Look Who’s Talking: Voices and Sources in the News

Cutting through the clamor: Revisiting voices in today’s political landscape

Patricia Moy (University of Washington)

Democratic theory is grounded in the notion of a knowledgeable and active populace, one where its members can express themselves freely and expect governmental responsiveness. Put another way, for democratic systems to work, voices must be heard—and journalism plays a normative and empirical role in ensuring these voices are heard.

In this opening keynote, I begin by presenting the historical arc of how voices have been heard, from bonfires in the “olden days” to journalistic representations of public opinion and the spate of new(?) voices today. Despite their prevalence, journalistic portrayals of public opinion are not perfect measures of what the “public” wants or feels.

What prevents the public from understanding the voices they are exposed to in the news and media landscape in general? Myriad factors exist, including: journalistic values and reporting practices; the rise of inauthentic voices such as “insincere” respondents participating in surveys and the growth of manufactured voices used for nefarious purposes; and individual-level dispositions (e.g., listening styles and distrust in the news) fueled by sociopolitical and technological developments.

Given the theoretical and practical foci of the keynote, the session will close with a group discussion of the challenges conference participants face in their own research to foreground specific voices.

Fake quotes, fake news? Reappraising forms and functions of speech and thought representation

Lieven Vandelanotte (Université de Namur & KU Leuven)

Across a broad range of text types and interactional contexts, a lot of what people talk and write about concerns the words and thoughts of others or of themselves, whether real or imagined. Which linguistic forms we use to provide access to the contents of such words or thoughts, and how we embed this representation within the larger discourse, can produce very different effects. As a fictive, jocular example, consider these possible reports on some recent Trump comments about Hitler, attacked by the Harris campaign, with examples (2-3) gleaned from a thread on the social media platform BlueSky:

• Trump says Hitler ‘did some good things’.
• Campaigns spar over historical comparison.
• Harris refuses to state which dictators she admires.

In this talk, I first want to review some theoretical and descriptive basics of speech and thought representation, probing the essential nature of quotations as ‘demonstrations’ (Clark & Gerrig 1990) and critically surveying traditional distinctions made in English between forms such as direct, indirect and free indirect speech/thought (Vandelanotte 2009, 2023). Next, I want to demonstrate how some journalistic forms provide interesting test cases as regards ‘types’ of speech and thought representation, including in more narrative (Van Krieken & Sanders 2021) and opinionating styles of journalism, and as regards the question whether quotes are ‘faithful’ (Short et al. 2002), fundamentally ‘constructed’, or even in some sense ‘fake’. Examples from social media discourse – often, these days, an important source of news, both real and fake – will further extend the scope of enquiry.

Clark, Herbert H. & Richard J. Gerrig. 1990. Quotations as demonstrations. Language 66(4) : 764–805.  

Short, Mick, Elena Semino & Martin Wynne. 2002. Revisiting the notion of faithfulness in discourse presentation using a corpus approach. Language and Literature 11(4): 325–355.  

Vandelanotte, Lieven. 2009. Speech and Thought Representation in English: A Cognitive-Functional Approach. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.  

Vandelanotte, Lieven. 2023. Constructions of speech and thought representation. WIREs Cognitive Science 14(2), e1637.  

van Krieken, Kobie & José Sanders. 2021. What is narrative journalism? A systematic review and an empirical agenda. Journalism 22(6): 1393–1412.

Becoming the Face of the Conflict: The Role of Foreign Correspondents in Covering the 2023/2024 Israel-Gaza War

Laura Postma (Leiden University)

In times of conflict and war, especially in the first phases, news and information move fast. Information is not only spread from direct sources involved in the conflict, but also shared from  various external sources on several channels on social media. In certain occasions it becomes  challenging to verify and select sources, or identify information as truthful and whether or not it is for example AI-generated. In a fast-pace environment and with the need to bring ‘breaking news’, foreign correspondents and visiting reporters need to make quick decisions in a limited amount of time and sometimes with a limited number of sources at their disposal. This study takes the 2023/2024 Israel-Gaza war as a case study, for the reason that it is a recent event that is still developing and receiving a lot of attention in international media. There is a significant number of foreign correspondents that are permanently stationed there. Also, during the first weeks of the war, thousands of visiting reporters arrived in Israel to report as ‘parachute journalists’. Between March and August 2024, 13 foreign correspondents and visiting reporters from 10 different countries were interviewed about their experiences reporting on the war. It was found that foreign correspondents have specific techniques and routines to verify information at these types of events. They often refer to the added value of their physical presence, which immediately sets them apart from other forms of foreign reporting. At the same time, many challenges were identified involved in reporting on a crisis on the ground, some of which can also be linked to the physical presence of the correspondents. This study contributes to a better understanding of the role of foreign correspondents and visiting reporters in the information provision about the 2023/2024 Israël-Gaza war. It looks into what influences the decision making, verification and production process of reports and if and how this changed during different stages of the war. 

Additionally, this keynote will take the case study as an example to zoom in on the role and position of the foreign correspondent in general as the ‘face’ and main source of a conflict, but also as the seen expert of a country or region and the responsibility this comes with. It will link these questions to personal experiences of the speaker being a foreign correspondent in the United States and Central Europe. Challenges will be highlighted and discussion points will be presented.

Having established a solid reputation in research into journalism theory and journalism practice, the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies (BIJU) is proud to launch its fifth call for papers for a new international conference. The topic for this year will be voices and sources in the news. As always, our conference is multidisciplinary. We invite scholars from different backgrounds like communication and media studies, conversation and discourse analysis, (cognitive) linguistics, translation studies, speech technology, epistemology and political and social sciences to share their insights with us on which voices and sources are heard in the news, and on how their words are represented.

True to tradition, we approach our central theme from two angles: communication studies and linguistics. 

The concept of ‘voice’, extending well beyond the term’s literal denotation, has become ever more relevant in our current interconnected societal environment, with a zeitgeist of heightened (self-)reflexivity, critical awareness and sensitivity to social and environmental justice and identity politics. Understood, in a political and a moral sense, as the articulation of an embodied social orientation, point of view or perspective, essentially tied to a particular positionality, ‘voice’ has been considered a human right or social good, fundamental to human communication and to normative ideas of democratic deliberation. In contemporary, networked societies saturated with media, various communicative avenues empower individuals to express their voices. This cultivates a dynamic and participatory environment where both journalistic and audience channels coexist. Consequently, news and opinions permeate the collective consciousness, becoming omnipresent or ambient. This context expands the scope and inclusiveness of public discourses and knowledge production practices as hitherto marginalized, underrepresented, suppressed, or otherwise ‘silenced’ social actors, speaking on behalf of themselves or the nonhuman ‘voiceless’, have been empowered to resist, talk back, counter hegemonic discourses, and reverse traditional source hierarchies. 

However, for ‘voice’ to make an impact, it requires active ‘listening’, a recognition of the worth or value of one’s voice by others. This is quite pertinent considering the well-established critique of dominant, mainstream news media’s selection bias, privileging elite voices, and its propensity to contain contestation within the sociopolitical consensus or status quo, informed by power relationships, social conformity, and efficiency considerations. Likewise, persistent social inequalities, audience fragmentation and essentially selective ‘news diets’ in an ‘era of plenty’, combined with ‘echo chamber’ and ‘filter bubble’ mechanisms, all restrict ‘exposure diversity’. Finally, ‘cyber-utopian’ aspirations of connectivity and dialogue are also qualified by the online proliferation of extreme, anti-social voices, materializing among others in the form of disinformation and deepfakes, hate speech, and radical deconstructive press criticism, feeding alienation, mutual distrust, and political polarization. 

Shifting focus to the individual journalist’s visibility and positionality, the notion of ‘journalistic voice’ engages with conceptions of journalism’s institutional role and purpose. This pertains to a fundamental tension between an active/interventionist versus passive/detached disposition orienting journalistic practice and norms. This disposition is reflected in journalists adopting advocacy, adversarial or propagandist stances, as distinguished from disseminator or facilitator roles where the journalistic voice is muted. As such, the concept offers a gateway to contemplating societal, institutional, or professional factors shaping journalistic models and journalism cultures over time and across the globe. Against the background of global and professional crises challenging traditional mainstream journalism’s authority and the ’news paradigm’, the journalistic voice, long contained by the normative ideal of objectivity, has arguably been revitalized in the shape of appeals for an ‘interpretive turn’ in journalism, which increasingly finds traction. This is characterized by journalists stepping away from a more descriptive style, expressing their (‘considered’) opinion more explicitly and reflecting on their positionality in their work. Recently, this has also been resonating in the boundary work journalists engage in to cope with concerns about professional identity raised by the rapid development of AI technology. Similarly, the idea of ‘finding one’s own voice’ applied to contemporary journalist authorship also opens to aesthetic interpretations of ‘journalistic voice’, to narrative and artistic forms of journalism. 

Studying voices and sources in the news can be done empirically from many different angles. From a linguistic point of view, studying the voices and the sources in a given text comes down to studying the evidentiality expressed in the text. Evidentiality is the linguistic category which gives shape to perception, proof and evidence. While the formal designation of evidentiality may vary widely among languages, evidential meanings are universally expressed in all languages. We can say that evidentiality indicates the source of information of the speakers/writers, what speakers/writers base their knowledge on and how certain speakers/writers are of that knowledge. 

From a journalistic point of view, studying evidentiality in a text makes us aware of the sources cited in the text. The study of reported speech and quoting is important to explain which voices are present in the news and how they are represented. Register also plays a role here, for example to examine how journalists deal with hate speech and rude speech.

Combining multiple disciplinary angles, it is relevant to look at the journalist's own voice and study how perception and other sources of knowledge are linguistically represented, and how certainty and reliability are expressed. Additionally, the language of fake news and the role AI and speech technology play in it are other possible topics for this conference.

Furthermore, as news sources are often international and interlingual, translation and interpreting processes in news production are of interest for this conference as well. How may translation, voiceover, dubbing or subtitling affect the news content, and do they increase or decrease the number of voices that are heard, are questions that could be addressed.

Suggestions for further reading

Moy, P. (2020). The promise and perils of voice. Journal of Communication, 70(1), 1-12.

Vandelanotte, Lieven (2022). Constructions of speech and thought representation. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 14(2), e1637.