| This dissertation examined the discursive construction of news in newsroom budget meetings. The study was introduced in the first chapter where the rationale and statement of purpose was presented. Relevant literature was reviewed in the second chapter, including group literature, meeting research, news meeting research, and work on media discourse. The second chapter also presented the theoretical framework of the study, which included the social construction of reality, the power of the press, framing discourse, and hierarchies. The third chapter detailed the methodology, action-implicative discourse analysis (AIDA), and specific procedures of the study. During the course of formal observation, 32 newsroom budget meetings at the Metro Daily News (a pseudonym for a major metropolitan daily newspaper in the West) were recorded. The recordings were transcribed, and the data were coded and analyzed. The analysis revealed three hierarchies that contribute to the discursive construction of news: the hierarchy of setting, of the talk, and of the text itself. The results and discussion were presented in three chapters that correspond to the triumvirate of hierarchies under investigation. In the fourth chapter, the hierarchy of the setting was presented and field note observations and meeting data were analyzed to give context to the focal communicative event of the meeting discourse. In the fifth chapter, the hierarchy of the talk was analyzed and several categories of discursive actions were revealed: identity positioning, displaying power, and face saving. The theory of conflicted identity positioning was introduced to explicate a communication situation where relational and task-oriented goals become mutually exclusive and cause conflict in how to position oneself. In the sixth chapter, the hierarchy of the text was examined and two main themes, "the mix" and exclusivity, were analyzed. This chapter ended with a description of the discursive construction of the "Best and the Rest," a binary created when constructing the newspaper that was revealed through the meeting talk. The seventh chapter presented the study's strengths and limitations, suggestions for future research, including studying the current converged media environment, and ended with concluding remarks. |
