Multimodal discourse analysis as a method for revealing narrative strategies in news videos

Abstract

Abstract News reporting has long been seen as involving a form of storytelling but techniques for revealing narrative constructions in audiovisual news remain limited. As the forms of expression mobilised for news become ever more diverse and multimodal, the challenges posed for analysis grow accordingly. The present paper asks to what extent we can pursue more differentiating accounts of the increasingly diverse audiovisual features employed in news video by employing recent advances in multimodal discourse analysis. Specifically, we explore how to recognise storytelling strategies deployed in audiovisual news reporting both more reliably and in ways that complement conventional journalistic labels, such as those discussed in research into news sensationalism. As an illustration, we offer a contrastive analysis of the specific reporting strategies of ‘individualisation’ employed in 166 news reports from two leading German news channels, Tagesschau and Bild TV, produced between 1 January 2022 and 15 March 2022. We show how we scale analysis methods to achieve greater coverage of data and discuss how this meets several recurring challenges for multimodal analysis more generally.