"Democracy under Attack": Viewpoint and Doxa in the Coverage of the Jan. 6th 2021 Events at the US Capitol on Belgian and French radio channels

Hambye, Philippe;Vernet, Samuel
(2022) A True and Fair View: Communicative, Linguistic and Ethical Aspects of Expressing Point of View in Journalism — Location: Vrij Universiteit Brussels (8.December.2022)

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This paper aims at addressing the relation between the expression of standpoint and viewpoint in journalism and the presence of doxa (Amossy 2002; Bourdieu 1996, 2003; Guilbert 2011). It will first discuss different understandings of the concept of doxa and different views of the place doxa may have in journalist discourse. We will consider that the expression of doxa is in itself the expression of a viewpoint which ignores itself as such, and hence which stays mainly implicit and not discursively expressed as particular and subjective. Yet, we will show that doxa is conveyed by discursive cues that allow the researcher to identify and characterize the nature of the particular but supposedly shared “common sense” which is often taken for granted in journalist discourse. It is precisely because doxa is a kind of viewpoint which is not recognized as such that it raises important theoretical and ethical questions when journalism is concerned. These issues will be addressed through an analysis of the transcript of the morning broadcast of two radio channels – the public radio channels in France, France Inter, and in French-speaking Belgium, RTBF – covering the “attack” on the Capitole on Jan. 6th 2021. Because it reports an event which was at the same time very politically loaded and totally unexpected and extraordinary, the journalistic account of this event helps to reveal and question the continuum between facts reporting and the expression of personal opinions, with all the nuances of clear and less clear sharing of subjective viewpoints in between. The corpus will be analyzed through a discursive analysis based on methods taken, among others, from framing analysis (D’Angelo & Kuypers 2010), critical discourse analysis (Wodak & Busch 2004) and argumentation theory (Amossy 2000) we will analyze the way the event is framed and how it is commented upon in order to highlight the discursive marks of viewpoints and doxa.
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Hambye, P., & Vernet, S. (2022). “Democracy under Attack”: Viewpoint and Doxa in the Coverage of the Jan. 6th 2021 Events at the US Capitol on Belgian and French radio channels. A True and Fair View: Communicative, Linguistic and Ethical Aspects of Expressing Point of View in Journalism, Vrij Universiteit Brussels. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/103572