Europe and the EU in British, Italian and Polish TV News Programmes

News programmes have a very specific structure (Hartley 1982) and they usually contain “accessed voices” such as legitimated persons (LPs) – experts and public figures – together with ordinary people (VOXs). These voices play different roles in the reports (Montgomery 2007), but they mutually affect the news reception by the audience. The study of “accessed voices” in TV news reports can shed light on the perception of EU institutions by citizens, since they still regard TV as most important source of information (Eurobarometer 55 2001). Our belief is that the role of LPs and VOXs differently affects the audience consumption and re-interpretation of news stories. LPs are authoritative sources (Montgomery 2007), but they convey a message which may be regarded as distant from the layperson, while VOXs are recognised as “one of us” and may lead to a more direct identification. The present study investigates the role of LPs and VOXs in British and Italian TV news reports through the analysis of two comparable corpora consisting of transcripts of TV news programmes (both public and commercial channels) The news stories included in the corpora have been divided into three categories: items related to the ‘EU affairs’, ‘EU countries’, and ‘other’, both domestic news and international (non-European) stories. We will focus on the role of attribution, mainly drawing on the Appraisal System (Martin & White), in utterances by LPs and VOXs, and the rhetorical effects deriving from such positionings. In order to carry out the comparison, the corpus will be queried exploiting the XML annotation which allows for detailed comparisons between countries and voices. A more quantitative analysis will make it possible to compare different uses of sources in TV news programmes when news items deal with the EU and European Countries vis-à-vis other topics in order to describe the way different forms of attribution are used when Europe related topics are dealt with. The quantitative analysis will be complemented with a more qualitative analysis of a news item available in all TV news programmes which will help shed light on the differences in attitude towards Europe across the three countries and between state/commercial broadcasters.