Disputing While Covering a Dispute on Television News: Discursive Devices and their Interpretation by Viewers

This paper discusses the potential of semantic, pragmatic and grammatical devices used in the Israeli television news coverage of a dispute to promote one agenda, negate a contradictory one and position the correspondent as a participant in the dispute. Moreover, I argue that viewers of news identify at least some of these devices and attribute an argumentative role to them. To support this, I analyze questionnaires in which native speakers relate to a specific news item, focusing on the three most common devices interpreted: implicatures, emotionality and textual planning. The discussion sheds light on dialogical interactions between, first, correspondents and their addressees; second, between the correspondents’ words and their co-texts, contexts and other occurrences of these words or their synonyms in public discourse. The corpus includes 19 items on a struggle between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews in Israel broadcast in 2009 on Israel’s Channel 2 television news.