Between Fact and Fiction: Semantic fields and Image Content in Crime Infotainment programs

Gaëlle Ferré

doi:10.1515/mc-2016-0018

Article

Between Fact and Fiction: Semantic fields and Image Content in Crime Infotainment programs

Gaëlle Ferré
Gaëlle Ferré is currently an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Nantes, France. She mainly teaches English phonetics and phonology but also (multimodal) discourse analysis both at undergraduate and at graduate levels. In research, she works primarily in Multimodality in English and French, adopting a linguistic-oriented approach, that aims at understanding the organization of information from the different modes in speech to form a message, with a strong emphasis on the links between visual (gesture and/or images) and textual (verbal and/or vocal) information in discourse units. The research presented in this paper is part of a larger project on a comparison of the visual and narrative design of infotainment in France and in the US.

Published/Copyright: November 17, 2016

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From the journal Multimodal Communication Volume 5 Issue 2

Abstract

Crime infotainment is a hybrid type of television program in which each episode is based on a real criminal case and presented to the audience under the form of a reconstructed narrative. Research has shown that although violent crime is ubiquitous in other types of media, leading to an over-representation of violent content, crime infotainment is the most fear-inducing type of media as compared with newspaper coverage and television crime drama. This leads people to believe their lives are at risk and they consequently support cultural conservative politics of anti-crime measures which are excessive considering the risk. It is therefore important to understand how crime infotainment content is built to induce fear. Adopting the framework of Ideological Discourse Analysis developed by van Dijk (1995a, Discourse analysis as ideology analysis. In: Language and Peace, C. Schäffner and A. Wenden (Eds.), 17–33. Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing, 1995b, Ideological discourse analysis. New Courant, 4:135–161, 2006, Ideology and discourse analysis. Journal of Political Ideologies, 11(2):115–140), the study presented here proposes an analysis of three French infotainment stories, comparing the semantic fields in their speech with the semantic fields developed in related newspaper articles. The study also proposes an analysis of image content in infotainment which leads us to the conclusion that the blurring of the lines between what is presented as (discursive) fact or (imagistic) fiction may well have a consequent impact on the audience.

Keywords: crime infotainment; semantic content; multimodality; ideological discourse analysis

About the author

Gaëlle Ferré

Gaëlle Ferré is currently an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Nantes, France. She mainly teaches English phonetics and phonology but also (multimodal) discourse analysis both at undergraduate and at graduate levels. In research, she works primarily in Multimodality in English and French, adopting a linguistic-oriented approach, that aims at understanding the organization of information from the different modes in speech to form a message, with a strong emphasis on the links between visual (gesture and/or images) and textual (verbal and/or vocal) information in discourse units. The research presented in this paper is part of a larger project on a comparison of the visual and narrative design of infotainment in France and in the US.

Acknowledgments

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors. The research presented in this paper is nevertheless part of a larger project on a comparison between infotainment in France and in the US, and I would like to thank two undergraduate students for their participation in the project as part of their course assessment: Gaëlle Hémion collected the press articles and helped with the analysis of their semantic content into thematic fields and Juliette Le Viavant helped with the annotation of one of the three infotainment videos.

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Published Online: 2016-11-17

Published in Print: 2016-12-1

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Articles in the same Issue

https://doi.org/10.1515/mc-2016-0018

Keywords for this article

crime infotainment; semantic content; multimodality; ideological discourse analysis