Preamble Narratives and Social Memory - Universidade do Minho

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Hard News Cognitive Shift: from Facts to NarrativesLuiz G. Mottaaddition, they say, the terms are not used to describe single characteristics of news reports,but rather a set of characteristics combined in news items, caused by collective ambiguity:authors use the same terms to mean different phenomena. According to them, there is notrue or false definition in social sciences, but rather a more precise or more unambiguousdefinition of a concept. Their multiple dimensions distinction between hard and soft newsis closer to the ideas developed in this article. They say:The more a news item is politically relevant, the more it reports in a thematic way,focuses on the societal consequences of events, is impersonal and unemotional in itsstyle, the more it can be regarded as hard news. The more a news items is not politicallyrelevant, the more it reports in an episodic way, focuses on individual consequencesof events, is personal and emotional in style, the more it can be regarded assoft news.In spite of being multiple dimensional, the Reinemann et al. definition is still heavilyfounded on the topic dimension, as the authors themselves recognize. In spite of that, itis closer to the purpose of the hypotheses I present here because it relies, at least in part,on the focus and the style dimensions. 2 To me, style is not a question of genre, however.It is rather an argumentative matter of the narrator’s strategic intentions: the ‘persuasiveforce’ a journalist implicitly imposes on the language of news reports (be it hard or softnews). From a pragmatic stand point (which I do assume in this article), hard news distinguishesitself from soft news not because of the theme, topic or style, but by reason of thecommunicative and cognitive purposes behind any type of news report. The communicativeintention necessarily leads reporters to write down a more objective or subjective newsstory. Any event can be described in a more objective or subjective way, depending onthe persuasive cognitive intention: one can objectively describe or subjectively narratea single event (political, economic, social, environmental, and so on) depending whetherone intends to simply inform directly or narratively attract and enchant receptors.In practice, hard reports word and rapidly classify the diffuse reality. They are preliminaryattempts to discursively organize the confused immediate world into meaningful reports;attempts to combine random parcels of reporters’ prime perceptions of the real phenomenoninto comprehensive preliminary dispatches. They are never-ending plots, always open to newadditional facts. The objective is to inform promptly and reproduce the immediate realityexactly as it is supposed to be, causing the effect of veracity: reality is supposed to be just asaccurate as it is described by hard news. There is no place for subjectivity in hard news storiesat all. The communication and cognition ‘contracts’ are tell the truth, or make people believethat what is said is the real truth. In conclusion, hard news represents the opposite side ofstorytelling or subjective reports, having nothing to do with tales or yarns.Journalists make a persistent effort to write down objective reports as precisely aspossible. In spite of that, hard news descriptions of real dramas and tragedies are never free2 Renemann et al. present that focus dimension of a news item as related to how the accentuation of personal or societalrelevance is coded; or the focus of a news item as related to how the accentuation of episodes or themes is coded. The styledimension takes the journalistic style of a news item as related to the explicit appearance of journalists’ personal points ofview; or the journalistic style of a news item as related to how the emotional presentation of information is coded. As statedabove, I take these dimensions as coming from predominantly entertainment or informative orientation of journalists whenaddressing a certain event to be reported.Narratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches96
Hard News Cognitive Shift: from Facts to NarrativesLuiz G. Mottafrom ambiguities and metaphorical interpretation. Audiences’ free interpretations may takedifferent directions from those originally intended. This makes journalistic communicationan act of pragmatic performances, an interesting cognitive game between what is openlymanifested by media hard reports and what is freely and imaginatively reinterpreted byactive audiences. An intersubjective game between what is said (propositional content) andwhat is communicated (free metaphorical inferences). This significant cognitive game isthe main concern of this article. I want to discuss whether objective hard news reports,supposed to be the opposite of narrative representations of the empirical world, may beinterpreted as narrative reconstruction of social reality.The key questions are: how do hard news reports organize the confused and diffuseimmediate social reality? Are they simply factual and objective descriptions of the everydayworld or do they compel us to build coherent sequential narratives about the ongoing socialreality? Are they producing factual and practical knowledge about the world exclusively, asjournalists usually claim they do, or are they also inducing to more subjective interpretationof the tragic everyday dramas reported? Can we take bits of information produced by hardnews as partial narratives about everyday life? If so, when do the factual descriptions yieldspace to subjective interpretations that narration customarily induces? What is the representationaloutcome of hard news descriptions of all social dramas and tragedies?To put it in a single question: can descriptive hard reports be interpreted by audiencesas short stories? Journalists do not tell stories, but write down factual precise information;their concise dispatches barely configure coherent stories with a clear beginning, aclimax and an end, as the classical narrative canon requires. The intention of hard news isto rapidly inform how incidents really happened, creating an impression of truth, and theydo not aspire to any literary refinement. At first glance, hard news never configures shortstories neither intends to do so. But hard news reports everyday conflicts, dramas, tragedies,triumphs and defeats of human beings that may induce narrative frames. Furthermore, thejournalism rhetoric tends to amplify the tragic aspects of the incidents, inducing dramaticinterpretations (fear and compassion) that stimulate cathartic effects typical of dramas. Ifthat is so, hard news reports may induce not only practical cognitive processes but alsocathartic effects similar to art and literature.That is the question that remains with me to the end of this paper, and stimulatesthe hypotheses presented here: when do the descriptive intentions of the factual reportsundergo a shift into near-dramas?Hard news shift to narratives: preliminary hypothesesHypothesis 1: Random bits of hard news information about a single incident reportedevery day by mass media configure a weak-willed plurivocal intrigue matrix rather than a neatnarrative composition. Hard news reports are not the product of one voice only but ratherthe result of an implicit or direct ‘negotiation’ process in which different empirical actorsinfluence the configuration of the story. These empirical voices may be manifest or implicitlypresent in the content, depending upon how each social actor succeeds in insertingNarratives and social memory: theoretical and methodological approaches97
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Cinematic Landscape and Social Memo
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comprises both remembering and forg
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include important questions related
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Part ICognitive and Emotional Proce
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Narratives and Social Memory from t
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The Lay Historian: How Ordinary Peo
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Cabecinhas, R. & Abadia, L. (eds.)
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The Works of Sísifo: Memories and
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Audiovisual Post-colonial Narrative
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Part IVEthnic, National and Suprana
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Narratives as Prison ‘Escapes’:
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Drawings and Narrative: the Inmates
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Comissões Unitárias de Mulheres d
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