Beyond Advertising and Journalism: Hybrid Promotional News Discourse

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show the usefulness of an expanded version of Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis approach, i.e. an approach that combines text analysis with an analysis of discourse processes in studying text production and interpretation, and also incorporates ethnographic methods, in this case, participant observation and interviews. This expanded approach was checked in the study of illegal promotional news discourse; the study was conducted chronologically in two stages. In the first stage, an analysis of interpractice—which identifies cases in which specific other practices of the process of text production and interpretation are overtly drawn upon within a practice—was used to identify promotional news reports and uncover elements of promotional practice which are drawn upon within journalism, such as having the advertiser, who realizes his/her commercial interest by paying for publishing or killing a certain story, as the key actor in the process of promotional news production. In the second stage, analysis of interdiscursivity revealed how promotional journalism through textual devices (genre, topics, perspective, choice of sources, lexical choice, over-lexicalization, coherence, choice of processes and participants) incorporates discursive elements of promotion which are drawn upon within the news report discourse, such as using representatives of the organization as almost the only participants, partiality, positive-only evaluation of the characteristics/activities of the subject discussed, which is in the interest of those discussed by the texts and not the readers.