Press Reporting and Broadcasting

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 699.

It has already been stated above that press reporting and broadcasting is a rather complicated non-homogeneous phenom­enon and may be very eclectic from the stylistic point of view. It is common knowledge that press reporting and broadcasting is a strong ideological weapon and is surely socially and politically marked. The same text addressed to a foreign listener sounds more imposing and edifying.

The events of political importance can be presented to the public in different lights by using similar techniques, by chang­ing the voice timbre. This only proves the statement that a jour­nalist, a reporter cannot be completely independent in his politi­cal views of his class, party, country and so on.

The central function of a newspaper and news bulletin is to inform, to present a certain number of facts to a reader, listener, or a viewer with the effect of giving the impression of neutral, objective, factual reporting. So all types of discourse in that style share some important prosodical features and putting them to­gether in this chapter may not be too misleading.

It should be noted, however, that the speech of radio and tel­evision announcers is somewhat different though they use simi­lar techniques in the presentation, the ability to be seen on the screen helps a TV news reader to guide the understanding to the viewer by means of facial expressions and gestures. On the con­trary the radio announcer, being isolated in a studio, tends to ex­

aggerate certain prosodic features to be better understood by a listener.

The speech of a radio announcer is very close to the "ideal model" and especially during news coverage when he elegantly enunciates the news in rather chilly distant tones adopted spe­cially for this occasion.

Here is the example of a radio news coverage. The text con­sists of two items in which national news of a rather neutral character is described:

^→ Thirty-five _vvehicles ⌇ 'were in^↘volved in a ↑ multiple col'lision \ on the ^↘M '1 ˋmotorway this _omorning. || The →acci­dent oc>curred |about ^↘three miles 'south of the 'Newsport 'Pag-nell _vservice area | when an ar→ ticulated _vlorry | ^↘carrying a load of _vSteel bars | ˋjackknifed and overturned. || A ^↘number of 'lorry drivers and _vmotorists || were unˎable to pull up in time | and ran ˋinto the overturned _vvehicle | → causing a ↑major >pile up.