Page 188 - Communication and Citizenship Journalism and the Public Sphere

DISCOURSES ON POLITICS 177

searching for predetermined categories. To ensure ‘inter-reader’
reliability in this method, two reading teams read each interview aloud,
discussed the themes that arose within each interview and listened to the
tapes for validation of the transcripts. This process was repeated for
each interview, after which both teams compared results. The themes
were virtually identical across the two teams.

The Danish case

The Danish study (Jensen 1987, 1988) explored the way in which
television viewers reconstruct the meaning of political and other social
information that is presented in news programming. The empirical
material consists of one half-hour news program from the fall of 1985
and thirty-three in-depth individual interviews. The broadcast was
selected randomly; the respondents represent a range of socio-
demographic profiles.
The interviews were conducted in the respondents’ homes on the day
following the broadcast, focusing on its ten stories. In each case the
respondent was asked to recount the content of the story, which was
identified by the interviewer with a cue word; only then did the
interviewer begin to ask for particular items of information given in the
story. After verbatim transcripts had been prepared of all the interviews,
as well as of the news program, a linguistic discourse analysis of all the
transcripts was performed. While the analysis examined the
characterization of political figures and institutions in news and
interviews respectively, as well as their discursive structure, special
attention was given to themes, that is, the unifying concepts which
could be said to summarize each story from either the journalists’ or the
viewers’ point of view.
In both studies, the themes that were employed by a substantial
portion of the respondents were of a particularly general kind, being
only remotely associated with the specific issues of politics as they are
communicated in journalism. In sum, we identify a number of themes,
which may be thought of as common denominators mediating between
the discourse of politics and the discourses of everyday experience.

Themes of politics
In order to account for processes of political understanding, we
elaborate the notion of themes as it applies to the two data sets. Themes
are distinguished from the schemata and scripts of cognitive psychology,