Abstract
News Simulcast, the flagship news program for China Central Television (CCTV), has been widely studied by Chinese scholars. However, little attention has been paid to its representation of ideological meanings. To address this issue, the present study, drawing upon Van Dijk’s (1988b) framework of three-level analysis of discourse structure, carries out a comprehensive discourse analysis of the news broadcast on this program. A corpus of 10 episodes of News Simulcast was selected as the database, from which a subset of four episodes were thoroughly examined from the macro-level of discoursal and thematic structure to the micro-level of linguistic and semiotic structure. It demonstrates that, due to its historic background and political privilege, News Simulcast broadcasts news with an authoritative national voice, speaking primarily in the interests of the Communist Party, the government and the people, and it thus forms a rather stereotyped discourse structure: positive ‘us’ versus negative ‘them’.
Introduction
CCTV, short for China Central Television, is one of China’s most important news broadcasters. As a flagship national news program, News Simulcast, or ‘新闻联播’ in Chinese, is a half-hour daily news bulletin broadcast on CCTV at 7:00 pm, Beijing Time. It is shown simultaneously by most terrestrial television channels in China, and local stations are required to carry it at the same time, making it one of the most watched television programs nationwide. As it enjoys national privilege, it is questioned and criticized increasingly within and outside Chinese academia. For instance, Zhou and Xu (2002: 25–26), based on a content analysis, observe that News Simulcast lacks diegetic sound, commentary and newsworthiness. Ai (2008), Chen (2008) and Song (2010) take a similar view. Chen (2008) points out that News Simulcast often confuses news values with propaganda and public opinion. Ai (2008: 114–125) put it even more straightforwardly that its value system is political, authoritative and ideologically guided. Shen (2011: 39–45) suggests that this program projects a monotonous and repetitive structure in headlines and news items at the expense of news values.
Chinese media scholars have pointed out certain serious problems and offered useful suggestions about this program. However, their studies have not sufficiently addressed its fundamental problems, that is, its underlying biased ideologies expressed in the discourse of the news. The current study aims at making some contributions to this issue.
Theoretical background
News as ideological discourse has been widely studied among critical linguistic scholars. First, critical linguists such as Fowler et al. (1979), Fowler (1991) and Hodge and Kress (1993) studied lexical and syntactic structures of various news texts based primarily upon Hallidayan systematic functional grammar (1978, 1985), suggesting that the accounts of news stories do not just give information, but also present dominant social ideologies. Critical discourse analysts went further than critical linguists and they managed to connect linguistic and semiotic analysis of news text with its situational and sociocultural contexts (e.g. Bell and Garrett, 1998; Fairclough, 1992, 1995; Fiske and Hartley, 2003; Van Dijk, 1988a, 1988b, 2011). Fairclough (1992, 1995), for instance, proposes that a critical discourse analysis include three dimensions: textual analysis, discursive practice interpretation and the explanation of connections between the discursive practice and the wider social practice. Text analysis must be the primary work of critical discourse analysis. As Bell (1998: 65) points out, ‘[a] close, linguistically proficient analysis of the text needs to be the foundation for all attempts to unpack the ideologies underlying the news’. According to Van Dijk (1988b), a news text includes three levels of discourse structures: linguistic microstructure, thematic macrostructure and the organizational superstructure. The microstructure includes grammatical features such as words, word orders and sentence patterns. The macrostructure captures overall topics or themes of the news text and at the same time defines the overall textual coherence. The superstructure is the organizational structure of the news text, which consists of summary and body of the text. Summary includes headlines and lead. Body includes main events, backgrounds, consequences, verbal reactions, comments, etc. Bell, based on Van Dijk, proposes that a news story consists of abstract, attribution and the story. Abstract includes headlines and lead, attribution includes the source, source place and time, and the story consists of episodes. An episode consists of events. An event may include attribution, actors, setting (place and time), action, follow-up (consequence and/or reaction) and commentary (context, evaluation and/or expectation) and background (previous episodes and/or history), etc. (Bell, 1991: 163–174; 1998: 66–69).
Van Dijk and Bell’s models were originally designed mainly for the discourse of print news. The study of television news has been largely ignored until Montgomery’s book, The Discourse of Broadcast News (2007), came out. According to him, broadcast news is not merely a linguistic text, but a social interaction which consists of ‘situated communicative actions under conditions of mediation in the specialized domain of news broadcasting’ (2007: 20). Broadcast news constitutes a distinctive order of discourse through a particular set of news genres such as news presentation, news reports and news interviews. These genres are realized with various discourse acts (e.g. presenting, reporting and greeting), discourse practices (e.g. headlines, ‘sign-in’ and ‘sign-off’) and discoursal structures (e.g. visual opening, news kernel, news items and/or live two-ways, etc.) (2007: 27–36). As a result, the study of broadcast news (television news included) should be the study of such genres as news presentation, news reports and news interviews through the description, interpretation and explanation of various discourse acts, structures and practices.
Methodology
The present study draws on a corpus of 10 randomly selected episodes of CCTV’s News Simulcast first broadcast on 22 and 24 January; 16 and 20 June; 29 July; 3, 5, 23, 24 and 25 August 2011. Specifically, it covers nearly 300 minutes of broadcast news and contains about 250 news items. As a corpus like this was too large for a thorough and comprehensive examination, a sub-set of four episodes (first broadcast on 22 and 24 January, 16 June and 29 July) was further selected, from which some news items and headlines were transcribed for the purpose of sample analysis. Through this study, two questions were addressed: 1) What are the distinctive discourse features of News Simulcast, and 2) how are national voices (ideologies) expressed in the news of this program?
The framework of three-level analysis of discourse structure devised by Van Dijk (1988b) is taken as the guideline for the present study. Since Van Dijk’s framework aims at the discourse of print news, its superstructure cannot be soundly fitted for the organizational structure of television news under study. Montgomery’s (2007) model of discoursal structure of broadcast news can better solve this problem. To be specific, this study includes:
Step 1: Discoursal structure: The discoursal (sub)genres such as headlines (Montgomery, 2007) were timed and counted. Take News Simulcast of 22 January 2011, for example. The genre ‘headlines’ was timed as 00:28–01:11; hence the time spent for ‘headlines’ was 43 seconds. Significant differences in frequency and coverage between (sub)genres were interpreted and explained in terms of sociocultural ideologies.
Step 2: Thematic structure: News topics and themes were classified into domestic news and international news. Domestic news was further classified into four general categories according the communicative purposes of News Simulcast. Differences in frequency and coverage between these categories were interpreted and explained in terms of sociocultural ideologies.
Step 3: Microstructure: Linguistic and semiotic features were analyzed based on ‘the ideological square’ (Van Dijk, 2011). The analysis followed the trajectory from headlines to news items, which in turn were studied from international news to domestic news drawing upon word selections, syntactic patterns and visual images.
Discoursal structure
Montgomery (2007) classifies the discoursal structure of broadcast news into two basic levels: the overall structure of a news bulletin and the structure of news items. The overall structure can be written as:
Hence, we generalize the overall structure of News Simulcast as:
The music visual opening sets the motif of this program: solemnity and authority. The two presenters appear to greet audiences, with a sense of journalistic authority. Then both deliver headlines with a direct visual address to the camera. News items are presented primarily with field-based footage and studio-based presenters’ voiceovers. There are seldom field reports or interviews, let alone live two-ways. The whole program, therefore, is filled with presenters’ standard and mellow articulation, but solemn and authoritative voices.
The second primary level of broadcast news is news items, which is schematized in Figure 1. A news item usually consists of news kernel and news subsidiary. News kernel is the lead or core part of a news item, a studio-based presentation realized usually with presenters’ direct visual address or studio-based voiceover. News subsidiary refers to those optional parts including news reports and/or news interviews, realized usually with voiceovers, stand uppers, two-ways, pre-recorded interviews, sound-bites and sign-off. Their frequencies and coverage on News Simulcast were examined based on four episodes (on 22 and 24 January, 16 June and 29 July 2011) (see Table 1). For television news, a news kernel is delivered primarily with direct visual address (Montgomery, 2007: 39), during which presenters make a visual delivery to the camera so as to engage the audience. For News Simulcast, however, the news kernel is delivered mostly with presenters’ voiceover. On average only 28.8% (7.25) of news items (7.25 items) used direct visual address while about 71.2% (18 items) employed voiceover to present the news kernel.
The schematized structure of news items.
The structure of news items on CCTV News Simulcast.
‘x/y’: item numbers/time length in seconds.
Montgomery (2007: 104–105) sees sign-off as one of important features in achieving the intelligibility of television news. In his view, the reporter, by signing off, ‘not only identifies him or herself by name but simultaneously situates him or herself in the space of the broadcast’. However, News Simulcast contains no sign-off. As has been shown in this paper, most news on News Simulcast is delivered by presenters in the studio, rather than by reporters in the news field. How could the presenters sign off by saying ‘this is XXX, CCTV News, from XXX’?
The subsidiary part of news items on News Simulcast includes voiceovers from the field, reporters’ stand uppers, presenters’ studio-based direct visual address, and some prerecorded sound-bites or interviews. The most often used (sub)genre is ‘studio-based voiceover’: about 61.3% of news items (15.5 items) employs this subgenre, covering about 63.9% of broadcasting time (1079 seconds). By contrast, other (sub)-genres used in the news subsidiary accounted for only a small proportion (such as ‘voiceover from the field’: 1.2% in item numbers and 3.1% in time length; ‘stand uppers’: 7.8% in item numbers and 1.7% in time length; and ‘sound-bites’ or ‘prerecorded interviews’: 15.4% in item numbers and 8.3% in time length) (see Table 1). It suggested that most of news items on News Simulcast were delivered by presenters or newscasters within the studio, rather than by reporters from the field. To take the news kernel into account, we may safely conclude that presenters’ presentation and performance has been taken as one of the most important signposts on this program. Since this program is officially considered as the window on China, its presenters have long been looked upon as the ‘national faces’ or ‘national voices’.
Thematic structure
Topics or themes belong to ‘the global, macrolevel of discourse description’; they are ‘the summary, gist, upshot, or most important information’ of a text (Van Dijk, 1988b: 31). How meanings are expressed in the news is largely determined by the organization and distribution of its topics and themes. According to Zhou and Xu (2002: 23–24), journalists of News Simulcast first divide news topics and themes into two general categories: domestic news and international news. Domestic news includes current affairs and politics, and others. Current affairs and politics can be further classified into national proclamations, conferences and meetings, diplomatic relations, and other leadership activities. Other domestic news includes events on economy, education, culture, military, law and crimes, science and technology, health and medicine, social affairs, and special reports. Quite comprehensive as it is, this classification entails many overlaps. Culture and education, for instance, cannot be clearly identified – an item can be seen as cultural and educational at the same time. It seems that the more divided it is, the more fuzzy it becomes. In order to avoid such a dilemma, we accept their first layer of division, that is, domestic news and international news. Domestic news refers to the events or stories happening within China, while international news refers to various events happening outside China, broadcast usually in the last four or five minutes. On the second layer, we divide domestic news into four general themes according to the ideological communicative purpose of this program: leadership activities, achievement news, social affairs and people’s livelihoods, and typical stories and characters (see Table 2).
Theme distribution of news items on CCTV News Simulcast.
‘x/y’: item numbers/time length in seconds.
‘Leadership activities’ refers to the news on national leaders’ activities including their attending meetings, diplomatic activities, domestic surveys and important proclamations. The news on leadership activities is usually largest in coverage. Data showed that it was about 23.7% in item numbers and about 46.4% in time length. On 22 January 2011, six items were about Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to the US, one about Xi Jinping’s survey in Jilin Province, 23.3% in item numbers and 50.8% in time length (see Table 2). National leaders are political elites. A large amount of coverage about them is quite likely to portray them as ‘political stars’.
‘Social affairs and people’s livelihoods’ refers to the news on such social issues as freedom, security, equity, equality and people’s daily life. News Simulcast attaches great importance to social affairs, especially people’s livelihoods. On average, this category covered about 25.9% in item numbers and 18.8% in time length (see Table 2), the largest coverage in items and the second largest in time length within domestic news. These reports tell the public indirectly that their Communist Party-led government has put people’s interests on its top agendas, hence fulfilling the notion of ‘serving the people’.
‘Achievement news’ refers to the news of developments and achievements from various fields including economy, culture, education, science and technology, etc. On average, this category of reports covered about 16.6% in item numbers and 11.4% in time length, the third largest within the domestic news (see Table 2). It is obvious that News Simulcast tends to highlight social and economic progress achieved under the leadership of the Communist Party. In so doing, it indicates explicitly and implicitly that the Party-led government follows the right political and economic route in leading its people forward.
‘Typical stories and characters’ refers to special news stories about those persons, groups and organizations that are officially judged as role models. It is routine that News Simulcast covers this special category in order to propagate ‘positive energy’ and ‘main melody’ of the society. On average, it was about 7.5% in item numbers and 8.2% in time length. Though it was not as salient as the other three, it was always treated as one of most important. The sample of 16 June 2011 showed that its reportage covered about 19.0% in item numbers and 22.3% in time length (see Table 2).
Compared with the above four types of domestic news (73.7% in item numbers and 84.8% in time length), international news occupied only a very small proportion (26.3% in item numbers and 15.2% in time length). That is, international news as ‘their’ news is greatly trivialized, while domestic news as ‘our’ news is heavily highlighted and focused upon.
Microstructure
Van Dijk suggests that an ideological discourse is often constructed in accordance with an ‘ideological square’, by which a text is constituted in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. An ideological discourse usually emphasizes ‘our’ positive side while de-emphasizing ‘our’ negative side. In contrast, it emphasizes ‘their’ negative side while de-emphasizing ‘their’ positive side (2011: 396). News Simulcast can be seen as such an ideological discourse, since it always frames the news in accordance with such an ideological square. This can be illustrated from the linguistic and semiotic structure of headlines and news items.
Headlines
Table 3 shows most of the headlines were domestic news. They were presented from a national perspective, on behalf of the Chinese people, and framed either to emphasize national leaders’ hard work or to highlight economic achievements. For example, Hu Jintao as (our) president was framed as doing contributions to ‘our’ diplomatic relations and to ‘our’ overseas enterprises (items 1 and 2); (our) national leader Xi Jinping was framed as ‘working hard’ (item 3); ‘our aviation industry’ as ‘having achieved great profit’ (item 4); (our) government as ‘taking measures to safeguard people’s travel and safe transportation’ (item 5); and (our) state-led cultural activities as ‘bringing happiness and warmth to rural people’ (item 6). Only two items were international news and they were presented negatively: South Africa was constructed as ‘being warned of water pollution’, and the former British Prime Minister was constructed as ‘being questioned’ (items 7 and 8).
The ideological presentation of headlines on News Simulcast of 22 January 2011.
News items
Data showed that nearly all domestic news reports were we-positive centered, whereas about half of the international ones were they-negative framed. Let us look at the international news first. Take the news of 22 January 2011, for example (see Table 4). The first item seemed to stress the negative effect of the event: possible damage was coming but without any prevention. From items 2 to 4, positive meanings were foregrounded: Brazil tried to help the storm-and-poverty-stricken communities; Japan succeeded in launching an airship; South Korea rescued the hijacked ship. From items 5 to 7, negative effects were again stressed. Item 5 implied questioning Blair’s policy on the Iraq War; item 6 suggested bad relations between the US and Cuba; item 7 stressed terrorist threats to the world. The last item positively indicated Russia’s progress in the aircraft industry. To sum up, for international news negative news is more likely to be covered on News Simulcast, hence imposing on viewers an impression that foreign people lead a constant ‘bad’ life compared with ‘our good’ living conditions.
The ideological presentation of international news on News Simulcast of 22 January 2011.
For ideological (re)presentations in domestic news, the above-mentioned four categories (leadership activities, social affairs and people’s livelihoods, achievement news, and typical stories and characters) will be analyzed from the perspective of word selection, syntactic structure and visual images.
Word selection
Fowler (1991) suggests that word reference and sense relations indicate certain social categorizations (or ‘classifications’ in Hodge and Kress’s (1993) view). Migrant workers, for instance, are often referred to as ‘peasant workers’ so as to categorize them as the lowest-class people in China. Categorization means access and control of interests and opportunities. As Fowler notes: Vocabulary can be regarded [. . .] as a representation of the world for a culture; the world as perceived according to the ideological needs of a culture. Like the map, it works first by segmentation: by partitioning the material continuum of nature and the undifferentiated flux of thought into slices which answer to the interests of the community. (1991: 84)
Fairclough also believes that ‘the meanings of words and the wording of meanings [. . .] are socially variable and socially contested’ (1992: 185). Certain kinds of wording imply certain ideological meanings. On News Simulcast, for the news on leadership activities, many words and expressions are loaded with political ideologies. On 24 January 2011, for example, the news contained: ‘中国特色社会主义’ (socialism with Chinese characteristics), ‘邓小平理论和三个代表’ (Deng Xiaoping Theory and Three Represents), ‘全党全军全国各族人民’ (the Party, the army and all the nationalities), ‘重要战略机遇期’ (the important strategic opportunity period), etc. These expressions clustered dominant Chinese political ideologies that highlighted socialism and nationalism while compressing certain inequalities and differences. ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’, for example, not only assumed that people all over China accepted the idea of ‘socialism’. What is more, it concealed the fact that Chinese socialism was still different from the essence of Marxist ‘socialism’ (social ownership in terms of equity), hence the inequality between state-owned enterprises and private-owned enterprises, for instance. Second, it prefers policy-implementing verbs, such as: ‘贯彻’ (implement), ‘提高’ (enhance, improve), ‘加强’ (strengthen), ‘开创’ (initiate, open up), etc. It takes it for granted that the doers or agents of all these positive actions (verb means ‘action’) are national leaders, governments, the Party or the nation in general.
For social affairs and people’s livelihoods, expressions are more amicable and informal. Chinese peasants are often kindly addressed as: ‘农民工兄弟’ (brotherly migrant workers), ‘群众’ (the general people), ‘村民’ (villagers), ‘农牧民’ (agro-pastoralists). These address terms suggest that most news stories are targeted at those disadvantaged people, showing that the government takes care of them. Second, positive evaluative expressions are pervasive, such as ‘温暖’ (warmth), ‘欢乐’ (happy), ‘亲切’ (kind), ‘激动’ (excited), ‘牢固漂亮的新房’ (a safe and beautiful new house), etc. These expressions are mainly used to show that the nation, and the people as a whole, brings good service to the public, especially disadvantaged people.
For achievement news, numerical expressions are usually employed to guarantee the truth of the news as well as to highlight the ‘achievement’, for instance (numbers underlined): Extract 1 (1) This project is able to collect (2) The production data of (3) Till now the operation distance of high-speed trains with the speed of
Second, it is full of technical terminologies. Shen (2011: 43) analyzed about 12 episodes of News Simulcast and found that the program contained lots of abstract economic and political terminologies such as ‘同比’ (on year-to-year basis), ‘环比’ (chain relative ratio), ‘CPI’, ‘PPI’, ‘规模以上工业增加值’ (the added value of industries above a designated scale). These terms suggested that the news was most likely to have been gathered from the state-owned official institutions. It therefore implied that the news was actually reported from the perspective of officials who would definitely say more ‘good words’ of their own work.
For typical stories and characters, the most prominent is that many favorable expressions are employed in order to create ‘a tall, great and perfect image’ of role models. For instance, in Extract 2, Party members were constructed as perfect role models who worked selflessly for others by expressions such as ‘braved fierce mountain torrents and rolling mudslides’, ‘rushed in … from all directions’, ‘stayed at the forefront of the rescue and relief work’ and ‘mainstay’. It highlighted the number of Party members to indicate the Party’s cohesion and attraction. It also highlighted the number of victims and even a pregnant woman and children to show that helpless people were always first concerned. The detailed description of the Party members’ armbands, Party emblems and chest cards implied that the Party would always be the guide and example to ordinary people.
Extract 2 […] this youth shock brigade of 35 Communist Party members
Syntactic structure
The syntactic structure of News Simulcast has been stereotyped into several different patterns (Ai, 2008; Chen, 2008; Shen, 2011). When reporting leadership activities it usually employs the following pattern:
National leaders are usually the agents/actors of the news events, constructed as doing something for the nation/people and making directives to others or local officials. Two types of processes are commonly used for this type of news: material process and verbal process. For material process, it often uses verbs such as ‘see’, ‘visit’, ‘take part in’, etc., showing that leaders are doing surveys and investigations. For verbal process, it often uses verbs such as ‘say’, ‘point out’, ‘stress’, ‘urge’, etc., showing that leaders are making directives or discussing with other officials or citizens. The process is usually expressed by transitive verbs where the patient is subordinate while the agent is dominant. For example: Extract 3: Xi Jinping braves the cold […]; (he) comes to the cities of Jilin and Changchun […]; Xi Jinping observes the production process and products […]; (He) learns the situation […]; (He) sees the frontline workers and technicians […]; He points out […]; Xi Jinping exchanges ideas with cadres and research workers […]; He stresses […]; Xi Jinping comes to Yongji County […]; (He) learns the situation […]; (He) stresses […]; (He) urges local Party committee and government […]; Xi Jinping comes to residents’ home […]; (He) stresses […]; Xi Jinping takes part in the activity […]; (He) affirms their work […]; (He) sees students […]; (He) encourages them […]; Xi Jinping holds the colloquia […]; (He) listens to the report […]; (He) affirms the work […]; He points out […] (Translated from News Simulcast, 22 January 2011)
In Extract 3, Xi Jinping (then Chinese Vice President) was formulated as the agent of these processes, either showing he was doing the survey (such as ‘observes the production process and production’, ‘sees the frontline workers and technicians’, ‘learns the situations’, etc.) or making directives to his subordinates (such as ‘points out’, ‘stresses’, ‘urges’, ‘encourages’). In so doing, he was constructed as a ‘political star’ on the one hand, and Chinese politics was represented as a strict hierarchy of power dominance on the other.
The news on social affairs and people’s livelihoods is mainly about citizens’ daily concerns such as living, traveling, food, clothes, safety, equality and freedom. They are usually reported in the name of ‘serving the people’, by means of the following structure:
This is a material process that is realized by a transitive verb connoting ‘service’, the agent is usually assigned to the official institutions or state-owned organizations, and ordinary people or grassroots are constructed as the beneficiary of the actions. For example: Extract 4: (1) The All-China Federation of Trade Unions, Ministry of Railways and Ministry of Transportation jointly launched the activity […] (2) Beijing Federation of Trade Unions opens up the service […] (3) (The Federation) helps migrant workers […] (4) Migrant workers in groups can call the trade unions by [. . .] (5) (Migrant workers) can apply for tickets from trade unions [. . .] (6) The trade unions have helped migrant workers […] (7) Ministry of Railways opens up the business of selling train tickets for migrant worker groups […] (8) (Ministry of Railways) helps migrant workers to buy the return tickets […] (9) Ministry of Transportation organizes passenger buses and chartered buses for migrant workers […] (10) (Ministry of Transportation) opens up a ‘green channel’ for migrant workers […] (11) (Ministry of Transportation) sends for tickets and buses for migrant workers […] (12) (Ministry of Transportation) cracks down on illegal behavior […] (Translated from News Simulcast, 24 January 2011)
In Extract 4, the agents were three official institutions: The All-China Federation of Trade Unions, Ministry of Railways and Ministry of Transportation, except for (4) and (5) (in italics). Most clauses were about how actions (services) were done by these institutions (agent). Migrant workers were constructed as the beneficiaries of those actions. Even though in clauses (4) and (5) the agents were ‘migrant workers’, the modality (modal verb ‘can’ means ‘permission’) of the two clauses indicated that ‘migrant workers’ were permitted to conduct such ‘actions’ as calling the trade unions in (4) and applying for tickets from trade unions in (5). In fact, it was so constructed that they were served by the state-owned trade unions.
Another syntactic structure is commonly used in the achievement news:
This is a relational process in which the predicators are realized by possessive verbs such as ‘increase’, ‘achieve’, ‘get’, or state verbs such as ‘is’, ‘become’, ‘amount to’. China or Chinese industries/groups/companies are the possessor of this process, and the possessed is usually ‘achievement’ such as ‘profit’, ‘values’ and ‘quantity’ realized often by numerical expressions. For example: Extract 5: (1) The production data of 2010 was issued recently by Civil Aviation Administration of China showed […] (2) The Chinese aviation industry achieved the profit of 4370 million Yuan […] (3) The volume of passenger traffic of Chinese aviation has surpassed 260 million persons […] (4) China has been the country with largest civil aviation passengers the world over […] (5) The profit of Chinese three large state-owned civil aviation companies increased largely […] (6) China Eastern Airlines’ last-year profit amounted to ten times that of 2009 […] (7) Air China has been the company with the highest market value in the world […] (Translated from News Simulcast, 22 January 2011)
Most of the clauses in this example are relational process, in which the Chinese aviation industry, China Eastern Airlines and Air China were assigned as possessors or agents while achievements (realized mostly by numbers) were as the possessed or attributes.
The news reports of ‘typical stories and characters’ aim at educating the public to be morally excellent citizens. Since this type adopts a form of story-telling, its syntactic structures are more flexible than other categories. Most clauses are simple sentences, but around the role model. Often, sound-bites are employed as the polyphonic narrative to support the theme of the news. For example: Extract 6: The reporting team of Comrade Li Dongxiao’s advanced deeds, which is jointly organized by Propaganda Department of the CPC, All China Federation of Trade Unions, and the Ministry of Railways, has recently made a report tour in Liaoning, Shanghai, Henan, Shaanxi, Sichuan, and other places. It has aroused strong repercussions. Li Dongxiao set the following driving standard for himself: safety – no accident, punctuality – no lateness, benchmarking – no gaps, start-stop – no shaking. The audiences are deeply shocked by these strict standards. I am deeply moved, and also deeply inspired. Even on an ordinary job one can still make very extraordinary deeds. [Sound-bite] (Translated from News Simulcast, 22 January 2011)
In this extract, the typical character, Li Dongxiao, was constructed as a role model for ordinary workers, through the effects of the report tour on his advanced deeds (‘strong repercussion’) from various places (‘Liaoning, Shanghai, Henan’, etc.), the description of his working standards – four ‘no’s’, and a polyphonic narrative – a sound-bite of an audience’s favorable evaluation and verbal reaction to his story (‘deeply moved’). A fixed sentence pattern cannot be identified in this example but the theme – the departure of sentence – was all about the role model and his report tour.
To summarize, it seems that ‘China/Chinese as a nation, Chinese institutions or a national leader’ are often the theme or part of the theme in most news reports, telling news stories from the perspective of the nation. In doing so, a positive ‘we’ as the Party, the government and the nation has been assumed and constructed.
Visual images
Visual images in News Simulcast have two significant properties: highlighting ‘elite’ people and scanning the background. First, news on this program tends to take (medium or close-up) shots of ‘elite’ people such as national leaders, moral models, or those whose actions are ideologically prominent. Salience, among others, is an important element in the visual composition. ‘[S]alience can create a hierarchy of importance […] selecting some as more important, more worthy of attention than others’ (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006: 201). For instance, the news on 24 January 2011 covered an item about Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s consultation with ordinary people. The news altogether contained 43 shots, out of which 12 shots were given to Premier Wen, 17 shots were given to another 17 different speakers, and the other 14 shots are background scanning. Most of Wen’s pictures and footage were close-ups. It was quite obvious that Wen as national leader was highlighted.
When reporting the news of ‘social affairs and people’s livelihoods’ or ‘economic news’, News Simulcast also makes salient images of ordinary people. However, this does not mean that they have ‘important’ power; rather, it signifies that they are the powerless people who need ‘help’ and have been helped by the powerful (government), hence it conveys implicitly a notion of ‘serving the people’. For example, an item of 24 January 2011 covered a story of migrant workers getting paid with the help of a local government. In this item, the camera repeatedly focused on migrant workers’ speech and actions: counting money, signing names, speaking and smiling. The news was so constructed that those workers’ satisfactory speech and actions signified the notion that the local government put disadvantaged people’s interests first. However, these images concealed the reality that the payment of their wages was often delayed. In effect, the salient images or close-up shots are often given to two types of actors in this type of news. First is to highlight the actions of those civil servants or official groups who offer the ‘service’. Second is to highlight the (happy and satisfactory) reactions of those who are served, such as the above-mentioned migrant workers. For instance, a news report of 16 June 2011 was about how the local transportation and police divisions helped send over 1000 migrant workers from their workplace (City of Liu Panshui) to their home city (City of Bijie) with 30 buses during a snowstorm. The last footage of this news was a close-up shot of a migrant worker’s smiling face.
For achievement news, it seems that graphic pictures are often exploited to indicate specific figures on profits, incomes, quantities, etc. Since most of the achievement news reports are about the results of certain development rather than the eventual and sensational actions, lots of shots are exploited as background panoramic pictures only to show the grand setting or scene of production, activities or performance.
For news of typical stories and characters, visual images can also be divided roughly into close-up shots and panoramic shots. Close-ups are assigned to two types of actors: one is the role model, the other the good result of the actions done by the role model. When the role model is focused upon, the camera usually follows their ‘advanced’ or ‘great’ actions and their ideologically or morally prominent properties. For example, the news in Extract 2 was about Party members’ being the mainstay of victims in the work of security and disaster relief in Zhouqu, Gansu Province. In reporting this news, not only were the actions of those Party members focused on, but also the Party-related symbols were foregrounded. The armbands of ‘Shock Brigade’, Party emblems, chest cards of ‘I’m a Party Member’, and the Party flag were photographed purposively. These suggested that the Party as a whole and Party members as the specific force always stood at the forefront of dangerous and difficult places in the interests of the public.
Another common prominent feature of the visual images on News Simulcast is that lots of background images or footage are employed. For instance, in the above-mentioned item about Chinese Premier Wen’s consultation with ordinary people, 14 shots (32.6%) were given to the audience in the meeting room (background scanning). In the second item, seven shots (36.9%) were given to the background setting. As mentioned above, they were even more commonly used in the achievement news. Take the news in Extract 5, for example: most of the visual images were the panoramic scenes about the passengers checking in tickets, passing the security gate, or waiting to board in a Beijing Capital Airport terminal. Zhou and Xu (2002: 26) also point out that on News Simulcast many shots were just pictures of scanning the meeting room from different directions. This indicates that visual images are still not fully exploited. Usually, it is more difficult for journalists to select enough visual images to denote a theme than to depict what is happening. As has been implied above, most news reports on News Simulcast are theme-oriented rather than event-driven. It means that this program cannot draw too much upon visual images. As a result, verbal presentation has to be employed as a primary medium. This is why we found at the beginning that studio-based presenters’ use of voiceover is overwhelming in this program.
Discussion
Drawing on the above analysis we can conclude that CCTV’s News Simulcast not merely reports the news, but more importantly assumes itself as a national voice, speaking for the interest of the Party, the nation and the government. It presents the news with a national authoritative voice by way of presenters’ articulation. Thematically, it focuses on domestic news, especially leadership activities, achievement news, social affairs and people’s livelihoods, and typical stories and characters, presenting nearly all of them in a we-positive way while trivializing international news and reporting it often in a they-negative way. As Xu (2009: 76) suggests, News Simulcast has formulated a rather stable structure: we-centered and we-positive presentation versus they-marginalized and they-negative presentation. Textually, News Simulcast can be regarded as a discourse of national narrative, telling news stories from a national perspective. Ideological meanings are expressed explicitly and implicitly through various linguistic and semiotic structures and practices such as wording, syntactical structuring and image designing.
News Simulcast forms such a discourse style mainly due to its unique history and special national privilege. During the early days of the People’s Republic of China, only People’s Daily and National Network of Radio News Broadcasting were considered as two of most authoritative official media outlets. Few Chinese people got to know television, let alone television news. It was not until 1 January 1978 that we saw the birth of News Simulcast. It originated from Television News (1958–1978) at Beijing Station which possessed two major features: first, the programming of news followed the format of news bulletins, that is, news stories were edited as simple, brief notifications without in-depth reporting; second, the broadcasting style was based on the original radio news broadcasting which stressed standard and mellow articulation, a clear-cut stance on what is good or bad, and a sense of solemnity and authority (Ai, 2008: 9–16). Both features have been inherited by News Simulcast without manifest changes even today.
At the very beginning, News Simulcast drew little attention from the public, let alone from the decision-makers. This condition did not change until April 1981, when the National Television Journalism Symposium was held in Qingdao (Guo, 1997: 95; Liu, 2007: 190). Two important decisions were made at the meeting: 1) all local television stations were obliged to gather news stories for News Simulcast; 2) all local television stations were obliged to relay News Simulcast (Liu, 2007: 190–191). Since then, News Simulcast has become a national program, coordinated with local stations, under the leadership of the Central Government, directed by the Propaganda Department and the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television. On 1 September 1982, News Simulcast was authorized as the primary outlet to announce grave national news. Ever since, News Simulcast has become the most authoritative national news program (Xu, 2009: 77).
Compared with other television programs, News Simulcast enjoys an absolute political authority. As is stated from the official portal of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, CCTV is a vice-ministerial institution. Guiding public opinion is its primary function. It is the important cultural and ideological front and the mouthpiece of the Party, the government and the people. News Simulcast, as the most important program on CCTV, has been officially seen as the Chinese national image. Its tenet is to propagandize the voice of the Party and the government, and to disseminate the information of the world affairs. As a consequence, it has established a fairly stable broadcasting structure over the last 30 years, representing the voice, the power and the spectacle of the nation, the Party and the government.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article is part of my PhD research project supported by the University of Macau. I wish to thank Professor Martin Montgomery for his patient instruction and valuable comments during my PhD thesis writing. I would also like to thank the editor for his generous comments and encouragement. Any mistakes, of course, remain mine.
Declaration of conflicting interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.