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This study explores how micro-bloggers react to disasters in social media by examining the discursive-semiotic activities activated in Twitter and Weibo in responding to the 2013 West explosion in ...

This study explores how the act of witnessing takes distinctive discursive shape in social media in the context of large-scale disasters or crisis events. Drawing upon a set of microblogs posted on China’s most widely used social media platform, Weibo, immediately after one of China’s most serious industrial accidents, this study shows how witnessing manifests itself through individual eyewitness accounts foregrounding personal experience but constrained within Weibo’s standard protocol of 140 Chinese characters. Often blending word and image, these accounts are examined using methodologies drawn from discourse analysis. On this basis, we argue that witnessing in social media in China not only demonstrates strong participatory, connective, and self-reflexive characteristics. It also opens up new possibilities for various patterns of meaning, which, when appropriated by other social media users, constitute a public testimony that can challenge official discourses of crisis in China.

Much commentary on the discourse of Donald Trump’s populist appeal has tended to focus on his use of Twitter, to the relative neglect of his campaign rallies. Yet his campaign rallies during the presidential election were arguably crucial for delivering the votes which secured his victory. Members of his own team, and Trump himself, certainly thought so. Since the election Trump has continued to campaign in rallies in key states with increasing vigour, attracting large audiences as the second term elections in 2020 approach. These large-scale public events confirm the bond between Trump and his base. But they also require us to re-focus attention beyond Trump as an individual figure to the process of mutual engagement between him and his highly active and vocal audience. This article, by examining the overall communicative behaviour of participants at his rallies asks: “Is the audience Trump’s creation or is Trump the audience’s creation?”

This paper focuses on aspects of the discourse of Donald Trump during his campaign for the U.S. Presidency. It argues that, although we can undoubtedly identify aspects of authoritarian populism in his campaign discourse, its appeal rested on more than its content. Indeed, although significant parts of the U.S. public sphere rejected many of his claims as lies, significant portions of the electorate found his words acceptable on some contrasting basis. By developing a comparison between Habermas’s notion of ‘validity claims’ and Aristotle’s distinctions between different kinds of rhetorical appeal, the paper suggests that a discourse of ‘authenticity’ rather than ‘truth’ provided a crucial cornerstone of Trump’s appeal to his electoral base.

The way in which television news-readers look to their audience is the realization of a particular mode of visual direct address that has been identified more generally as characteristic of television as a medium. This mode of address, however, is not uniform across institutions, or unchanging over time, but is a distinctive kind of practical accomplishment, dependent – in part at least – on the technological developments around the autocue or teleprompter. This article explores how the introduction of the autocue altered practices of television news-reading, and – by enabling a greater degree of expressive release by newsreaders – fostered a stronger sense of para-social interaction between newsreader and audience. These developments, however, are not simply driven by technology but interact with cultural and institutional pressures which we illustrate by comparisons between British (BBC), U.S. (CBS) and Chinese (CCTV) news presenters. Indeed, the adoption of and development of direct visual address in news reading, with accompanying forms of expressive release, may ultimately be seen as fulfilling a general communicative principle: “for mediated communication at a distance, favour directness over indirectness, informality over formality, and social solidarity over social distance.”

In a discussion of political discussion on social media, this chapter argues that the production of offensive discourse in the political domain is enacted within definable “participation frameworks”. The structured performance of offence is constituted by such key components such Offence Giver, Offence Taker, Target of Offence and Audience. However, these are modulated in late modern societies, such that digitalisation and social media platforms allow resemiotisation to initiate differences in the terms within frameworks are activated in subsequent reiterations, especially in the transition between private or face-to-face offensiveness or between connected individuals and publicly oriented offensiveness. Moreover, while claims to authenticity dominate in the rationalisation of such offence, its direction against the groups and priorities associated with progressive politics has implications for the conditions of the contemporary public sphere.

Broadcasting, in its concept of ‘dead air,’ apparently proscribes against silence and in favor of talk which, in its broadcast forms, aspires to conditions of liveliness. Indeed, one measure of liveliness might be the avoidance of silence, so much so that an informal communicative entitlement for speaking on-air might well be the capacity to talk without hesitation, pause, or other forms of apparent dysfluency. However, even within broadcasting the tolerance of silence or pausing varies, with some genres (such as the experiential interview) showing more tolerance than others (such as the accountability interview). This chapter examines some of the variable properties of silence or pausing in broadcast talk and offers some observations about the relation between silence/pausing, style, and genre. Indeed, dead air in broadcasting may not prove to be the total antithesis of liveliness.

Learning Objectives1. Describe the normal radiologic anatomy of the mandible2. Outline a practical imaging feature-based approach to differential diagnosis of sclerotic mandible lesions3. List distinguishing imaging features of common and uncommon sclerotic mandible lesions4. Describe general components of management for common sclerotic mandible lesionsBackgroundJaw lesions are frequently encountered by radiologists during imaging for unrelated complaints of the head/neck. Providing a concise differential diagnosis and recommendations for further management is made difficult by the fact that many jaw lesions are unfamiliar to general radiologists. Three components of radiograph or CT lesion analysis are essential to narrowing the differential diagnosis: radiodensity, structure of origin, and transition zone width. Familiarity with unique features of each lesion allow a more specific diagnosis. ConclusionBy achieving familiarity with sclerotic jaw lesions, applying an algorithmic approach using key imaging features and utilizing clinical information, an accurate differential diagnosis can be achieved.

This special issue of Discourse & Communication brings together researchers working within different methodologies and theoretical paradigms - linguistic pragmatics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics and discourse analysis - who share a common interest in the analysis of discourse produced by the broadcast media. The authors are all members of the Ross Priory Group for Research on Broadcast Talk, an international group of scholars distinguished by their interdisciplinary approach to the study of mediated communication; and their particular concern for this issue is with personalization in broadcast news.

Interviewing as part of broadcast news includes a wide range of practices that go beyond calling public figures to account in ways that have received so much attention and analysis in the research literature. This article examines a major strand of news interviewing which it identifies as ‘experiential’ and argues, on the basis of close discourse analysis of interviews drawn from coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2005 London bombings, that the focus on personal experience and emotion in them is managed in ways quite distinct from accountability interviewing. Indeed, the apparently formulaic quality of the verbal performance in these interviews gives shape to experience in a fashion close to ritual but demands a quite different kind of alignment from the audience than that implicated by accountability interviewing.

In previous work on the news interview, considerable attention has been devoted to its role as an instrument for holding politicians to account, leading to studies of evasion, of challenges to questions by interviewees, of how neutrality is performed, and of how issues are pursued by interviewers. Apart from Clayman (1992) and Ekstr⊘m (2001), however, few accounts of the news interview examine the other roles that it can serve and its place within the overall economy of news discourse. This article sets out to explore the range of types of news interviews and suggests that it is a mistake to regard the accountability interview with a public figure as the principal or defining type, despite their public salience and despite the way which broadcasters themselves routinely regard them as the cornerstone of their public-service remit.

Maps are graphic interpretations of real or imagined space. Although utilitarian by nature, they are of intrinsic aesthetic and artistic value. In addition to their material qualities, they are constructs of the human mind at a specific time and in a specific culture. Traditionally judged on the basis of their Cartesian rather than artistic qualities, maps are categorised by their spatial accuracy according to a positivist construct. This criterion has recently been re-examined to address mapmaking across cultures and through time. A new definition developed by the History of Cartography Project not only treats maps as material culture, but further broadens the concept of the map to include all artifacts that depict space.1 In this theoretical framework, maps discovered in archaeological contexts are rare artifacts that provide a window into the minds of their makers and users, the way in which space was perceived, as well as the relevance and function of maps in ancient societies. By definition, this is an attempt to address an emic perspective.2

This article examines the role of the live two-way exchange in broadcast news. It sets out to demonstrate that there are marked differences between the discourse of the unscripted live two-way interchange between correspondent and studio presenter and other scripted sections of the news. In particular, it is maintained that linguistic selections in the live two-way (particularly choices in linguistic modality) project a different approach to the truth conditions of its discourse, with less emphasis on precise veracity than is found generally in the news. The implications of this variation within the discourses of the news are then examined by considering the unscripted contribution by Andrew Gilligan to the BBC’s Today programme that became the focus of much attention before, during and after the Hutton enquiry.

The article traces the emergence of war as the dominant term for responding to the events of 9/11. It does so by focusing on speeches, interviews and newspaper headlines in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in their discursive-pragmatic contexts. In order to account for the salience and circulation of an expression such as war, it proposes for the public sphere a principle of discursive amplification. The article also highlights, however, the unevenness of the adoption of the term war by showing how differently it was inflected at different moments and in different sections of the public sphere. In addition, other modes of expression could have been adopted. The article provides some discursive reasons why war prevailed.

Authentic talk is treated as displaying features of spontaneous, unrehearsed discourse close in character to Goffman ‘s (1981) description of “fresh talk.” In the broadcast context it has become associated with eye‐witness accounts and the rendering of firsthand experiences (see Scannell, 2001): the evident lack of a script provides a guarantee of authenticity. This article examines how features of authentic talk can be deployed in political broadcasting by analysing a Party Election broadcast from the U.K. Conservative Party where the message is conveyed as if through the experience of ordinary people.

This article explores some aspects of public speaking in the mediated public sphere by examining the verbal tributes offered by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, by the Queen and by Earl Spencer in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. It considers some of the linguistic properties of these three public utterances, but focuses mainly on the ways in which they were assessed by members of ‘the public’, in order to explore possible changes to the discursive character of the public sphere.1

This article engages with the temporal and spatial features of nostalgic discourse in general, and `The Journey' (a British Conservative Party election broadcast employed in the 1992 general election) in particular, in order to illustrate several ways in which `the past' may be re-articulated so as to legitimize a politicized configuration of the present. The form of this article is as follows: first, `nostalgia' as a conceptual problematic is set in relation to questions concerning discourses of self-identity, community and nation. Next, the historical specificity of party election broadcasts is discussed, as is the production and reception of `The Journey'. A critical analysis of `The Journey' is then provided, with special attention given to its construction of a nostalgic reading of PM Major's personal biography consistent with the ideological imperatives of conservatism as a political philosophy.

We compute the monoid $\mathcal{V} [ L_{K} (E) ]$ of isomorphism classes of finitely generated projective modules of a Leavitt path algebra over an arbitrary directed graph. Our result generalizes the result of Ara, Moreno and Pardo in which they computed the monoid $\mathcal{V}[ L_{K} (E) ]$ of a Leavitt path algebra over a countable row-finite directed graph.

This article looks at the significance of the practices of ‘belligerent broadcasting’ in the popular ‘trouble-shooting’ business television programme Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, USA. Belligerent broadcasting is a broadcast style that offers as spectacle expressions of anger or impatience, or the exercise of intimidation, against an on-screen interlocutor. Focusing on the performances of Gordon Ramsay, the article analyses the management of on-screen confrontation between participants occupying asymmetrical positions of power and perceived expertise. The article looks at how the face-threatening component of belligerent talk is ameliorated by strategies of authenticity and its representation as a productive force within the narrative of the programme. Finally, we assess the relevance of arguments that this broadcasting style might be seen as part of a ‘new incivility’ across media discourses.

The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism presents an authoritative, comprehensive assessment of diverse forms of news media reporting – past, present and future. It provides an essential guide to key ideas, issues, concepts and debates, whilst also stressing the value of reinvigorating scholarship with a critical eye to developments in the professional realm.

Political violence, of course, is not new. Nor is terrorism new. Depending on how the latter is defined, its history can be traced back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century (Burleigh 2007). What is new since September 2001 are changes in the discursive disposition of the terms adopted in the public sphere to describe terrorism and political violence. This chapter shows how the discursive lineaments of the present public reactions to terrorism have evolved since 9/11. Its purpose is not only to display the distinctiveness of the current discursive disposition but by doing so to suggest how the discursive arrangements might have been and could still be different. In this way the chapter might be seen as a form of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1993, 2003;Wodak and Meyer 2001;Widdowson 2004): its focus is on the present and the immediate past but its intention is to act — in Bauman’s phrase — ‘as a knife with the edge pressed against the future’2 (Bauman 1976;Bauman and Tester 2001).