How Do News Narratives Achieve Their Aims?

By Jocelyne Arquembourg
English

In a pragmatic and hermeneutic perspective, narratives are operations of judgement that determine events and situations. They are temporal judgements that configure a mediation of the action by stamping it with a goal-oriented dynamic. What we refer to as news narratives are based on a temporal orientation that is twofold. It consists in a retrospective organization of chronological narrative sequences, and in accompanying the narrative process under way. The author's study of the TV coverage of Operation Desert Fox on two French channels shows how news is transformed from a sequence of separate pieces of information into forms of intermediate narrative configuration or what she calls crystallizations. These constitute the framework of public debates, the alternatives and questions of which lie at the heart of the narrative process.

Keywords

Go to the article on Cairn-int.info