News: Events and issues

Distinguishing between sensational and cerebral…

George: Any news?

Emma: A truck has overturned on the southern motorway and traffic is banked up for nine kilometers.
George: It’ll be cleared in a couple of hours. I meant any new issues being reported on.

Emma: Issues. Hmm. The storm down south? Trees down?

George: These are events. They come to an end, whether it’s a storm or a celebrity scandal, there’s a clean-up, an end, and sometimes an analysis. But there’s an end.

Emma: So crashes are cleaned up and scandals die out. End of story, you mean?

George: Yes. With issues there’s an ongoing discussion, about global problems, ideologies, scientific findings, environmental problems.

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Voice-over

Like news, some people’s conversations are event-based. Others incline towards debate and discussion. It’s a qualitative distinction.

Discussion about Discussion

From report to discussion…

Flora: In what order should you reveal the facts?

Discussant: What is the first question to be addressed. Topic first.

Who comes first?

Flora: And then?

Discussant: Details follow. Who? When? Where?

Flora: Yes?

Discussant: And then the why. The how. That’s when the news report blooms into a discussion.

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Voice-over

Check the order of your questions. Let the discussions begin.

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Monologic and Dialogic News Models

Monologic News Model

Queenie questions a quotation

Q: What means this, dialogic news?

Dialogic News Model

A: Mikhail Bakhtin. We define dialogic in opposition to monologic.

Q: You talk in riddles.

A: Not at all. I’m drawing on literary theory to explain media theory. A monologue is a soliloquy. There is only one direction. A monologist monopolizes. Bakhtin identified dialogic literature as being that which is  in communication with other works. It goes in two directions; past literatures are altered by present ones.

Same thing is happening with media nowadays.

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Voiceover

Mikhail Bakhtin may have been referring to dialogues between writers and their works of literature. Applying literary theory to media theory: Web 2.0 has resulted in news media evolving from a monologic model into a dialogic one.

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Moral of the story

Emi and Mai have been given the task of thinking of a story with a moral in communication class.

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Emi: The news always has good stories.

Mai: That one, that one about the baby dropped from the third floor.

Emi: I know, and it landed in the net and didn’t cry, like nothing had happened.

Mai: Weak moral though.

Emi. Ignorance is bliss?

Mai: Maybe. How about the one about the twenty elderly people caught in a bus in a flood.

Emi: They all drowned?

Mai: They cut up the curtains and made a rope and climbed out onto the roof.

Emi: Necessity is the mother of invention?

Mai: That’ll do.

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Voiceover

For a ready-made moral, try attaching a proverb to a story. Quick and easy.

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