The mass media are an integral part of citizens’ everyday life. At the same time, their crucial importance, among other things, consists in the fact that they constitute one of the central components of life-long education.
Citizens of all age groups, in their everyday spare time -or even at work-, learn from the media, in the sense of both deriving information and acquiring abilities that influence their participation in social life.
Citizens of all age groups, in their everyday spare time -or even at work-, learn from the media, in the sense of both deriving information and acquiring abilities that influence their participation in social life.
The political programmes of television, and more specifically television news bulletins, which by definition provide the most direct connection to everyday events, contribute definitively to the very image that TV viewers have of themselves as citizens. It would not be an exaggeration to assume that citizens’ identity is largely constituted by the structure and the discourse of TV news bulletins. This constitution is accomplished in two interconnected ways:
Ø The subjects of enunciation of the bulletins’ discourse -newscasters, reporters, as well as (in an indirect fashion) directors, producers and everybody else involved in the production process- address TV viewers as citizens, inciting them either explicitly or implicitly to form opinions with regard to political events or issues that concern them. A key concept here is that of public opinion, which it is taken for granted that it is constituted by citizens-viewers.
Ø As to the news bulletins’ referents, that is, the events themselves, citizens as a rule appear as the anonymous participants in them - either directly, or indirectly as those who are affected by certain measures taken by the government, for example. Here a concept of central importance is the anonymous citizen him/herself -as opposed to the “celebrities” of political and public life-, as well as citizens’ rights, which are constantly put forth -manifestly or latently- as that which is at stake in relation to both governmental policies and any other political or social practices.
Considering the media -private or public- as a mechanism in which knowledge and power intertwine, this study will employ the methodology of discourse analysis, which is grounded in approaching discourse on the basis of four fundamental properties pertaining to it: referentiality, subjectivity, knowledge and ideology.
Kyrkos Doxiadis was born in Athens in 1955. University degrees: LSE: B.Sc. (Economics), 1978; Birkbeck College, University of London: M.Sc. (Sociology with Politics), 1979, Ph.D. (Department of Politics and Sociology), 1986. He is Associate Professor of Social Theory with special reference to Communication at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration of the University of Athens. His research interests are mainly oriented towards the study of ideology and culture by way of the methodology of discourse analysis, as well as towards questions in poststructuralist social and political theory. In October 2008 his book Discourse analysis: Social-philosophical grounding was published (in Greek) by Plethron.
