become a new research optics for considering news media texts and will help to search for new news formats for television companies in their competition with Internet communications.

Keywords

Authors

References