CRITICAL REVIEW
Reviewed by:
Chris Paterson, Department of Radio, TV, Film University of Texas Austin
http://jmg.gu.se/nordicom/sv/nyheter.html
Nordicom-Information Nr 2/1996
Television's Commercial 
Discourse Style

 

Finnish Views of CNN Television News: A Critical Cross-Cultural Analysis of the American Commercial Discourse Style 

In Europe and through much of the world, the reception of pervasive imported television news services has led to wide speculation and consternation, but a dearth of scholarly analysis. Brett Dellinger’s contribution is useful and laudable because it provides far deeper insights into American forms of television news than appear in most critiques of Americanization, while offering an innovative reception analysis of an culturally appropriate audience. Finns are a suitable target of analysis due to their considerable English language skills contrasting with their substantial differences in culture and broadcast traditions from America or Britain. The Finnish audience, notes Dellinger, does not accept the American style implicitly as news. But the author clearly fears they may come to, thereby affecting the very structure of the "language of public discourse" in Finland and throughout Europe. While essentially valuable, Dellinger’s project is diminished by some conceptual and organizational difficulties and an exposition of his research with Finnish subject audiences which is less than lucid. Dellinger’s first chapter discusses the nature of public discourse in Finland, focusing on the evening news programs of Yleisradio (YLE), Finland’s public broadcasting service. The chapter concludes with mention of the increasing penetration of Time Warner’s (the new owner of Turner Broadcasting) Cable News Network (CNN) in Europe. Chapter two builds the case for the present study by addressing weaknesses in traditional content analysis, and their failure to discover deeper levels of meaning creation. He also introduces differences in the American news style, here defining a important component of the American news discourse called "cueing", although the reason for discussing this aspect of the American style here is unclear. Chapters three and four present a cogent summation of historical factors leading to the development of American television news, dating back more than a century. This is an eloquent effort to more accurately position this broadcast style historically, for it is not a modern development at all. The deep roots of commercialism and hucksterism in American broadcasting, paralleling governmental rejection of public service broadcasting, are demonstrated. American television news is shown to have been born into a family of salesmen, not journalists. American public broadcasting, which so far has generally avoided the style Dellinger identifies, is truly the more modern approach in the U.S., the author argues in footnote (fn. 5, p. 69). Practices which have become standardized in the industry, since the days of the first newscasts, were originated as means of holding an audience from commercial to commercial, program to program. Chapter four raises the difficult question of "control" of the news, as exercised by journalists, government, media owners, and advertisers. Chapter five takes us finally to the realm of theory, paying respectful visits to Hall, Gramsci, Barthes, and Fiske. Dellin- ger not only makes a strong case for the ideological hegemony of cultural products, but lays bare the linguistic roots of the branch of communications scholarship grounding his project. He skillfully builds his case against the conglomerate dominated, commercially oriented American TV news industry to a point when, just as the reader prepares to toss the glowing image of Bernard Shaw and Peter Jennings out the window in a desperate act of self defence (à la Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television), we are confronted by Fiske’s active audience, the possibility that we make our meanings, we find our own pleasures, in the morass delivered to us from New York, Hollywood, and Atlanta. But Dellinger wisely counsels that, 

 

 

  • To completely embrace Fiske’s approach, it seems, would place the concerned critic in danger of overemphasizing radical rhetorical analysis while underemphasizing the actual operations of the capitalist economy and the culture over which it exercises hegemony. (146) 

Having posed this challenge, the author answers it by introducing one methodological approach taken in this project: Critical Discourse Analysis, a method which "enables the media critic to ’denaturalize,’ or expose the ’taken- for-grantedness’ of ideological messages..." (148). The method, according to Dellinger, "offers the opportunity to adopt a social perspective in the cross-cultural study of media texts" (149). Dellinger draws from the pioneering discourse analysis of Teun Van Dijk to demonstrate ideological components of news discourse. A contrast is drawn between implicit and explicit forms of discourse. Dellinger then moves to the core of his analysis, the lacuna method of cross-cultural analysis as advanced by Hartmut Schroeder of Vaasa University, building on Russian ethno-psycholinguistics. "Lacuna," explains Dellinger, "refers to perceived or unperceived ’gaps’ in cross-cultural texts (in which there is a nonequivalent lexis) or other poorly understood cultural items" (160). Chapter six details the methodology and presents findings from the study. Five minutes of a CNN International (or CNNI) broadcast are analyzed discursively. A Finnish interpretation summarizing the comments of Dellinger’s Turku University student informants, and his own extensive commentary is then offered for nine specific elements of this brief audiovisual text. Chapter seven returns to a discussion of framing in television news, and development of "formula" newscasts. Oddly, it draws from one news consultant’s 1971 format recommendations (fn. 47, p. 213). American TV news is a stagnant genre, but not that stagnant. Dellinger’s intent here is to introduce a second cross-cultural analysis of CNN, this of CNN’s Gulf War coverage. Examples of news framing which neglect the Iraqi point of view, allude to a terrorist threat, dehumanize Iraqis, overestimate Iraqi strength, and self-promote CNN are discursively analyzed. The dissertation’s final chapter addresses concision, a term proffered by Noam Chomsky (perhaps to explain why he can’t get a hearing on American television). The term refers to the need, in American commercial television news, to express an idea within a very limited time frame, since every second of air-62 itself represents a lacuna to the Finnish audience. Given that, another program addressing a more culturally relevant topic might have led to more insightful data on the cross-cultural reception of this form of American commercial discourse style. Dellinger’s descriptions of CNN are often problematic. His first chapter concludes with an introduction of the CNN International phenomena, but this early appraisal of the CNN "formula" is misleading. CNN’s success was more the result of prevailing trends in media economics than, as Dellinger suggests, the decisions to shun trade unions and buy in dramatic, if unimportant, pictures. These were the inclinations of most American broadcasters during CNN’s inception. More significantly, this project never fully addresses CNN International as an object of analysis independent of CNN. Is there a difference? Anyone who has watched CNN inside and outside of the U.S. would likely think so. And Turner Broadcasting certainly considers its international product to be unique. Turner adds and differentiates products so rapidly in the global and domestic marketplace that it would be impossible for any scholar to understand them fully without comprehensive primary research involving some combination of direct contact with CNN and content analysis of individual news products. Dellinger’s failure to do so embrangles his project. CNN International, the only service of Turner Broadcasting currently seen in Europe, is a peculiar amalgamation of programs and production practices borrowed from CNN’s domestic services, from American cablecasters and broadcasters, from other global broadcasters, and some practices uniquely created for this service. It is far from a clone of CNN’s main domestic service, which is itself a unique creation, in many respects very different from other popular television news services in the U.S. Not until page 167 does the author inform us that his main CNN sample is actually a broadcast of CNN Headline News (one of CNN’s domestic services) on CNNI. So various unique Turner products are viewed by the Finnish sample: Headline News, Crossfire, and an example of CNNI war coverage, but a typical portion of the routine CNNI coverage a Finn is most likely to see is never used. Even if a typical CNNI text were used here, the choice of this channel remains problematic. It is probably reasonable to say that CNN International in Finland is the best locally available example of the American commercial discourse style Dellinger devotes most of the dissertation to identifying, but it is vital that his reader understands it is but one very bastardized and particularly internationalized example, far from representative of American television news. The culturally specific particularities of the reception of global media products is of considerable interest, but such products must be properly analyzed on their own terms, and not unquestioningly identified with the nation and/or culture native to their ownership. Should Rupert Murdoch implement a global news network of his own, as he seems to be doing, what national or cultural identity shall we assign it? Would it be Australian, American, or English? It would more likely be a uniquely international product, produced by and for a variety of cultures, and produced in a great many places. CNNI is such a text now, even if its producers remain predominantly American and borrow heavily from American broadcast traditions. time carries a high dollar value. To offer but one example of Dellinger’s cross-cultural phenomena, American television’s concision is unaccepting of silence, whereas to a Finn, silence evokes positive connotations (275). Dellinger attempts to construct a cross-cultural definition of concision, using Finnish perspectives on the CNN program Crossfire. Dellinger’s too brief conclusion offers little summation, but only the vague hope that emerging information technologies will make redundant our concerns about an inadequate, centrally controlled mass media. As the one consistent object of comparison (since several variants of CNN are used) the analysis presented of YLE is too limited. Discursive analysis is provided of a portion of a single newscast, one Dellinger admits to be unusual. This gives the reader little faith in the representativeness of his sample of Finnish news, upon which much of the rest of the project rests. Suggesting in his introduction that "the written word" is the current style of discourse preferred by European public service broadcasters sets up the contrast with American TV, while ignoring its internal contradiction. YLE has a spoken (not written) and visual style of news presentation of its own, albeit a different one from American broadcasters. Their writers write for television, not print, only following different rules from American writers. Chapter two is a curious collection of feeble justifications for this very justifiable project. The methodological criticism of content analysis as aid to understanding of cross-cultural communications might have been persuasive had Dellinger not chosen to critique two highly ideological and methodologically unsound studies to make his case. These are a 1983 study of CNN by the conservative Media Institute, and Mickiewicz’ 1988 analysis of Soviet television, Split Signals: Television and Politics in the Soviet Union. As a comparison of styles and as an historical analysis of American television news, this project excels. But Dellinger’s method ultimately reveals little, for it is bogged down by Dellinger’s restatement of aspects of the American style, as though his systematized viewing of YLE and CNN texts by a subject audience served more to reinforce his own complaints about American broadcasting than to expose the lacuna he seeks. Dellinger’s informants are rarely heard – no extended transcription of interviews is provided. His analysis of subject’s responses to CNN lack credibility since few examples of informant responses are offered. Dellinger’s analysis of Gulf War coverage adds little to the massive literature already addressing the subject, a literature substantially ignored here. While Dellinger’s method offers many advantages – a credible exposition of lacuna in this situation would contribute massively to the understanding of cross-cultural mass communications – this research is replete with enough inconsistencies and biases to make the positivist cringe. (Dellinger seems to trust, for example, that his informants report only on the specific YLE and CNN newscasts they have been shown, and disregard, at his request, any other TV news they may have seen). The choice of Crossfire is unfortunate, for it is a uniquely conservative and deliberately "no-holds-barred" interview program on the fringes of mainstream national news. The very issue being debated in Dellinger’s sample Crossfire, sexual harassment in the workplace – virtually a non-issue in Finland, 63 Dellinger might have benefited from a closer collaboration with one of the major communications research centers in Finland: Tampere or Helsinki. One indication of this is either his ignorance of or inappropriate choice to ignore other significant Scandinavian studies addressing similar issues. Especially noteworthy is Ritva Levo-Henriksson’s largely quantitative cross-cultural project, Eyes upon Wings: Culture in Finnish and US Television News. Levo-Henriksson’s set out to reveal more about American and Finnish culture than about aspects of reception, but nonetheless addresses many of the same issues as Dellinger. Her project was started in 1987 and published by YLE in 1994, so should have been accessible. The recent work of Ingunn Hagen of the University of Bergen and Stig Hjarvard of the University of Copenhagen might also have been employed to further probe the use of television news in the broader Scandinavian and European contexts. As "... an attempt to structure and explain Finnish audience perception of American commercial news broadcasts" (164), Dellinger’s project succeeds. He is to be commended for theorizing the existence of an American commercial discourse style in the cross-cultural context, and proposing innovative methodological mechanisms for its analysis, even if he fails to demonstrate their efficacy here. His is a thoughtful review of the literature on objectivity, news as propaganda, and control of news, and an intelligent, if conspicuously left leaning history of American broadcast news. Dellinger’s writing is always clear and crisp and perhaps in consideration of his largely Nordic audience, is not inundated with English jargon. The dissertation provides excellent footnotes throughout. Dellinger makes an important start at understanding cultural impacts of imported television news, a phenomena too long ignored or glossed over by scholars. But just as he wisely discards empirical analytic paradigms, he must also discard the outdated media imperialism paradigm which lurks in his project’s recesses. Global conglomerates create global products for an imaginary global audience. What does this mean to the very real consumers of these alien genres? As the global broadcasters grow, Dellinger’s will surely not be the last word on this topic. 


NOTES:

References Hagen, Ingunn (1993) News Viewing Ideals and Everyday Practices: The Ambivalences of Watching Dagsrevyen. Ph.D. Dissertation, Department of Mass Communication, University of Bergen, Norway. 

Hjarvard, Stig (1992) Live On Time and Space in Television News. Nordicom-Review, 2/1992. 

Hjarvard, Stig (1991) Americanization of European Television: An Aesthetic Approach in Nye, D. & Pedersen, C. (ed.s) Consumption and American Culture, European Contributions to American Studies XXI, Amsterdam: VU University Press. 

Levo-Henriksson, Ritva (1994) Eyes upon Wings: Culture in Finnish and US Television News. Helsinki: Yleisradio.