Before we consider issues of management and control, it is worth considering the role and persona of the media presenter to whom institutional power is allocated. In the context of academic writing, Tang and John (1999) distinguish between three roles that a writer moves between: societal role, discourse role and genre role.
These distinctions can be adapted to the context of media discourse to help us better understand its dynamics. The three roles can be summarized as follows: • societal roles: those which are inherent to a person, for example, mother,
father, daughter, American, Singaporean.
• discourse roles: the identities that a person acquires through participation in a discourse community, for example, a lawyer, a doctor, a patient, and so on. These roles only hold within the confi nes of the discourse community. Though Tang and John concede that a discourse role can permeate a societal role when a person becomes defi ned by his or her job, for example, ‘when a prominent medical doctor is identifi ed as such even when he or she is picking up a head of lettuce in the supermarket’ (Tang and John 1999: 25).
• genre roles: these are identities that are created within a given genre. In the context of undergraduate essay writing, Tang and John (1999) give the example of identities such as: ‘architect of the essay’; ‘guide through the essay’. In the context of media discourse, we could talk about manager of the discourse, discourse conduit, confi dante, etc.
Each of us, as Joseph (2004) puts it, is engaged in a lifelong project of construct- ing who we are, and who everyone is that we meet, or whose utterances we hear or read. For media personae, there are a number of levels at which identity and role interplay in the private and public sphere. Tang and John’s distinctions above provide an interesting challenge to the media context. A media presenter is nor- mally a public persona known and familiar in the public sphere. Usually, she would be identifi ed by her discourse role if spotted in the supermarket. She obvi- ously has a private sphere societal identity as a partner, a daughter or a mother, and so on, but in the public sphere, she is identifi ed by her discourse role: a radio or television presenter, for example. In contrast to Tang and John’s three distinc- tions, it might be more accurate to say that in the case of media personae, there are two parallel identities at work:
1 the public sphere persona (with societal, discoursal and genre identities)
2 the private sphere persona (with lesser known societal, discoursal and genre identities).
Crucially in media discourse the genre and discourse identities very often defi ne the societal identity of the presenter. For example, if a news presenter is known for being very tough and dogged in her questioning style (an identity stemming from her genre role), this will interplay with her discourse identity as a presenter and this in turn can have an impact on the types of media interactions that she has as a presenter. For example, a chat show host with a publicly defi ned persona of being non- judgemental
and kind will generate a certain type of pseudo- intimate relationship with her guests and so may achieve a greater level of disclosure (how pseudo- intimacy can be created and sustained linguistically will be explored in detail in chapter 5). By the same token, a presenter can build up a ‘hard’ public persona. Because talk is the tool of the media persona, his or her discourse traits and style are often open to public comment and a presenter’s genre and discourse roles become bound up with their societal role. Here are three examples of public comments about presenters.
Firstly, the well known British television presenter, Jeremy Paxman, is referred to in the following way on the website of The British Film Institute:
. . . In 1985 he became anchor of the BBC’s new 6 O’Clock News, and the fol- lowing year moved to Breakfast News. But it was as anchor of Newsnight [BBC, 1980–] from 1989 that he has become best known, attracting acclaim – and several awards – for his tough, even savage, approach to interviews . . . Some, however, liken him to a swaggering playground bully, and worry that the result of such an aggressive approach to politicians is a national cynicism which has debased Britain’s political life . . .
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/people/id/571500/ (accessed 18 January 2005) Another example, taken from The Irish Times, refers to a well known Irish radio presenter Marian Finucane. Note again here how the presenter’s genre and dis- course roles are bound up with her societal role:
Finucane is justifi ably regarded as a uniquely appealing presenter. Her occasional lapses in verbal fl uency are more than compensated for by her extraordinary warmth of tone, intelligence and sense of sympathy with the concerns of her listeners. What she isn’t is that rarest of breeds, a really accomplished interviewer. This was demonstrated both Tuesday and Wednes- day in two contrasting formats . . .
Brown (2000: 11) Here is another example of comments about British chat show host Michael Parkinson:
Michael Parkinson has a reputation that is positively Bradmanesque,1 arguably the greatest the game has ever seen, he plays with style, grace and an unfail- ing sense of decency. His surname is his passport, he’s just about everyone’s point of comparison.
http://www.abc.net.au/enoughrope/stories/s1153923.htm (accessed 21 January 2005)
These examples of how Paxman, Finucane and Parkinson have been characterized in the public domain are contrasting and it is argued that these publicly created perceptions of media personae can infl uence the interactions that they have at an interpersonal level in media interactions. We will look closely in this chapter, and in chapter 5, at the linguistic markers that create and sustain such identities as ‘swaggering playground bully’, ‘extraordinary warmth of tone, intelligence and sense of sympathy’ and ‘style, grace and an unfailing sense of decency’.
4.2 The media presenter within the participation framework