Media and Journalistic Communication: Impact and Characteristics
Media: We Live in a Society of Raw Information
Technical advances and competition among media outlets are the cause that we are more informed than ever. The chosen model for the journalistic message, the sender, the channel with which it counts and has elements, as well as the receiver to whom it is directed, determine the characteristics, nature, and formal aspects of journalistic texts.
Media Information: The Most Important Transmitters
Radio, TV, and print journalism.
- Radio: Uses auditory codes and is the quickest way. It allows for instantaneous transmission of facts and direct intervention with low production costs. It is supported by simple language and paralinguistic intonation. Its summary and information are often reiterative.
- Television: Although it can incorporate live broadcasts, it transmits information previously published in the form of videotape. Images are more relevant than written texts and pursue emotional effects.
- Journalism: Uses paper or electronic media as a carrier. Compared to radio and TV, it has in its favor the availability of reading, providing greater capacity for reflection and analysis.
The production of radio and television includes much opinion, as opposed to the press, which prefers to separate information from opinion.
Journalistic Communication
It is unilateral and does not produce an exchange. In dialogue and journalistic communication, the issuer actively controls the communication, and the receiver, an anonymous person, should rely on the truth of what is transmitted.
General Characteristics
In the process of communication, “emitters” of journalistic texts are the result of a process that involves not just individual journalists but also other issuers, such as the editor-publisher.
- Receptors: Are collective subjects, undifferentiated groups that theoretically share knowledge.
- Messages: Are redundant, repeating information. Their contents are grouped into sections: international, national, etc.
- Code: Combines various codes of journalistic language: linguistics, typography (size, letter), and iconography (pictures, maps, etc.).
Information Sources
SMS are based on the informative testimonies that are the sources:
- Sources within the media: Refer to information that journalists gather from the event’s location or through correspondents.
- Institutional Sources: These are reports from press offices of government agencies and private or volunteer news agencies.
- Sources: These are testimonies of people affected by or concerned about a particular situation.
- Confidential and anonymous sources: They are generally connected to power.
The Journalistic Language
It is influenced by a number of factors: contact with developments and technical progress, the influence of foreign languages, contagion from other speeches, and in some cases, an international message.
Morphosyntactic Characteristics
- Ambiguity: Tendency to place the subject at the end.
- Prone to lengthening sentences: Verbal phrases and paraphrases, prepositional and conjunctive phrases, redundant expressions, appositions, and incised.
- Employment of Anglicisms and Gallicisms: Misuse of “a” + infinitive.
- Use of the periphrasis “be being” + participle.
- Conditional use of possibility.
- Mixture of direct and indirect styles.
- Frequent use of passive voice.