Joanna Thornborrow
Biographic Data
| ID | 659190 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Joanna Thornborrow |
| GIVEN NAMES | Joanna |
| FAMILY NAME | Thornborrow |
| SIGNATURE | THORNBORROW J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 206 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Introduction: Why the study of broadcast talk matters for journalism
International audience
Reporting the unsayable: Scandalous talk by right-wing populist politicians and the challenge for journalism
This paper focuses on the moral work of journalism as displayed and enacted in the reporting practices used in news coverage of scandalous talk by right-wing populist (RWP) politicians. Using a qualitative discourse-analytic approach, we analyze a set of cases of journalistic framing of RWP talk recently circulating in Sweden, Greece, France and the UK, and examine ways in which anti-democratic or racist talk is represented within print, online a…
News media and the politics of fear: Normalization and contrastive discourses in the reporting on terrorist attacks in Sweden and the UK
This paper provides a comparative critical discourse analysis of news discourse on terrorism with respect to the coverage by two Swedish and two UK broadsheet newspapers of the terrorists attacks that took place in Stockholm and in London respectively in the year 2017. The research goal is to investigate the type of discourses mobilized that help enact a ‘politics of fear’, and to compare the constitutive elements of this rhetoric within the same…
Question design and the construction of populist stances in political news interviews
This paper focuses on the relationship between journalism and right wing populist discourses in the context of broadcast news interviews. We analyse a specific feature of question design in which the public is invoked as a source of opinionated positions in adversarial interviewing. Analysing data from a range of socio-political contexts, we identify a shift in adversarial questioning along a scale of ‘soft’ populism, that is the attribution of v…
Discursive constructions of populism in opinion-based journalism: A comparative European study
The normalization of the populist radical right in news interviews: A study of journalistic reporting on the Swedish democrats
Focusing on the salient case of news interviewing, this paper investigates the role of journalism in the normalization of radical right-wing politics and the discourses of nationalism and nativism. Normalization is related to transformations in the socio-political landscape, the discursive strategies of political actors, the professional norms of journalism, and the discursive positioning of political views in news reporting. Data include news in…
Online audiences and televised political debates: Shifting discourses of public engagement
Public participation in political broadcasting has offered an important site forengagement between citizens and their elected representatives in interactions whichtake place live, on air, and often in front of a studio audience. As technology hasadvanced, producers have taken advantage of the affordances of digital media inbroadcasting political debates, shifting frameworks of participation beyond thestudio and inviting participation across a ran…
Hybrid Politics: Media and Participation
Discours des réseaux sociaux: Enjeux publics, politiques et médiatiques
La communication numérique, les réseaux sociaux et leurs enjeux sur les pratiques journalistiques et politiques actuelles. Comment interagit-on dans et avec les réseaux sociaux ? Comment ceux-ci affectent-ils la politique et le journalisme ? Comment construit-on un espace et un lieu interactif ? Comment les utilisateurs de plateformes digitales se définissent-ils comme membres d’une communauté ? En dix contributions, des analystes du discours de …
Mediated Constructions of Crisis
I’m a Scouser: Membership categories and political geography in the 2015 UK Election Call Phone-in
Despite the emergence of newer forms of web-based political engagement, radio phone-ins continue to have a significant role in the enactment of the democratic process, providing a live forum for direct encounters between members of the public and politicians, beyond the professional forms of mediated encounters between studio journalists and politicians. In this paper, drawing on data from the BBC’s 2015 phone-in Election Call, we use Membership …
Evaluation and expertise: The discourse of reality television competition scores
Narrative analysis
Grab a pen and paper: Interaction v. interactivity in a political radio phone-in
In this paper we analyse the discursive frameworks for interaction in a UK political radio phone-in between 2001 and 2010, and the implications of those frameworks for public engagement with politicians. The BBC Radio 4 phone-in program Election Call, broadcast in the run-up to a general election, has experimented with ‘new’ interactive technology (TV simulcast, web broadcasting and e-mail) in its attempt to provide listeners with the opportunity…
Backstage activities as frontstage news
This article examines some of the discourse practices of contemporary television news reporting. Basing their analysis on BBC and ITV reports of the G20 summit meeting in London, April 2009, the authors investigate aspects of contemporary television news coverage. Drawing on Goffman’s work on backstage and frontstage regions and on footing, the authors focus specifically on the role of small talk, media self-referentiality and artfulness in visua…
Going public: Constructing the Personal in a Television News Interview
In this article I examine how a ‘private’, inside story was constructed through an extended news interview ( ‘Tonight’ with Trevor Macdonald, ITV1) drawing on models of both the experiential and the accountable broadcast interview. The analysis, based on aspects of adjacency sequencing, question/ response design, and narrative organization, explores the ways in which a personal account is elicited about an event that had been highly prominent in …
Special issue on personalization in the broadcast news interview
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 distingui…
Questions and Institutionality in Public Participation Broadcasting
International audience
Greg Myers . Matters of opinion: Talking about public issues
Greg Myers . Matters of opinion: Talking about public issues . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp xvii, 258. Public opinion clearly matters very much to a great many people. We are constantly being given figures from the results of the latest survey and the most recent opinion poll; the losses and gains in popularity of our political leaders make headline news. Our opinions are solicited on the doorstep, on the phone, in the street; …
Narrative, opinion and situated argument in talk show discourse
Lifestyle and the Depoliticisation of Agency: Sex as Power in Women's Magazines
Sex, due to its connotations of dangerousness and the non-traditional, has been used heavily in women's magazines and other mass media to signify core values of power and freedom as part of their brands. Through this process, other forms of agency for women have tended to be excluded. In these magazines women are shown to be assertive, powerful and independent, not through the political views that they hold, not through the way that they act upon…
Gossip as strategy: The management of talk about others on reality TV show 'Big Brother
In this paper we examine the nature of gossip talk as an activity type in the context of the TV game show 'Big Brother'. Using a detailed analytic approach to the situated nature of gossip sequences, we show how participants in the show manage gossip talk strategically to establish social relationships within the house, as well as to present themselves in a positive way to the viewing (and voting) audience. We argue that there is a contextual dou…
Floors, talk and the organization of classroom activities
This article addresses the issue of the conversational floor. Using data from classroom discourse, covering a wide range of floor related phenomena, the authors propose a concept of the floor that ties it to the activity in hand, and the local flexible organization of talk within that activity. After beginning with a short review of current work relating to the conversational floor, discussion turns to extracts from data as examples of various ty…
Branding and Discourse: The Case of Cosmopolitan
Like fast food and fizzy drinks, discourses are globally marketed by powerful multinational corporations. In this article we look at discourses about women which are distributed around the planet by the 44 different national versions of Cosmopolitan. These versions are localized, but still transmit the Cosmo brand, resulting in similarities between the versions. We apply a multimodal discourse analytic approach to understand this global branding,…
The Organization of Primary School Children's On-Task and Off-Task Talk in a Small Group Setting
This article deals with the organization of children's interaction in a school setting where the teacher is absent. Basing my analysis on a 30-min session where a small mixed-age group of pupils are working on a math problem, I examine the ways in which the children accomplish the task, the "on-task talk" through which they organize and work through a particular activity, as well as attending to the phenomenon of "off-task talk" as it is interwov…
Branding and Discourse: The Case of Cosmopolitan
Like fast food and fizzy drinks, discourses are globally marketed by powerful multinational corporations. In this article we look at discourses about women which are distributed around the planet by the 44 different national versions of Cosmopolitan. These versions are localized, but still transmit the Cosmo brand, resulting in similarities between the versions. We apply a multimodal discourse analytic approach to understand this global branding,…
The normalization of the populist radical right in news interviews: A study of journalistic reporting on the Swedish democrats
Focusing on the salient case of news interviewing, this paper investigates the role of journalism in the normalization of radical right-wing politics and the discourses of nationalism and nativism. Normalization is related to transformations in the socio-political landscape, the discursive strategies of political actors, the professional norms of journalism, and the discursive positioning of political views in news reporting. Data include news in…
Lifestyle and the Depoliticisation of Agency: Sex as Power in Women's Magazines
Sex, due to its connotations of dangerousness and the non-traditional, has been used heavily in women's magazines and other mass media to signify core values of power and freedom as part of their brands. Through this process, other forms of agency for women have tended to be excluded. In these magazines women are shown to be assertive, powerful and independent, not through the political views that they hold, not through the way that they act upon…
Authenticating Talk: Building Public Identities in Audience Participation Broadcasting
Public participation broadcasting has recently become the focus of attention in media studies, as well as from the social interactional perspectives of discourse and conversation analysis, and it has been argued in particular that the talk show genre has given new and enhanced status to the `authentic' voice of lay members of the public. What remains largely unexplored is how lay participants discursively construct authentic positions for their o…
Special issue on personalization in the broadcast news interview
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 distingui…
Narrative, opinion and situated argument in talk show discourse
Gossip as strategy: The management of talk about others on reality TV show 'Big Brother
In this paper we examine the nature of gossip talk as an activity type in the context of the TV game show 'Big Brother'. Using a detailed analytic approach to the situated nature of gossip sequences, we show how participants in the show manage gossip talk strategically to establish social relationships within the house, as well as to present themselves in a positive way to the viewing (and voting) audience. We argue that there is a contextual dou…
Grab a pen and paper: Interaction v. interactivity in a political radio phone-in
In this paper we analyse the discursive frameworks for interaction in a UK political radio phone-in between 2001 and 2010, and the implications of those frameworks for public engagement with politicians. The BBC Radio 4 phone-in program Election Call, broadcast in the run-up to a general election, has experimented with ‘new’ interactive technology (TV simulcast, web broadcasting and e-mail) in its attempt to provide listeners with the opportunity…
Questions, Control and the Organization of Talk in Calls to a Radio Phone-In
This article examines the management of participation in calls to radio phone-in programmes. In the broadcast media, there are increasing occasions for interaction between `professionals' and lay members of the public, particularly within what have come to be known generically as public participation programmes (talk shows, phone-in programmes and the like). People call in to phone-in programmes for various reasons; to give opinions, to get advic…
Metaphors of Security: A Comparison of Representation in Defence Discourse in Post-Cold-War France and Britain
In this paper I examine the different types of metaphoric representation in French and English within the domain of security and defence in Europe. The analysis takes the form of a comparison of the metaphors used in press reports of two summit meetings dealing with issues of security (Nato in London, July 1990, and CSCE in Paris, November 1990). It is argued that even though some metaphors occur in both languages, there are some marked differenc…
Going public: Constructing the Personal in a Television News Interview
In this article I examine how a ‘private’, inside story was constructed through an extended news interview ( ‘Tonight’ with Trevor Macdonald, ITV1) drawing on models of both the experiential and the accountable broadcast interview. The analysis, based on aspects of adjacency sequencing, question/ response design, and narrative organization, explores the ways in which a personal account is elicited about an event that had been highly prominent in …
Floors, talk and the organization of classroom activities
This article addresses the issue of the conversational floor. Using data from classroom discourse, covering a wide range of floor related phenomena, the authors propose a concept of the floor that ties it to the activity in hand, and the local flexible organization of talk within that activity. After beginning with a short review of current work relating to the conversational floor, discussion turns to extracts from data as examples of various ty…
From problematic object to routine `add-on: Dealing With E-Mails in Radio Phone-Ins
This article investigates the new phenomenon of e-mailed questions to a radio phone-in programme, BBC Radio 4's `Election Call'. Our interest in this phenomenon arose for several reasons. First, as a new form, e-mails were singled out at the beginning of each broadcast for special instructions to listeners, although there was evidence that as the series progressed, dealing with e-mail became more of a routine event in each subsequent programme. S…
Myths, Lies and Audiotapes: Some Thoughts on Data Transcripts
News media and the politics of fear: Normalization and contrastive discourses in the reporting on terrorist attacks in Sweden and the UK
This paper provides a comparative critical discourse analysis of news discourse on terrorism with respect to the coverage by two Swedish and two UK broadsheet newspapers of the terrorists attacks that took place in Stockholm and in London respectively in the year 2017. The research goal is to investigate the type of discourses mobilized that help enact a ‘politics of fear’, and to compare the constitutive elements of this rhetoric within the same…
Backstage activities as frontstage news
This article examines some of the discourse practices of contemporary television news reporting. Basing their analysis on BBC and ITV reports of the G20 summit meeting in London, April 2009, the authors investigate aspects of contemporary television news coverage. Drawing on Goffman’s work on backstage and frontstage regions and on footing, the authors focus specifically on the role of small talk, media self-referentiality and artfulness in visua…
The Organization of Primary School Children's On-Task and Off-Task Talk in a Small Group Setting
This article deals with the organization of children's interaction in a school setting where the teacher is absent. Basing my analysis on a 30-min session where a small mixed-age group of pupils are working on a math problem, I examine the ways in which the children accomplish the task, the "on-task talk" through which they organize and work through a particular activity, as well as attending to the phenomenon of "off-task talk" as it is interwov…
Discursive constructions of populism in opinion-based journalism: A comparative European study
I’m a Scouser: Membership categories and political geography in the 2015 UK Election Call Phone-in
Despite the emergence of newer forms of web-based political engagement, radio phone-ins continue to have a significant role in the enactment of the democratic process, providing a live forum for direct encounters between members of the public and politicians, beyond the professional forms of mediated encounters between studio journalists and politicians. In this paper, drawing on data from the BBC’s 2015 phone-in Election Call, we use Membership …
The construction of conflicting accounts in public participation TV
Some of the recent work in the field of media discourse has been concerned with various levels in the organization and structure of audience participation programs on radio and television; other approaches to the analysis of talk in these settings have focused on the interactional frameworks at play in the talk. The aim of this article is to develop the interactional approach by looking at the production of narratives in a mediated context: speci…
Metaphors of Security: A Comparison of Representation in Defence Discourse in Post-Cold-War France and Britain
In this paper I examine the different types of metaphoric representation in French and English within the domain of security and defence in Europe. The analysis takes the form of a comparison of the metaphors used in press reports of two summit meetings dealing with issues of security (Nato in London, July 1990, and CSCE in Paris, November 1990). It is argued that even though some metaphors occur in both languages, there are some marked differenc…
Deborah Schiffrin, Approaches to discourse. Cambridge, MA & Oxford: Blackwell, 1994. Pp. x + 470
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Patterns in Language: Stylistics for Students of Language and Literature
Myths, Lies and Audiotapes: Some Thoughts on Data Transcripts
The construction of conflicting accounts in public participation TV
Some of the recent work in the field of media discourse has been concerned with various levels in the organization and structure of audience participation programs on radio and television; other approaches to the analysis of talk in these settings have focused on the interactional frameworks at play in the talk. The aim of this article is to develop the interactional approach by looking at the production of narratives in a mediated context: speci…
Authenticating Talk: Building Public Identities in Audience Participation Broadcasting
Public participation broadcasting has recently become the focus of attention in media studies, as well as from the social interactional perspectives of discourse and conversation analysis, and it has been argued in particular that the talk show genre has given new and enhanced status to the `authentic' voice of lay members of the public. What remains largely unexplored is how lay participants discursively construct authentic positions for their o…
Authenticity, Talk and Mediated Experience: Introduction
Questions, Control and the Organization of Talk in Calls to a Radio Phone-In
This article examines the management of participation in calls to radio phone-in programmes. In the broadcast media, there are increasing occasions for interaction between `professionals' and lay members of the public, particularly within what have come to be known generically as public participation programmes (talk shows, phone-in programmes and the like). People call in to phone-in programmes for various reasons; to give opinions, to get advic…
Meta-narratives of Cultural Experience: Race, Class, Gender
Preview this article: Meta-narratives of Cultural Experience: Race, Class, Gender, Page 1 of 1 /docserver/preview/fulltext/ni.12.2.17tho-1.gif
From problematic object to routine `add-on: Dealing With E-Mails in Radio Phone-Ins
This article investigates the new phenomenon of e-mailed questions to a radio phone-in programme, BBC Radio 4's `Election Call'. Our interest in this phenomenon arose for several reasons. First, as a new form, e-mails were singled out at the beginning of each broadcast for special instructions to listeners, although there was evidence that as the series progressed, dealing with e-mail became more of a routine event in each subsequent programme. S…
Branding and Discourse: The Case of Cosmopolitan
Like fast food and fizzy drinks, discourses are globally marketed by powerful multinational corporations. In this article we look at discourses about women which are distributed around the planet by the 44 different national versions of Cosmopolitan. These versions are localized, but still transmit the Cosmo brand, resulting in similarities between the versions. We apply a multimodal discourse analytic approach to understand this global branding,…
The Organization of Primary School Children's On-Task and Off-Task Talk in a Small Group Setting
This article deals with the organization of children's interaction in a school setting where the teacher is absent. Basing my analysis on a 30-min session where a small mixed-age group of pupils are working on a math problem, I examine the ways in which the children accomplish the task, the "on-task talk" through which they organize and work through a particular activity, as well as attending to the phenomenon of "off-task talk" as it is interwov…
Gossip as strategy: The management of talk about others on reality TV show 'Big Brother
In this paper we examine the nature of gossip talk as an activity type in the context of the TV game show 'Big Brother'. Using a detailed analytic approach to the situated nature of gossip sequences, we show how participants in the show manage gossip talk strategically to establish social relationships within the house, as well as to present themselves in a positive way to the viewing (and voting) audience. We argue that there is a contextual dou…
Floors, talk and the organization of classroom activities
This article addresses the issue of the conversational floor. Using data from classroom discourse, covering a wide range of floor related phenomena, the authors propose a concept of the floor that ties it to the activity in hand, and the local flexible organization of talk within that activity. After beginning with a short review of current work relating to the conversational floor, discussion turns to extracts from data as examples of various ty…
Lifestyle and the Depoliticisation of Agency: Sex as Power in Women's Magazines
Sex, due to its connotations of dangerousness and the non-traditional, has been used heavily in women's magazines and other mass media to signify core values of power and freedom as part of their brands. Through this process, other forms of agency for women have tended to be excluded. In these magazines women are shown to be assertive, powerful and independent, not through the political views that they hold, not through the way that they act upon…
Greg Myers . Matters of opinion: Talking about public issues
Greg Myers . Matters of opinion: Talking about public issues . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp xvii, 258. Public opinion clearly matters very much to a great many people. We are constantly being given figures from the results of the latest survey and the most recent opinion poll; the losses and gains in popularity of our political leaders make headline news. Our opinions are solicited on the doorstep, on the phone, in the street; …
Narrative, opinion and situated argument in talk show discourse
Questions and Institutionality in Public Participation Broadcasting
International audience
Going public: Constructing the Personal in a Television News Interview
In this article I examine how a ‘private’, inside story was constructed through an extended news interview ( ‘Tonight’ with Trevor Macdonald, ITV1) drawing on models of both the experiential and the accountable broadcast interview. The analysis, based on aspects of adjacency sequencing, question/ response design, and narrative organization, explores the ways in which a personal account is elicited about an event that had been highly prominent in …
Special issue on personalization in the broadcast news interview
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 distingui…
Backstage activities as frontstage news
This article examines some of the discourse practices of contemporary television news reporting. Basing their analysis on BBC and ITV reports of the G20 summit meeting in London, April 2009, the authors investigate aspects of contemporary television news coverage. Drawing on Goffman’s work on backstage and frontstage regions and on footing, the authors focus specifically on the role of small talk, media self-referentiality and artfulness in visua…
Grab a pen and paper: Interaction v. interactivity in a political radio phone-in
In this paper we analyse the discursive frameworks for interaction in a UK political radio phone-in between 2001 and 2010, and the implications of those frameworks for public engagement with politicians. The BBC Radio 4 phone-in program Election Call, broadcast in the run-up to a general election, has experimented with ‘new’ interactive technology (TV simulcast, web broadcasting and e-mail) in its attempt to provide listeners with the opportunity…
Narrative analysis
Evaluation and expertise: The discourse of reality television competition scores
Discours des réseaux sociaux: Enjeux publics, politiques et médiatiques
La communication numérique, les réseaux sociaux et leurs enjeux sur les pratiques journalistiques et politiques actuelles. Comment interagit-on dans et avec les réseaux sociaux ? Comment ceux-ci affectent-ils la politique et le journalisme ? Comment construit-on un espace et un lieu interactif ? Comment les utilisateurs de plateformes digitales se définissent-ils comme membres d’une communauté ? En dix contributions, des analystes du discours de …
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (25 works) · Media studies (19 works) · Politics (16 works) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies (15 works) · Linguistics (15 works) · Computer Science (14 works) · Law (14 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (12 works) · Media Studies and Communication (12 works)