I have been studying in the Doctorate programme of Communication, Media & Theatre in Tampere University.
Here is a link to my dissertation titled Tomorrow in Media: Temporal Orientation and Narrative Argumentation in News that brings phenomenology, narrative theory and argumentation theory into one analytical framework.
In newswork, a journalist needs to attribute causes for events, describe phenomena, and project future outcomes with only a few sentences. A standard tool for this is the inverted pyramid, whereby the causality builds on “the most important information first” structure.
Hard news is meant to bring clarity to the reader. A journalistic report on events is meant to be simpler, more concise, and formally more neutral than other actors’ descriptions of the situation. This is achieved by the narrative style of unobtrusiveness where a narrator organises the speech acts of others rather than intervenes in stating their opinion.
In journalism research, the impression of objectivity produced by hard news has been considered a tactic where journalism covers up the traces of its own use of power (Tuchman, Kunelius, etc.). Research by scholars, such as Väliverronen, has also noted changes in news reporting, such as the increased future orientation of news instead of reporting on the past.
The epistemic ambiguity built into news has received somewhat less scrutiny, especially the relationship of news to phenomenologically defined temporality.
My research seeks to reduce the epistemic ambiguity linked to temporality in news texts by approaching them from the distinct perspective of narrative argumentation. I will also assess how journalists exploit the temporal fragmentation of news stories politically, and what Ricoeur’s phenomenological perspective can illuminate about temporalities in news texts.
Colliding Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical phenomenology and his theory of narrative temporality with Douglas Walton’s dialectical argumentation theory enables the introduction and operationalisation of two composite concepts: dialogical emplotment and narrative argumentation scheme. Hard news stories can be perceived as presumptive narrative argumentation schemes with headlines that provide the conclusion of a reverse-order argument progressed by dialogical emplotment, which utilises facts, sources and narration, and reconfigures narrative temporality.
For my discourse analysis, I selected all 62 articles linked to immigration and refugees in Daily Mail and The Guardian on 3 and 5 September 2015, 10 March 2022, and 20-22 July 2022, by using LexisNexis and ProQuest databases, and I indexed them to find their general temporal orientation based on the number of temporal references. I selected immigration and refugee stories, as they tend to be ideologically loaded and politically contested, offering conflicting future projections and arguments.
In conformity with other studies, the dominant temporality was live and extended present. What was particularly noteworthy was that temporal references were often imprecise, which raised the question about their function in news discourse.
I then selected seven refugee news stories out of the 62 and approached them as narrative argumentation schemes to review their temporality beyond their temporal orientation. My finding was that temporality was exploited as a resource for arguments that weren’t genuinely dialectical and truth-seeking but tended to simulate dialogue rhetorically. The sources were fitted in the scheme to support the journalistic voice and the editorial policy with opposing voices discounted and devalued and with strategic omissions playing an important role.
All three temporal orientations, as outlined in Ricoeur’s phenomenology, were present, each supported by a distinct argumentation structure and with an individual news story built on a singular temporal orientation that provides a unifying structure for otherwise temporally fragmented narratives. The problem-solving narrative argumentation scheme was the most future-oriented, the change-demanding the most past-oriented, and the process-focused one was oriented towards extended present and recent past.
Although the seven news stories had most temporal references to extended present, followed by recent past, only the process-oriented scheme was fully oriented towards extended present. The change-demanding scheme exploited past as an argumentative resource for change. The problem-solving scheme was future-oriented in its problem-solving. These results illustrate that focusing on the sheer quantity of temporal references might be misleading when it comes to understanding the temporality of news stories. Also, they imply that emplotment in news stories might be better conceptualised as part of an argumentation scheme than as cause-effect relationships.