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This page will be published in Hester, Stephen and Housley, William (eds.), Language, Interaction and National Identity. Aldershot: Ashgate 2001.
On dialogical networks:
Department of Linguistics
Charles University
nám. Jana Palacha 2
CZ-11638 Prague
e-mail: nekvap@ff.cuni.cz
and
Dept of Psychology
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
England
email: I.leudar@manchester.ac.uk
Contents
- Introduction
- Ethnographic background
- The events and the participants in the dialogical network
- The empirical analysis of the mass media dialogical network
- Newspapers
- Use of mass media texts in everyday conversations
- Television debate
- The uptake of the TV debate and the other developments in the network
- Concluding remarks
Introduction
We have several goals in this study. One is to extend our work on how local media presented Romanies and the relevant themes soon after the Czech Republic came to being in 1993 (see Leudar and Nekvapil 2000). We shall do this here specifically in the context of the new migration law which was then being discussed in the Czech Republic. Our second goal is to continue to develop the concept of a ‘dialogical network’ which we have formulated in our previous work (see Leudar 1995; Leudar 1998; Leudar and Nekvapil 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 1998). The third aim is not unrelated to the second: we want to show how mass media materials - texts themselves and their themes – are used in everyday conversations.
We shall be using three kinds of materials.
All these materials originate in the period 6.1 to 16.1.1993. Their mutual relevance is not simply that they come from this relatively short and socially interesting period (the first weeks of existence of the Czech Republic). These three kinds of materials, even though from the analyst’s standpoint they are different types of data, are thematically and interactively connected: the same theme is debated in the newspaper articles, in the television programme and in the everyday conversation. Moreover, as we shall see, speakers react to what they read in the newspapers, and the authors of the newspaper articles react to what they saw and heard in the television debate.
Our previous research indicates that different types of speech and text can be thematically and interactively connected and this is expressed by our concept of a dialogical network. From a methodological standpoint, this concept turns the analyst’s attention to mutual connections between different types of discourse, which are traditionally studied separately. Our argument is that such connections are not simply thematic, but in some instances dialogical. Our concept of a dialogical network does not stand alone. Kittler (1990) formulated a similar concept, translated from German as ‘discourse networks’ (‘Aufschreibesysteme’), and used it to analyse the German literary culture in 1800-1900. The concept also deals with the phenomena which in French semiotics are covered by the term ‘intertextuality’.
The concept of a dialogical network has not been used in ethnomethodology or in conversation analysis previously, but we shall make some effort to follow the methods developed there (Sacks 1992; Jalbert 1999). This requires us to show that the problems we are concerned with are also problems for the speakers and the hearers, or in ethnomethodological speak, for the ‘members’ of a given collectivity, even though our stance is theoretical and theirs is practical. In the case under investigation the members are mainly resolving the problem of whether the migration law is sensible and adequate, or flawed and racist. Our task is to show what methods and resources the members used to present the law as sensible and adequate or flawed and racist, and how they themselves understood the contributions to the gradually emerging dialogical network. This means that we are investigating the verbal actions of individual participants as local, situationally conditioned acts. Our aim is not to criticise the migration law nor to criticise how journalists presented that law and the controversy surrounding it in the newspapers. This does not mean, however, that our research may not provide grounds for any of these.
Even though we focus on connections between different kinds of data, each may nevertheless require a different analytic approach, or so it may seem to begin with. The TV debate and the everyday conversation can be analysed using the so-called sequential analysis, this being one area of conversation analysis (Watson 1997). Newspaper articles, though, are usually on the periphery of conversation analysts’ interests. In our study we show, however, that when the unit of analysis is a network, then sequentiality has to be considered even in the analysis of newspaper articles. They need to be seen as collaborative ‘turns’ in a developing dialogical network. This does not mean, however, that the conversational and network sequential structures are exactly the same.
The argument about the migration law is about what properties can be attributed to that law. We shall see that the migration law was debated by the participants through attributing it some characteristics, denying others, and by including it in specific collections of activities. These concepts are all tools in a sub-domain of conversation analysis, membership categorization analysis (MCA). MCA was originally developed for the analysis of categories of persons (see Sacks 1992) but it was gradually extended to non-personal objects (e.g. Hester and Eglin 1997; Edwards 1997). In this study we shall note whether the usefulness of the technique extends to objects such as laws.
The participants in the investigated dialogical network were varied (politicians, parliamentary deputies, journalists, mayors) and they formulated their contributions to the developing dialogical network from different participant positions. (J. Kredba writing in Lidové Noviny, 15.1.1993, started his article thus: ‘The events of the last few days forced me to speak out. Not as a disobedient procurator, but as a citizen of the Czech Republic’.) Such positioning is another phenomenon which we are interested in. For example, to what extent does dialogical position affect whether a person will become a part of a dialogical network? We will also pay special attention to what role ethnic identity plays in positioning.
Ethnographic background
The materials with which we work come from the very beginning of the Czech Republic. They reflect the problems of disintegrating Czechoslovakia as well as the chaos in certain areas of the public life after the change of political regime in 1989. There was a substantial increase in criminality and an increased migration of population. It was expected that, as a consequence of the division of Czechoslovakia, there would be a significant movement of population from Slovakia to the economically more advanced Czech Republic, especially to Bohemia. All this was of course represented in media - consider for instance the bold headline in one of the national dailies, Rudé Právo (16.10.1992): ‘A huge migration of Romanies into Bohemia is being prepared’. The situation in some communities was at ‘boiling point’ as is documented by the following article:
(1) Českomoravské Zemědělské Noviny 16/10/1992
The squad did not attack
Jirkov (roč) - Not even one misdemeanour was recorded yesterday in Jirkov in the Chomutov area, where about one sixth of the 19,000 citizens are Romanies. The death squad which according to an anonymous source was to start a series of attacks on Romany inhabitants did not appear. Romanies did not appear much in the restaurants nor in the streets, with the exceptions of Nové Ervěnice, the site of the emergency headquarters of the police of the Czech Republic. 120 Romany children were yesterday missing from school desks in Jirkov, and three days of their absence were excused. According to some views what is involved in Jirkov is not only revenge, but also a sort of 'prevention' whilst expecting the tide of Romanies after the division of Czechoslovakia.
In order to control the increasing criminality allegedly related to immigration into Jirkov and ostensibly to prevent social conflict, at the beginning of November 1992 the local authorities published a notice to safeguard public order and security in the town. This official document, referred to in the media as the ‘Jirkov notice’, was subsequently adopted by other towns, mainly in Northern Bohemia. Moreover, the Jirkov notice, which introduced for instance the institution of a ‘town jail’, became a motive for the proposal of a law concerning ‘exceptional steps to secure public order’ (the so-called ‘migration law’) which the office of the General Procurator of the Czech Republic put before the parliament in the last days of December 1992.
The events and the participants in the dialogical network.
The degree of complexity of dialogical networks seems to be determined by how socially important and topical is the problem which is being resolved by the individual participants. The more socially serious it seems, the more participants join the network and, as a result, the more dialogical events are involved in the emerging network.
The following dialogical events were relevant, that is interactionally productive, in the dialogical network which we are investigating.
The heterogeneity of these ‘events’ is one crucial characteristic of dialogical networks and it may be appropriate to comment at this point on what we mean by the emergence of a dialogical network and by dialogical events. Dialogical networks are communications distributed in mass media, accessible through it and mediated by it. The participation of media is what lends to this kind of communication its basic characteristic: it is distributed and not at one time and in one place. The participation of media can of course take a varied form, for instance
Austin (1962) argued that descriptions are performatives like other speech acts. In this sense, newspapers do not simply describe what happens in emerging networks, they play a performative role, in other words they ‘do things’. In fact, the participation of mass media is a necessary condition for the emergence of a dialogical network, even though not a sufficient one, as will become obvious from the analysis.
The participants involved in the network will appear as the analysis proceeds. Let us just summarise here who they were in terms of their social identities. Some were politicians and senior civil servants. The proposed law was, for instance, defended by the Czech General Procurator and his deputy, by the Mayor of Prague, and a parliamentary deputy representing ODS. It was also supported by some political activists such as the representatives of KAN. Other politicians and public figures rejected the law. They included the chairmen of the constitutional and security committees of the Czech Parliament, the deputy chairman of Parliament, and leading lawyers and law academics. The law was also attacked by Romany activists and politicians. Other participants were interactively productive, even though they did not take a stance for or against the law and instead aimed to deal with the problems the law was meant for. They included the Mayors of several towns in Northern Bohemia and the ministers of the relevant department of the Czech government.
There were, however, also participants who could have joined the dialogical network, but did not (as our materials show). What can justify us claiming this? How can we know who could have joined the network and who could not? The point is that some absences seem noticeable to participants, or at least to some of them. The representatives of the ROI at a press conference targeted the Czech premier Václav Klaus, accusing him of not fulfilling promises. The following is a fragment of an article published in Rudé Právo on 11.1.1993:
(2) Rudé Právo 11/1/1993
[K. Samková] also spoke about negotiations with Václav Klaus in late September and early October, [and] according to her the Czech premier, did not fulfil even one of the promises [he made] in it […] ‘We consider today’s meeting with the journalists, and our declaration to be also the last appeal to Mr Klaus’ stated K. Samková.
Dialogically this appeal constitutes a first part of an adjacency pair. In ordinary conversation one expects the second part, and its absence may be heard as a refusal to respond. Klaus never reacted publicly to the call by the ROI representative. Can Václav Klaus then be said to have refused to join the network? One of our concerns is to compare the sequentiality in ordinary conversation and in dialogical networks. The question is, even though both may apparently involve the same structures, it is not clear that the same normative expectations operate in both of them. How did the participants take Václav Klaus’ silence? Nekvapil and Leudar (1998) have shown that the same politician, V. Klaus, rejected another minority activist’s call to participate in a different network by questioning his right to do so.
The empirical analysis of the mass media dialogical network
Newspapers
We shall begin the study of the network with the following article:
(3) Českomoravské Zemědělské Noviny (ČMZN) 6/1/1993
The procurator’s office proposes an exceptional migration law
Prague (sot) – The proposed law concerning the extraordinary measures to safeguard public order, which reacts to the unmanageable situation created in some municipalities by the great concentration of Romany inhabitants, was prepared and submitted in the last few days to the Parliament of the ČR [Czech Republic] by the office of the General Procurator of ČR. According to the proposal of the interior ministry, the law reacting to illegal declarations of municipal authorities in Jirkov and in Ústí nad Labem, would be enacted by the Czech government, in a specific parish and with a limited application. During such a period the user or the owner of a flat would have to apply to a residence registration office for a permit for his visitors (except for direct relatives). In these cases the duration of stay could not exceed five days and moreover each adult visitor should pay ten crowns per day. In the case of non-payment the illegal inhabitants [lit. ‘black dwellers’ in the original] would be threatened by a high fine or by an unconditional prison sentence. According to the statute, the taking in of lodgers would also be subject to the agreement of the municipal or parish office. In the interview with ČMZN the deputy General Procurator J. Patočka rejected the view that the proposal of the law is in contradiction with the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. ‘The use of extraordinary measures during an extraordinary event is common, and the Charter allows it’ he said and used as an example the law of ČR concerning fire control.
The article starts by reporting that the General Procurator’s office proposed a law to the Czech parliament. The contextualisation of this action is intricate. The journalist relates it not just to the situation in some municipalities, but also to actions of the authorities in Jirkov and in Ústí nad Labem. These published Public Notices (i.e. bylaws) were, as the article reports, illegal. The proposed law is referred to as a ‘migration law’, presumably because it would restrict migration by controlling accommodation. What is being controlled in particular is, though, clearly the migration of Romanies, since it is they who are defined as a problem - the journalist states as a fact, not as somebody’s view, the following: ‘the unmanageable situation created in some municipalities by the great concentration of Romany inhabitants’. We shall see that in other newspapers the words used were in fact ‘anti-migration law’.
The author of the article informs the readers of the content of the law, but does not provide his own assessment of it. It might have been expected that the Parliament of the ČR would react, because the law was proposed to it, and such a proposal is a first part of an adjacency pair sequence. The journalist, however, does not report any such reaction here. He does report the assessment by unnamed other agents, according to whom the law violates human rights. The journalist then reports a reaction to this assessment by the representative of the agency which proposed the law. He thus creates a sequence assessment-rejection, which, however did not take place in a face-to-face conversation but was distributed in time and space. Notice furthermore that the author of the original assessment is not specified: it could have been a Member of Parliament, a Romany activist or even the journalist himself or all of these. The deputy could be reacting to a widely voiced reaction. Leudar and Nekvapil (1998) and Nekvapil and Leudar (1998) have shown that it is not easy always to find who exactly a participant was reacting to. In fact, we found there is not a unique antecedent of second parts of adjacency sequences at all.
The rejection of the assessment by the Deputy General Procurator is reported indirectly but the backing of it is verbatim. The comparison Patočka uses results in a collection which contains two extraordinary events, ‘a fire’ and ‘the great concentration of Romany inhabitants’. The article therefore presents Romanies as a source of public disorder and does this in the voice of a state official. What about the journalist’s own stance? We have seen that he did not voice his own assessment of the law, but what about his assessment of the problem motivating the law? We have seen that the problem for him is the concentration of Romanies and not, for instance, Czechs’ reactions to them. By reporting this in a narrator’s voice, without a comment or attribution of the view to anybody, he presents it as something generally agreed on. The sense in which the presence of Romanies is a problem is left unsaid, but it is implicit in terms of the activities which are bound to the category Romany (see Leudar and Nekvapil 2000). The journalist then works here with categories in two ways. One is to make use of membership category bound activities to say, without saying it in so many words, why the concentration of Romanies constitutes a problem. The other is to include the law in a collection of legal objects (namely ‘statutes designed to control crime’), so defending a law, which, as we shall see, many characterised as directed specifically against Romanies.
The last important point to note about the Deputy Procurator’s rejection is that it was not quite spontaneous – it was elicited by the newspaper. In other words, the newspaper does not just describe the rejection, it participates in it.
So we can see that the article (3) reconstructs and constructs a chain of at least four dialogical events:
This, then, is the first fragment of the dialogical network we are investigating. Let us pause to consider the event which started the network off – why did the chain of events not stop with the action of the municipal authorities in Jirkov and Ústí nad Labem, or with the reaction of the General Procurator’s office? One reason is the controversial legal status of the local notices (were they legal or illegal, right or wrong?), then there is the controversial status of the proposed law (was it against the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms?). Even so, it is clear that the network would not have developed without the media. The article makes it clear that the journalist played an active role in generating the network. He not only summarises others’ reactions to something, which has happened, but he also interviews the deputy procurator on his own initiative and makes his reaction public. The article itself is also a dialogical event in the network.
Was Českomoravské Zemědělské Noviny the only newspaper involved in the network at this stage? Clearly not. The events were reported on that day in many Czech national papers and the ‘migration law’ became a political problem. Some newspapers named the critics of the proposed law, for instance the following:
(4) Lidové Noviny 6/1/1993
The procurator’s proposal
Open Racism
Prague (jis) – The secretary of the constitutional committee of the House of Deputies of the Czech Parliament M. Výborný (KDU-ČSL) [Czechoslovak Christian Democratic Party] characterised as inflammatory the General Procurator of the ČR‘s wording of the law on exceptional measures to secure public order. ‘It contains more errors than it has paragraphs,’ Mr Výborný said about the proposed law. According to him the part of the exposé in which the need for the introduction of the law was connected to the large concentration of Romany population was an open expression of racism. M. Výborný moreover said that that sort of law is not necessary and he highlighted the fact that there exist many criminal, legal and civil norms which can solve the problems.
The proposed law could not have found a better qualified critic in the Czech Parliament than the chairman of its constitutional committee. His critique is substantial: the law is flawed and inflammatory, it is racist. Note that the journalist does not provide the proximal context in which M. Výborný made the critique (was it in the Parliament, at a press conference, speaking to journalists?) - the relevant context is simply that he is reacting specifically to the proposal of the General Procurator. The journalist then presents the reader with a proposal-rejection sequence.
The predicate ‘racist’ which he attributed to the law is in fact highlighted by the journalist in the headline ‘open racism’. The same characteristic of the proposed law was in the headline of another article published on the same day in the Czech daily Mladá Fronta Dnes (6.1.1993, p.2) - ‘According to Výborný, the procurator proposed a racist law’. Whether or not the law was indeed racist became a problem which motivated the development of the network. The Mladá Fronta Dnes article did not report any reactions to Výborný ’s assessment of the proposed law, but two articles which appeared the next day in the national daily Lidové Noviny did so.
(5) Lidové Noviny 7/1/1993
Jiří Šetina defends his law proposal
A well meant provocation
PRAHA (jiš) – The proposal of a law, which the General Procurator J. Šetina sent to the House of Deputies was yesterday rejected as unacceptable by the chairman of the constitutional committee M. Výborný (KDU-ČSL) and also by the chairman of the security committee V. Šuman (ODA).
After yesterday’s meeting of the General Procurator with deputies and the chairman of the House of Deputies, J. Šetina denied that the exposé of the law could be characterised as racist. M. Výborný, on the other hand, quoted several sentences from the text, which are in his words expressions of racial hatred.
‘We consider the situation in North West Bohemia to be explosive, to be threatening and I personally consider it to be extraordinary’ said J. Šetina, and he added that law proposal was meant as an initiative providing a working model of the law. As he also said, the unlawful notices in some towns and parishes which are threatened by the migration of Romany inhabitants, are ‘a well meant provocation’.(6) Lidové Noviny 7/1/1993
Jirkov notice
Chomutov and Most
ÚSTÍ NAD LABEM – The generally binding notice to maintain public order and security in the town, which the town representatives accepted following those in Jirkov on 10th of December last year remains valid, declared the mayor of the town Lukáš Mašín. He added that even though the General Procurator designated this ‘Jirkov’ notice as illegal, the district Council in Ústí nad Labem so far did not cancel the validity of this notice. According to the press secretary Jiřina Henzelová the district council will have at least 14 days to assess the notice before it publishes the final decision. On Monday 4th of January the ‘Jirkov’ notice came to power in Chomutov. In Most it will be valid from 9th of January.
Let us begin with (5). This reports that the proposed law has now been rejected by two leading politicians – the chairmen of the constitutional and security committees. The reader is not told of the circumstances of the rejections – for instance, did the two politicians do their rejections together or on separate occasions? The details are irrelevant and the point is that the rejection is not just local but duplicated and distributed, but the journalist collects the rejections in one place.
The title and the first two lines of the piece reveal that the adjacency sequence proposal-rejection is now joined by a third part. We could characterise this, together with the journalist, as ‘the defence of the proposal’. This time, the defence is done by the General Procurator himself, not by his deputy. Why did he join the network now? The possible reason is that he, and not his deputy, or his office, has become the target of critique, as the titles and the text make obvious (‘The procurator’s proposal: Open racism’, and ‘According to Výborný the procurator proposed a racist law’). Moreover, the procurator reacted when the law proposal was attacked by the relevant politicians. And why did the chairman of the security committee join the argument in the network? The North Bohemian town representatives were in the first place concerned with the security of their municipalities and this is a concern relevant to the chairman of the security committee.
The crucial problem, which is now being argued in the network, is whether the proposed law is racist or not. The chairmen of some parliamentary committees claim it is, the Procurator denies it. The author of the article does not provide the reader with the evidence with which the two accusers justify their claims, he just reports them. He, however, indicates through a direct speech report that the Procurator is defending the proposal by stressing the extraordinary situation in which some towns are threatened by immigration of Romanies. Moreover, he not only defends the law against the categorisation ‘racist’, he also excuses the original local notices – they are not expressions of racism but ‘well meant provocations’. The journalist highlights this in one of the headlines.
Note that in defending the proposal, the Procurator used very much the same argument and formulation as that which his deputy did in (3). This indicates that the cohesion of a dialogical network is not just managed dialogically (through sequential structures) but that it is also thematic, and managed through the use of the chosen expressions and argumentative moves.
The accompanying article (6) puts into context the argument between the Procurator and the two chairmen by reporting the statement of the Mayor of one of the towns in question to the effect that the so-called ‘Jirkov notice’ remains valid in his city even though it has been declared unlawful nationally. Moreover, the article reports that the disobedience of national legal judgement is spreading to other towns in Northern Bohemia. What is involved in the network, then, is not simply an argument between three national politicians. The Mayor was recruited into the network by having what he said reported and connected to the ongoing argument.
We can now move on to how the law proposal was debated in the press the next day, that is on 8.1.1993. The Czech national daily Rudé Právo printed a long interview with the General Procurator, which dominated the home page. The title of the piece was, literally, ‘With Jiří Šetina about the extraordinary measures against crime - He rejects the accusations of racism’. The text of the interview was placed next to the article ‘The deputy Body demands the resignation of Šetina’. The important point is that Body is a Romany deputy in the Czech parliament (and the only one at the time). He is the first Romany to appear in the dialogical network.
(7) Rudé Právo 8/1/1993
With Jiří Šetina about the extraordinary measures against crime
He rejects the accusations of racism
The proposal of the law on exceptional measures to safeguard public order has so far not met with the approval of the deputies in the Czech parliament. The procurator’s office of ČR reacted by this proposal to the public notices of the local councillors in Jirkov and in some other parishes, where they decided to deal in their own way with dishonest elements which are congregating in their neighbourhoods. But, for example, Miloslav Výborný (KDU-ČSL), the deputy of constitutional committee of the parliament of ČR, characterised the exposé of the law proposal as ‘blatantly racist’. ‘If it was compared or directly labelled as racist, this is at best disloyal from a colleague’ the General Procurator Šetina told us. ‘The notice is general and nobody should accuse the office of the procurator, that it is directed against the Romany ethnic group. If somebody commits three or four times criminal deeds of robbery, then he is for me neither Czech, nor Slovak, but not even, for example Swiss, but a dangerous recidivist. If the large part of crimes are being committed by Romanies, a social problem is involved amongst other things, but the law does not recognise such differences or cause them.’ [2/3 rd of the interview omitted]
The first paragraph of this article contains a summary of the dialogical network: the reaction of parliamentary deputies to the action of the office of the procurator, which in turn is presented as a reaction to actions of local councillors in Jirkov and elsewhere. The reaction of the chairman of constitutional committee, which we know from the article (5), is mentioned specifically. In Rudé Právo, the journalist characterises it as an accusation, that is the first part of an adjacency sequence. Šetina’s response is characterised as a rejection, that is the second part of the sequence. The whole sequence is in fact provided for the reader in the headline. The procurator does not simply reject the accusation, but he also backs the rejection and his reasoning is of some interest. He rejects the right of his critic to level the charge – according to him it is against the spirit of mutual consideration between professional peers. This of course cannot be, by itself a decisive argument since it would mean that colleagues can never criticise each other (at least not in public). The procurator argues in addition that the law is not racist because it does not concern Romanies but criminals. The last clause in the argument is revealing – it is not the problem for the procurator that the majority of crimes is committed by Romanies nor are the social causes of this ‘fact’. The irony is, however, that the proposed law would selectively criminalize actions of a particular ethnic group and so it would itself potentially increase the ‘criminality’ of that group. Note also that the criminality of Romanies is presupposed in the procurator’s argument, it is not a claim in need of a warrant. We have argued elsewhere that this is typically how ‘stereotypic’ predicates are used, see Leudar and Nekvapil (2000). The procurator comes very near to re-categorising Romanies as criminals. (There is of course an inferential gap between saying ‘most crimes are committed by Romanies’ and ‘Romanies are criminals’.) We shall encounter the same argument and analyse it in more detail later in the network.
One typical way to enter the dialogical network is a press release.
(8) Rudé Právo 8/1/1993
The deputy Body demands the resignation of Šetina
PRAGUE (zr) – The Romany deputy Ladislav Body is calling on the General Procurator of Czech Republic, JUDR Jiří Šetina to resign. The reason is the proposal of the so-called migration law, which was put forward by the General Procurator at the end of last year. Body considers it ‘as a gross violation of constitutional order’. The proposal of the law contradicts the constitutional order in ČR, it is in contradiction with the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and its acceptance would lead to curtailing the rights of all of one ethnic minority living in ČR, the deputy Body writes in his Thursday’s declaration, which he made available to the editor’s office of Rudé Právo.
L. Body is a parliamentary deputy, but he is not just any deputy – he is a Romany. A declaration by a Romany deputy is significant for the reason that through him a representative of the minority which was targeted by the proposed law now joined the network. We shall see that his dialogical position is sometimes ambiguous – does he speak as a deputy, a Romany, or a citizen? This becomes a problem not just for him, but also for other politicians and the journalists.
The way Body entered the network is of course conditional on his particular dialogical and political position. The way the participants are categorised in the article is revealing: it is the ‘parliamentary deputy’ who calls for a resignation of the ‘General Procurator’. Should it have been an ordinary citizen who called upon the procurator to resign, his ‘press release’ would at best have ended on the letters page. The ordinary readers’ chances of joining a mass media dialogical network are minimal. How then do the readers participate?
Use of mass media texts in everyday conversations.
We have so far studied mass media as if its clients were just politicians. It is true that newspapers and television can mediate much of the communication between politicians and that politicians use mass media so that they can communicate without having to meet face-to-face (Leudar, 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar, 1998).The owners and the publishers of media, however, also depend on ordinary readers. Their participant position is different from that of politicians. Ordinary readers can write or telephone the editor and, for instance, comment on an event, or demand that the editor or a politician do something. Mostly, however, the public is limited to being a spectator. Reading newspapers in particular may provide them with a partial overview of a network since, as we have seen already, journalists summarise networks for readers. Writing to the newspapers or telephoning TV studios will, however, not lead into a dialogical network, since individual letters to newspapers are usually answered by other letter writers, not by politicians or journalists. The participant status of ordinary readers or viewers in the media networks is that of an overseer or perhaps a bystander. This, however, does not mean that newspaper texts end in private minds by affecting opinions and attitudes. On the contrary, such texts may directly influence other interactions - they become resources in everyday conversations. This is what we shall turn to now - how the newspaper texts are used in everyday arguments. One of us addressed this problem previously in a somewhat different setting, investigating how the members of British House of Commons used newspaper headlines as resources in their debate of a new law concerning the care for individuals with mental illness (Leudar and Thomas 2000, pp. 166-170). The headlines were used to set up the agenda and sometimes as first parts of adjacency pairs. Our interest here is consonant – in the use of the network materials in ordinary conversations.
Let us remind ourselves that we have left our dialogical network following the analysis of newspaper articles which were published on 8.1.1993. That same evening a conversation was recorded, the transcript of which we shall now consider. The conversation took place in a city in Eastern Bohemia and its participants meet regularly to play volleyball. The recording was made after a game in the common room, where they met as usual. We could characterise the genre of the conversation as an 'after sport get together'.
(9) EB 8/1/93
01 M: well see, I think that its okay over here ((lit. in our country)). ((I think)) that we are a democratic society because when I see how they all cry for those Gypsies, who basically break into flats ((said with amusement)) they occupy it there, + (.) as they wrote in the newspaper today, just like that using a hose, a bicycle inner tube they had gas connected to a stove, yeh (.) have you not read it? ((said loudly and with amusement)) with a bicycle inner tube just like that +.
02 I: well so admit what newspaper do you read. where did where did you read it. (.) [Blesk.]
03 Ja: [((laughter))]
04 P: Špígl. Špígl.
05 M: I think that it was Mladá Fronta man.
06 Va: I read that
07 I: no, it was not there
08 Va: it was not there. no no no
09 P: so the Rudé ((Právo))
10 Ja: ((laughter))
11 M: it was not in those, (..) ((in)) Hospodařské ((Noviny))? (...) ( ) I really don't know ( )
12 Ja: excuse me, well how many do you read every day,
13 M: I read the Rudé ((Právo)), well maybe it was in Rudé ((Právo)). (.) and there was wait. (.) there was such a beautiful shot. a high rise block, steps, and there stood in front of it four Gypsies. all with such beer-guts ((demonstrates)) (.) and the title below was man like
14 V: ((with laughter)) starving Somalian, +
15 M: no no like, no
16 Va: no wait. there was a title, (.) 'are they second rate citizens?'
17 M: yes yes yes
18 I: so that is the Mladá Fronta
19 Va: ( ) there there was nothing
20 M: there was. it ((was)) there
21 I: yeh, ((speaking fast))) hang on maybe I haven't read it. + but there is a [photograph,] isn't there and
22 Va: [there is ]
23 I: there is, like there are
24 Va: wait ((noise)) (.)
25 M: no they are not second rate. (.) there I would start with the fifth category usually (.)
26 Va: well
27 I: well so what then, please.
28 M: what- wait well well you see what we were talking about, well. nowadays (.) ((with irony)) how we will sort of oppress they ((sic.)) and take away those eh those rights, won't we. + ((mockingly)) those poor people, they will come over, they have nothing to do here, and they break into a flat, they demolish it, what was left there they steal, sell + (..) and (.) that then basically the laws should apply to them. but which ones? (.) isn't that so.
29 Va: hm
30 M: if you are not able to move him out of there. because he there (…) ((angrily)) he they are puzzled that you can move somebody out of a flat and not give him a replacement flat, so he breaks in there,
31 Va: hm,
32 M: and you should give him a replacement flat +
33 P: well that is a theft. that's simply from the first ((day)) of the first ((month)) of ninety three this is considered to be using of others' thing ((without a permission)). in other words a theft.
34 M: it is a criminal matter. a criminal matter.
35 P: so the one which is eh punished by a prison sentence. and by an unconditional one. (.) yeh, it’s like that, simply from the first ((day)) of the first ((month)) of the year ninety three so really all that is now concerned is how the the courts will cope with this.
We cannot analyse here in any detail the sequential organisation of this conversation or even how Romanies are categorised (for detailed analysis of this conversation see Holšánová and Nekvapil 1995). We will limit ourselves to analysing how newspaper articles are used in this exchange.
The first point about this conversation is that the participants talk about the same themes which the journalists wrote about at the time, and which the politicians debated. What concerns them all are the (supposed) migration of Romanies, their alleged criminality, and whether the contemporary laws can deal with it or not. It is true that journalists must write about what interests their readers, but there is more to this than just thematic coincidences. The speakers themselves mark what they are saying as coming from newspapers and they may also try to localise precisely from which newspapers the texts and images they use came (lines 1-23). We therefore consider that the participants in this conversation speak not just as single individuals but as readers of media texts. In Goffman’s terms (Goffman 1981) the participants are not the only ‘principals’ of what they say - they themselves make this obvious. This in turn means that the newspaper texts are not transformed into individual cognitions (or if they are, they do not thereby lose their mass media identity). It is also clear, if not surprising, that the readers associate particular positions on the ‘Romany’ problem with particular newspapers. The participants then speak as readers of specific newspapers. (They do not necessarily, at least in a Czech context, speak as readers of just one newspaper.)
The first specific problem, then, is how do we know that the participants use a newspaper text at all? Sometimes the readers themselves make this explicit. There are three such places in the transcript. The first one is (10).
(10) EB 8/1/93/01-05
01 M: well see, I think that its okay over here ((lit. in our country)). ((I think)) that we are a democratic society because when I see how they all cry for those Gypsies, who basically break into flats ((said with amusement)) they occupy it there, + (.) as they wrote in the newspaper today, just like that using a hose, a bicycle inner tube they had gas connected to a stove, yeh (.) have you not read it? ((said loudly and with amusement)) with a bicycle inner tube just like that +.
02 I: well so admit what newspaper do you read. where did where did you read it. (.) [Blesk.]
03 Ja: [((laughter))]
04 P: Špígl. Špígl.
05 M: I think that it was Mladá Fronta man.
M starts with a somewhat ironic personal assertion: he thinks 'ours' is an 'okay democratic' society because people ‘cry for those Gypsies’ who commit crimes. His voice indicates that he enjoys telling the story and, considering the genre of the conversation he is presumably trying to amuse his partners. He documents his story by reporting an instance where Romany squatters improvised a gas connection. The newspaper story is then used to warrant his implicit characterisation of Romanies as criminals and those who are a source of danger. Note also that the conduct reported in the story, which is a specific event, is presented by M as normal to Romanies.
The immediate reactions of the participants I and P to the story concern the reliability of the newspaper story. Both participants situate it in the tabloid press, and by doing so put its veracity in doubt. The participant M, on the other hand, claims a serious information source for the piece. The dispute about the veracity of the newspaper story is clear evidence that everyday speakers/readers differentiate not only between different newspapers, but also between different kinds of newspapers.
In (11) M is reproducing a different type of newspaper communication, a photograph.
(11) EB 8/1/93/13-14
13 M: I read the Rudé ((Právo)), well maybe it was in Rudé ((Právo)). (.) and there was wait. (.) there was such a beautiful shot. a high rise block, steps, and there stood in front of it four Gypsies. all with such beer-guts ((demonstrates)) (.) and the title below was man like
14 V: ((with laughter)) starving Somalian, +
M continues to try to identify the newspaper in which the story was published and he offers very noticeable material to help the identification. The verbal reproduction of the photograph has indeed contributed to the identification of the newspaper, as is indicated by the subsequent conversation. It is remembered by two other participants, but without any critical comment on how M presented it.
M is not just describing the photograph, he is evaluating it - it is a ‘wonderful shot’, he says - his words present a certain image of Romanies. It is not important here exactly how he captures the organisation of visual signs in words. The important point is that in doing this he adopts an attitude to Romanies which seems to be in alignment with that of a newspaper.
What is important then is what image of Romanies M is constructing in talk, what predicates he is attributing to them. The first of these is that the Romanies ‘stood’ - this implicitly documents their passivity and idleness (see line 28 where the same speaker says ‘they will come over, they have nothing to do here’). The second predicate concerns the appearance of the Romanies, and specifically of their large guts. This characteristic became in the subsequent conversation a part of a sarcastic criticism of the essentially good life of Romanies (line 14).
Finding out what was the newspaper in question is a joint accomplishment.
(12) EB 8/1/93/16
16 Va: no wait. there was a title, (.) 'are they second class citizens?'
In (12) Va helped M to reconstruct the semiotically heterogeneous communication consisting of the photograph and the subtitle and by doing this he provided a further material to identify the newspaper (see also lines 17-23). From the point of view of the subsequent conversation it is important that participants accepted that this was Mladá Fronta, which is a 'serious' broad sheet. At this point M becomes a trustworthy story narrator and he now explicitly formulates his negative attitude to Romanies: ‘no, they are not [citizens] of the second rate. (.) there I would start with the fifth category usually’ (line 25). So we can see that the speaker M does not simply reproduce newspaper texts which he read, he enters into a dialogue with them. His reply is of course surprising. The rhetorical question accompanying the photograph expects a negative reply, ‘no, they are not’, or perhaps even a positive one, ‘yes, they are, but they should not be’. The speaker M, however, clearly formulates a negative reply in which he magnifies the ‘inferiority’ of Romanies. He uses the newspaper to legitimise his negative attitude to Romanies.
This finding can be extended if we confront what M said in the conversation with what actually appeared in the newspaper. The first point is that the matters to which the participants referred actually came from two articles in two different newspapers. The story of the improvised gas connection was a part of an extended report in Rudé Právo on 8.1.1993. The photograph of Romanies together with the subtitle appeared in Mladá Fronta Dnes also on 8.1.1993.
The article in Rudé Právo headlined ‘The fight in Jirkov about the acceptance of the public order notice’ takes a whole page, and it is a montage of varied texts (fragments of interviews with the Mayor of Jirkov, with the chief of the town police, with a long settled Romany, some extracts from the so called Jirkov notice etc), as well their photographs. The piece contains the following subtitles, which structure into a number of sections: ‘The mayor defends the citizens of Jirkov’, ‘Non-payers owe almost 3 millions’, ‘Long settled Romanies agree with the notice’, ‘In the nick with the chief’, ‘The notice can change much but …’. The speaker M focused on the part of the article, which was subtitled ‘Romanies cooked with a bicycle inner tube’. And he ignored other parts, including those which split the category Romany into those who are settled and the newcomers.
In the second article headlined ‘The procurator unpleasantly surprised parliament’ and published in Mladá Fronta Dnes, the journalist I. Jemelka criticised the proposed immigration law, put before the parliament by J. Šetina. He resonated the criticism of the proposed law, voiced by M. Výborný (see above), and extended the criticism and proposed some solutions. The photograph which accompanied the commentary depicted the individuals whom the proposed law concerned. This was in fact the photograph remembered in the conversation, which was indeed entitled ‘Second class citizens?’. In the commentary the photograph and the subtitle are clearly an expression of the journalist's rejection of racial discrimination, which, according to him, some parts of the proposed law display. This, however, is not how M uses the photograph or its caption.
So far we have only paid attention to those parts of the conversation in which the participants made it obvious they were using newspaper texts. It is clear, though, that they may use such texts without making it explicit. Such implicit use may take different forms, including the use of a specific expression, concentration on a specific theme, and the re-use of arguments. Identification of such resource use is methodologically difficult, even in general, and perhaps impossible in individual cases. This is especially so since a speaker may adopt the same conversational resource from a different newspaper or second hand from another reader. He may even invent it himself, reasoning as the journalist may have done.
We’ll demonstrate the complexity of this kind of undertaking on the following extract from the transcript we are analysing (see 13):
(13) EB 8/1/93/30-32
30 M: if you are not able to move him out of there. because he there (…) ((angrily)) he they ((Cz. voni)) are puzzled that you can move somebody out of a flat and not give him a replacement flat, so he breaks in there,
31 Va: hm,
32 M: and you should give him a replacement flat +
It is arguable that the speaker M is here using parts of the report we introduced above which was entitled ‘The fight in Jirkov about the acceptance of the public order notice’, without, however, saying so. How can we know? M used this article in his immediately preceding talk and there is a similarity between M's talk now and the text of the article. The text starts:
(14) Rudé Právo 8/1/93
The mayor of Jirkov […] is, for more than a month, conducting a paper battle with the regional office and with the General Procurator, who claim that the Jirkov public order notice […] is contrary to the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. […] The greatest protests were especially provoked by parts of the notice, which enable evictions of those who do not pay their rent and of illegal squatters, […] simply on the basis of decision of a misdemeanour committee of the local authority.
[…]
In the case of an illegal entry or an occupation of a flat […] the person will be punished by the fine up to 5000 crowns. Moreover that person or persons will be evicted [...] without the right for a replacement flat, accommodation or shelter.
Now note the referentially vague pronoun ‘they’ (Cz. voni) in M's talk (extract 13, line 30). To whom could it refer? In Czech everyday discourse, for several decades now, it had a vague reference and points to ‘those at the top’ - to the government, to the party political or economic elite with power. The use of that pronoun by M can be understood against the background of the article. The journalist wrote about the protests against the Jirkov notice and the reasons for them. But who is the agent of these protests? It could have been any of the following: the regional council, the General Procurator of the Czech Republic, the members of the Czech parliament, or even the journalists. This is not specified in the report. What M said was ‘they are puzzled that you can move somebody out of a flat and not give him a replacement flat’. The complement of the verb ‘puzzled’ in this is a reformulation of what the journalist wrote. The point is that M used the pronoun in accordance with the article. He does not specify the agency either, and the absence of the agency is noticeable in both cases.
This means that M indeed does make use of the text of the article, but not in any simple and direct way. His attitude to the notice - and by implication to the protests against it - is not the same as that of the journalist. He selected a passage from the report, paraphrased it and polemicised with its content. He does not do this in his mind though, but in the argument with his friends, and the paraphrase and putting on the record his attitude clearly play a role in the conversation. The point is that M does not aspire to contribute to the developing dialogical network, by for instance writing to a newspaper. He does not try to address his disagreement to ‘them’. He is speaking to his friends and there, in the ordinary conversation, he comments on the events in the media dialogical network and expresses disagreement. This is in fact the typical position of everyday speakers in dialogical networks, and inevitably so.
Television debate
So far, our focus was on how the network developed in newspapers. Now we come to a different type of media, the television. We will now consider one TV debate and its place in the network. TV debates are of course face-to-face communications but, at the same time, the participants in the studio may take into account that they are watched by millions of viewers, some of whom will be politicians and journalists. What the participants in the studio say may therefore not be only addressed to the others present in body, but also to others elsewhere. So a TV debate can become a part of media network.
The debate we shall consider here was broadcast on Czech television on 10.1.1993. It belongs to a series of political debates broadcast every Sunday lunchtime from the beginning of nineties to the present day. The organising principle was to discuss the most important political events of the past week (hence the name 'What the week brought’.) The programmes were at the time considered not to be just entertainment, but important political events in their own right. They were highlighted in the TV news and reported subsequently in Czech newspapers (cf. Nekvapil and Leudar 1998; Leudar and Nekvapil 1998). The debate of 10.1.1993, though, has an unique place in the sequence of political events. On 1.1.1993 Czechoslovakia ceased to exist, and it was replaced by the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The programme was one of the first public political debates in the new state and it can be viewed as a portent of some problems to come.
What was the debate about? The programme had two hosts, a man (Mod) and a woman (Moda). Mod began the programme by setting the themes, doing this through introducing participants by name.
(15) Debata 93/01-10
01 Mod: a nice Sunday afternoon not only to you at the television screens but also to the guests in our studio. the themes which will be talked about today you may recognize even from the names (.) of the gentlemen who accepted today’s invitation. I welcome here Mr Jan Patočka, the first deputy of the General Procurator of the Czech Republic.
02 Pat: good afternoon.
03 Mod: Mr Vladimír šuman, the chairman (.) of the committee for legal defence and security of the House of Deputies of the Czech Parliament.
((5 lines omitted))
09 Mod: Mr. Ladislav Body, from the House of Deputies of the Czech Parliament,
10 Body: good afternoon.
...
This mode of introduction of course depends on the participants’ known activities, and on their public social identities, which most readers of this article will not know. So to explain this, the debate did not just concern the ‘Romany problem’ but also the problem of Sudetenland and of Moravia (for detailed analysis see Leudar and Nekvapil 1998). In this study we will be only concerned with the Romany part. Following the introduction of participants, the programme hostess (Moda) formulated the theme explicitly:
(16) Debata 93/19
19 Moda: good afternoon. eh during the last few days the General Procurator of the Czech Republic Jiří Šetina has been eh in the spotlight. because he submitted to the Czech Parliament a proposal of a law concerning exceptional measures to safeguard public order. ...
eh this law relates closely eh specifically to northern Bohemia. so lets go and have a look there.
The theme of the debate, then, is the proposed law on exceptional measures to safeguard public order. The hostess sets the theme by summarising the basic moves so far in the developing dialogical network: the General Procurator proposed a law to parliament, and the reaction to it was relatively negative. She does not specify a reaction by a particular individual - the formulation (‘in the spotlight’) makes it clear that the reaction is one of many participants, a reaction distributed in time and space.
As is usual in programmes of this sort, the debate in the studio is preceded by an introduction which includes a brief street poll in the territory affected by the conflict.
(17) Debata 93/20-39
20 Rep: Romanies in the north of Bohemia. your opinion [on] this matter.
21 Res 1: [( )] well they don't really belong here. when they do not behave themselves like normal people, then they do not belong here.
22 Res 2: mostly they should return back to Slovakia.
23 Res 3: yeah they should gid out of 'ere. yeah.
24 Rep: why.
25 Res 3: why. well (.) they create hassles everywhere.
26 Res 4 ((a Romany)): I don't see any problem.
27 Rep: nevertheless people protest.
28 Res 4: I don't know who.
29 Rep: Jirkov, Chomutov, Ústí nad Labem,
30 Res 4: depends on how they live.
31 Rep: do you think that they all live as they should.
32 Res 4: I think in me opinion they should live this way.
33 Rep: isn't it eh eh expelling Romanies.
34 Res 1: in my opinion no: in my opinion no. they came from there, (.) they gotta go back.
35 Res 5: for them an independent village. (.) you understand.
36 Rep: but that sounds a bit like a concentration camp.
37 Res 5: no it doesn't s- it doesn't s- they have a freedom of movement.
38 Rep: eh Romanies in Ústí nad Labem. ehm how do you look at this theme.
39 Res 6 ((policeman)): well the Romanies. (.) ehm. that is a problem in itself, yea:h but sort of (.) we are trying get'em out o'here. in some way. in some proper ((way.))
((back to the studio))
The first thing to note about this street poll is that the makers of the programme contextualise the proposed law exclusively with respect to the problems Czechs have with Romanies. This means that they accept as the issue what was already discussed in the dialogical network: is the proposed law racist? This issue is clear in the replies of the non-Romany participants (especially R5 and R6). Note also that the Czech stereotype of Romanies is distributed in the poll – Romanies do not act as ‘normal people’ (R1), ‘they create hassles everywhere’ (R3) and so on (for detailed analysis see Leudar and Nekvapil 2000). The introduction rehearses the supposed reasons for proposing the law in the first place. Only one poll participant is a Romany and he does not see the problem.
Immediately following this introduction, the programme hostess puts a question to the representative of the General Procurator.
(18) Debata 93/40-41
40 Moda: Mr Patočka: eh (.) why did you put forward this law proposal. and does the office of the General Procurator have at all the right to take initiative in law formulation.
41 Pat: we put this law forward because we have been there personally several times, and the General Procurator especially visited ústí, and me he sent to Dubí, so we saw it with our own eyes. …
Note here that the deputy General Procurator contextualises the proposed law in the same way as the poll did – with respect to the problems in Northern Bohemia. (This contextualisation is accepted as relevant by other participants in the debate, as we shall see). He does not specify exactly what these problems are – they are ‘it’ in his talk, but we have seen what they are already in the street poll. His use of the pronominal expressions ‘there’ and ‘it’ makes sense if we assume that he is orienting to the introductory street poll. But remember also that Moda’s introduction to the street poll summarised the development of the dialogical network to date. The pronouns then accomplish their reference with respect to the network.
Patočka reacts to the programme hostess’ question with an extended turn and in it he presents information and arguments, which have already appeared in the developing network (see above). He considers the situation in Northern Bohemia to be ‘critical’ and by accepting the contextualisation of the debate provided by the poll he gives the viewers the opportunity to interpret ‘irresponsible groups’ ‘threatening the rights of citizens’ to be Romanies (line 41 cont.):
(19) Debata 93/41(cont.)
41 (cont.) Pat: … the Charter ((of Fundamental Rights)) itself allows in critical circumstances, it is specifically in the article four, that if some irresponsible groups threaten (.) the rights (.) of citizens, (.) that it is possible to simply restrict ((those rights)). …
The host reacts to this not by analysing the issue but by pointing out public reactions to the proposed law :
(20) Debata 93/42
42 Mod: Mr deputy. the proposal by Mr šetina really provoked a storm of very different views. mostly somehow of negative views. do you think even today after about a week, that one could find anybody in the Czech National Council who would take your proposal for his own, and are you still insisting that the proposal is not in contradiction with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
He does not specify whose reactions these are, but we have ourselves encountered some of them in our analysis already. He does, however, provide the time scale of these reactions, and he summarises their content. This means that the programme host treats the events in network as the relevant context.
In the two turns which follow, Patočka explicitly defends the proposed law. From our point of view it is important that he defends it not just in terms of its rationale and logic, but also by trying to invoke alliances with others, some of whom were present in the studio and some of whom were not:
(21) Debata 93/45
45 Pat: ... and even Mr Kryče:r (.) and others, (.) are beginning to recognise that there is something to our proposal.
Some participants, even though they were not invited into the studio to comment on the proposed law, and were not directly addressed by Patočka, responded to what he said. J. Kryčer, for instance, may have been invited to speak on Moravian problems, but responded to what Patočka said. The following day the daily Práce interviewed him, not as a chairman of the Movement for Autonomous Moravia and Silesia, but as a person whose views on the proposed law were relevant.
The deputy procurator also turned to those whom the proposed law concerned very directly, that is to the north Bohemian towns:
(22) Debata 93/43
43 Pat: ... we simply want it to be looked at. on which the towns will certainly agree with us. ...
And, as we shall see below, in the next day or so, the mayors of these towns did react to the proposed law.
As obvious from the following extract, the hostess turns to another person in the studio who has also already participated in the dialogical network:
(23) Debata 93/46
46 Moda: Mr šuman. how will the Parliament of the Czech Republic deal with this law.
Šuman, who is the chairman of the committee for legal defence and security of the Czech Parliament, categorically rejects the proposed law in his turn:
(24) Debata 93/47
47 Šu: ... the law that proposal, that initiative, is completely systemically (.) wrong, and its wrongness is in that: as is obvious from the first sentence of the exposé, it has a certain (.) racist character. ...
Šuman then mentions other negative traits of the proposed law. From our point of view it is important that sometimes he does this by reporting views of those who participate in the dialogical network, but who are not present in the studio. For instance in line 47 (cont.) he recruits M. Výborný (whom we have already encountered) as a legal expert who rejects the law proposal on technical basis:
(25) Debata 93/47(cont.)
47 (cont.) Šu: ... and moreover I’ll there (.) point out only I am not a lawyer but according to the opinion (.) of the chairman of the legal constitutional committee and other lawyers, (it is) from the judicially technical viewpoint it is very (.) eh imperfect.
Following Šuman’s turn, L. Body enters the discussion. Body was introduced as a member of the Czech Parliament, but from the dialogical network we know that he is the (only) ‘Romany deputy’ there, representing the Left Block (see the extract 8). This is of course known to all the other participants in the studio, and moreover Body’s appearance and his manner of speech also invoke his ethnic background to the Czech participants. We have shown elsewhere how the Czech participants in this and other TV debates positioned him as a representative of Romanies. He, though, does not position himself in this way, not even indirectly by criticising the racist character of the proposed law. Instead he joins the debate as an ally of V. Šuman, following on his technical critique of the proposed law. Šuman rejected the relevance of Body’s comments in the studio, but they were reported the next day, side by side with his own:
(26) Mladá Fronta Dnes 11/1/1993
ROI threatens disobedience
Praha (iv)
[…] The Romany deputy of the Czech Parliament Ladislav Body (The Left Block) drew attention to the factual mistakes in the proposal. The chairman of the committee for legal defence and security of the Czech Parliament Vladimír Šuman (ODA) pointed out that the critique of the proposed law will not solve the untenable security situation in some communities. The remedy should be, according to him, the duty of the executive - and especially the government. [...]
There is no reason to analyse every interactional intricacy of the TV debate. With respect to its content the important thing is that from this point on, the participants were less concerned with the law proposed by the procurator or the solutions tried by the local administration in Jirkov. These were judged to be unacceptable, so now the participants considered other solutions, and proposed some themselves. V. Šuman expressed the view that the pressure should be put on the government to resolve the situation:
(27) Debata 93/76
76 Šu: ... it is necessary (.) to develop (.) a resolute action towards the government, and that in the direction of exceptional executive measures of which I spoke already, and secondly if the overnment concludes that it is necessary to take legislative measures let it put forward a proposal, …
Was he though just expressing his view of what needed to be done, or was he actually doing it, that is, did what he said have the force of appeal to the government? Considering the public nature of the occasion, this effect was likely. In fact later in the debate the appeal to the government became a little more likely effect, whether intended or not:
(28) Debata 93/77-78
77 Mod:
so Mr Šuman, where do you see the fault. surely the situation has been known
for months, one could say years, yesterday at a (.) even w- words like civil
disobedience were heard from from the speakers for Romany Civic Initiative.
78 Šu: ... there aren’t- there are no simple and quick solutions of
this problem. but on the other hand I say that this situation as they describe
it and as we know it from Northern Bohemia must be resolved very fast,
and in my view, it is necessary to appeal to the government in the
direction I suggested already. ...
Šuman therefore responded to the moderator, but he also in effect addressed others outside the studio. (The expression ‘it is necessary to appeal to the government’ is, of course, not the same as ‘I appeal to the government’ but the first can do work of the second.).
The Romany deputy Body supported explicitly Šuman’s way of dealing with the problem (extract 30, line 86). Like him he saw the proposed law as being racist because it focused on and punished just one ethnic minority (see extract 29).
(29) Debata 93/90
90 Body: ... I agree with Mr Mašín and with Mr (.) Valvoda, that (often) mayors are in a situation when they are looking for solutions. extreme, but please, let us first take really (.) somehow the legal route, and then we'll see that we'll find the solution, maybe we'll find it later, but we'll find it. and don't don't let us resort to sanctions. because this proposal basically of the law which ( ) Mr Šetina (lodged), it is a punitive law, which affects a certain minority.
Like Šuman, Body then addressed others outside the studio. The host asked him what solutions he proposed for the problems (line 85) and he answered her by urging the Czech government to act (line 86).
(30) Debata 93/84-86
84 Body: =nevertheless I of course agree with what Mr Fenič was saying here, but the question was how to solve it. and so I (thought) about it that perhaps not really in that way.=
85 Moda: = but how.
86 Body: ... and here I of course see the way pointed out by my colleague Šuman, but really the Czech should ( ) but in the first place the government should prepare proposals of laws which would have a chance of being accepted in Parliament, ...
In other words it seems that the participants in the TV debate respond to local demands, but they may also address individuals elsewhere. Let us recapitulate our reasoning in reaching this conclusion. We start with the fact that Šuman and Body were speaking in a TV debate. This was a public political event - several politicians participated in it and Šuman and Body are both politicians of some repute. What they said was not in private but heard by other politicians, including the members of the government, and by the public. We are not arguing that what they said was only directed outside the studio - an appeal to or urging of the government - and nothing else. Our argument is that some of what they said had a double function - in response to the programme hostess it proposed a solution, and relative to the government it tentatively initiated the solution. A dialogical reaction of a government representative (or of some other network participant) to what Body and Šuman said would confirm that our understanding of what they were doing in the debate is not just the matter of our analytic framework. So to summarise, some talk in the studio has a double significance – it is for the participants in the studio, but not only for them. Others elsewhere may also be addressed.
The uptake of the TV debate and the other network developments
Inevitably, the TV debate evoked public reactions by those who viewed it, and by those to whom parts of it were reported. Sometimes, it may have been used in conversations such as the one we analysed. In this section we will consider how journalists took up and used what was said in the debate. We will focus on two basic moves which we have noted elsewhere (Leudar and Nekvapil 1998; Nekvapil and Leudar 1998). One is to report what was said, thereby make it public again, and amplifying its reach and effect. The second related move is to set up mutual relevancies between what was done and said in different places and at different times. There is of course a third move, which we have encountered already, when journalists themselves motivate and initiate network moves by others.
In the TV debate, not just individuals, but ‘towns’ were targeted by the deputy General Procurator J. Patočka (see extract 22). The town representatives indeed responded to what he said:
(31) Mladá Fronta Dnes 12/1/1993
The proposed migration law is harsher then the town notices
The Mayors of ‘Jirkov-like’ towns react to the proposal of the procurator’s office
Following Jirkov and Ústí nad Labem the representatives of Most implemented ‘Jirkov’ notice. At the same time, in front of the Czech Parliament lies a proposal of a ‘migration law’ of the General Procurator Jiří Šetina. He rejected the town notices as illegal. What do the Mayors of these towns think of the proposed law?
The mayor of Ústí nad Labem Lukáš Mašín: ‘[…]’
The Mayor of Jirkov Filip Škapa: ‘[…]’
The Mayor of Most Bořek Valvoda: ‘[…]’
[[we have omitted their actual comment on the proposed law as these are irrelevant to our argument here]]
Despite some reservations, all three Mayors would welcome it if the proposed law was accepted.
[...]
Some deputies of the Czech Parliament branded the law proposal and the exposé as racist. ‘I invite the deputies to come and visit us next Monday, to get to know the situation here, about which they are going to be deciding’ said the Mayor of Jirkov Filip Škapa.
The article (of which we here reproduce just about a third) shows the reaction of the representative of one of the relevant towns to what the two deputies said in the TV debate. The mayor of Jirkov (where the first anti-Romany notice was implemented) responds by, in effect, saying that the Jirkov notice, or rather, migration law proposal was necessary because of the situation in the town. But what exactly does he respond to? We cannot know whether he saw the TV debate and is responding to it directly, or whether the journalist acted as an intermediary, and the Mayor was responding to something he said. In fact, the deputies voiced their criticisms of the law proposal not just in the studio, but also elsewhere, and the Mayor might have been responding to any or all of them. Whatever is the case, there is a sequence (i) publication of the proposed law; (ii) critical reaction to it on the TV (and elsewhere); (iii) implicit rejection of the criticism and an invitation to visit. This sequence is like what one observes in face-to face conversation, but again with a difference – a part of the sequence does not refer to a singular piece of talk (the rejection) but is distributed over several tokens.
There is another point to note. An invitation to visit is a first part in a sequence, which may continue by an acceptance or by a rejection. The media did not report whether the deputies accepted the invitation. This means that whatever happened, the invite issued by Škapa did not contribute to the development of the dialogical network. This shows that such networks do not develop in all possible directions, but they also have local endings.
We cannot be sure, simply on the basis of reading the article, how the journalist mediated in the above sequence. But the role of the journalists in keeping dialogical networks going is important. The author of the article J. Rýdl presumably contacted and spoke to the three town representatives - he quotes from their answers. This again illustrates that journalists can initiate and co-produce the development of dialogical networks. The towns may have always agreed with the General Procurator, but this agreement became effective by being made public by the journalist.
Note also that the reaction of the town Jirkov is contextualised in the dialogical network as it developed so far. The ‘space’ or the ‘slot’ for the town representative’s reaction follows from the logic of the actions presented in the media to date. Šetina rejected the town notices, and instead proposed the migration law, so it is logical to ask what the towns have to say about the change.
We have already encountered the left wing deputy L. Body in the TV debate. Ethnically he is a Romany, but as we have seen, to begin with he did not act as a Romany representative. Eventually though he positioned himself as Romany and their representative, not just as a left wing deputy.
(32) Debata 93/88
88 Body: ... now I am talking about Romanies, we have been (.) on our own initiative preparing proposals, how to deal with these things, the last time was just after the coming of the premier (.) Mr Klaus. (when) we visited him, we proposed a conception, of course and because this Czech government is really starts from the principle of a citizen, it rejected (.) our (to discuss) our (.) our eh: proposals, pointing out that it is not possible to deal somehow separately with one community or a group of citizens, but it is necessary to start as a citizen as such. and I completely agree with it. ...
The interests of Romanies on the Czech political scene are also represented by an organisation to the right of the political spectrum, the Romany Civic Initiative (ROI). One of their activities was mentioned in the TV debate by the host: ‘yesterday at a (.) even w- words like civil disobedience
were heard from from the speakers for Romany Civic Initiative’ (see extract 28, line 77). This is a quote from a press conference which took place on 9.1.1993, one day before the TV debate. How do we know this? – in the TV debate there was no mention of the press conference. On 11.1.1993, however, the following article was published.
(33) Mladá Fronta Dnes 11/1/1993
ROI threatens disobedience
Praha (iv) – The chairman of the Romany Civic Initiative Emil Ščuka and deputy chairperson Klára Samková expressed disagreement with the proposal for the so called migration law and with publication of the town notices discriminating against Romany citizens. The proposal of the law is according to Emil Ščuka anticonstitutional and undemocratic and the General Procurator should be dismissed for proposing it.
Klára Samková characterised the Saturday’s press conference on this theme as the last attempt to gain the willingness of the government for a joint approach. ‘We do not want to make difficult the complicated socio-economic situation, in which the citizens of the Czech Republic find themselves. We were always loyal to the government, but if it does not react fast together with parliament, we shall consider even such steps as civil disobedience’ she declared. [...]
According to deputy procurator Jaromír Patočka, speaking yesterday on the TV programme ‘From the political scene’, the proposal for the law on exceptional measures is a good try to solve through a law the security situation in some communities. […]
The Romany deputy of the Czech Parliament Ladislav Body (The Left Block) drew attention to the factual mistakes in the proposal. The chairman of the committee for legal defence and security of the Czech Parliament Vladimír Šuman (ODA) pointed out that the critique of the proposed law will not solve the untenable security situation in some communities The remedy should be, according to him, the duty of the executive - and especially the government. [...]
We can see that ROI joined in the appeals to the Czech government, but this partly depended on being reported in newspapers. The journalist in Mladá Fronta Dnes increased the public visibility of what the ROI said at the press conference, but he did not report everything that was said. The TV host mentioned no other activity of the ROI, except for the threat of civil disobedience, and in the article this same point was fore-grounded. So, for both the TV host and the Mladá Fronta Dnes this was the salient activity, bound to the ROI. In our other studies, we have found that the Romany representatives in the Czech Republic had to resist Romanies being included in the collection ‘extremist groups’ – the activity of self defence invoking ‘extremism’ (see Leudar and Nekvapil 2000). In fact, K. Samková spoke of several other issues, as she also did at another ROI press conference. Here she constructed a collection of legislative acts, which according to her documented the ‘tendency towards state racism’. This collection contained not just the proposed antimigration law but also the nationality law.
(34) Práce 16/1/1993
The deputy chairperson of the ROI Klára Samková:
Racism exists
OSTRAVA (dav). ‘The elements of racism appear in every society, in Czech republic they are stronger than elsewhere. Today there appear even tendencies to state racism’ declared the deputy chairperson of the ROI Klára Samková at yesterday’s press conference in Ostrava.
She documented her assertion not just by the proposal of the antimigration law, but by other legislative acts. One is, for instance, the law concerning acquisition of citizenship. It sets up as one condition the knowledge of Czech language. ‘In this way the possibility of getting Czech citizenship was taken away from some tens of thousands of Romanies, who speak half Romany and half Slovak.’ [...]
The law proposed by the General Procurator was already attributed the predicate ‘racist’; now a new predicate is attached, ‘state racist.’
But what is the connection between the TV debate and the Mladá fronta Dnes article provided in (33)? It is possible that the journalist wrote the title of his article having seen the TV debate, even though the press conference preceded it. At the time in the Czech Republic, there were no Sunday papers and so Monday’s newspapers reported events which took place over the whole weekend. It is also likely that the TV debate increased the visibility of the press conference. The general point is, the sequencing of moves in a dialogical network is not simply a matter of their calendar temporal occurrence but also of media technology, social organisation and of the network logic.
This feature of media allows journalists to summarize Saturday's and Sunday's events in one article (and of course journalists can put together events which took place during one day). In doing this journalists take it that the events ‘go together’, but it is important to note the performative effect (of putting them together in a published article). Gathering events in collections, or arranging them in sequential structures is not a private insight, but something which may be performatively self-fulfilling. The way journalists connect events in their texts cannot be too ‘creative’ – it has to resonate relevancies which are real to others in the network. It is then highly likely that in setting up relevancies, journalists orient to previous or potential moves in the dialogical network. Their texts themselves may confirm that a dialogical network is not an arbitrary construct of the analysts. We have speculated that the Saturday's press conference of the ROI and the Sunday's TV debate 'go together', this on the basis of the conspicuous presentation of potential civil disobedience in both. In fact, the journalist set up the same relevancy – he reported both events, the TV debate and the ROI press conference in one article, together.
Five days after the TV debate another ROI press conference took place and it was reported in several national dailies. We are concerned with two questions. Did the ROI representatives orient themselves to the dialogical network? And did the journalists report it in terms of the same network?
(35) Lidové Noviny 16/1/1993
No trains with Romanies
OSTRAVA (mot) - The Romany Civic Initiative is not considering steps leading to civil disobedience, said the deputy chairman of the ROI JUDr. Klára Samková in Ostrava. If the trend, characterised by the ‘Jirkov notice’ and particularly the proposed anti-migration law should triumph, the ROI will turn to the EU and the UN. According to the information provided by the ROI, no trains with Romanies are heading from Slovakia to the Czech Republic, and the migration has not increased since the division of the State. The numbers concerned are in the order of hundreds of persons, but even they, together with criminal elements, are able to bring confusion to the places with concentrated criminality. Romanies have never been and never will be a stable population, said K. Samková. She rejected the idea of Romany villages and spoke for a complex solution to the Romany problem.
In the original Czech version, the phrase ‘steps leading to the civil disobedience’ are presented as something known, ‘context-dependent’ (Firbas, 1992). It is also conspicuous that in the Czech original, the phrase is the first theme of the article (leaving aside the catchy title). Recall that the potential appeal to civil disobedience was already voiced in the network several times. What is new at this point is that ROI does not consider civil disobedience. The first sentence of the article then denies something which was established in the network. To summarise the sequence: civil disobedience is threatened at the first press conference of the ROI, this is reported in newspapers and mentioned in the TV debate. It is now denied at the second ROI press conference, and this is reported in newspapers.
As we noted before, there are some similarities and some differences between conversational and network sequencing. The adjacency structures seem to be the same in terms of types of actions which are normatively mutually relevant. The difference is that an expected action, a projected slot, in a sequence may be filled by several unconnected participants. Here, for example, the ROI was not alone in rejecting the idea of Romany villages. In Leudar and Nekvapil (1998) we observed that denials in the network could be in response to indeterminate number of challenges.
We have seen that several network participants appealed to the government to resolve the problem. We will now briefly consider those newspaper articles which reported reactions of the government to these appeals. We have tentatively concluded that in dialogical networks there may be a definite adjacency sequence, but it may be impossible to tie a specific reaction to a particular antecedent ‘turn’. We shall see that this is the case for the government reaction – it seems to be to a distributed appeal, not to any token in particular.
(36) Mladá Fronta Dnes 12/1/1993
The criminality of Romanies will be dealt with by the government
Praha (jem) – The possibility that the government will give attention to the increased criminality in the north of the Czech Republic, was yesterday admitted by the director of the legislative office of the government Milena Poláková. […] According to her, the solution will probably require cooperation of the ministries of justice, interior and economy. […]
Meanwhile, the minister of the interior J. Ruml said yesterday that if the government will not be able to deal with the situation he will take the initiative himself. [...]
The journalist here reports and makes mutually relevant reactions by a member of the government and by a senior civil servant. The civil servant is reported reluctantly to accept the appeal to the government. The member of the government, however, undertakes to act himself if the government will not. The division of the government on this issue is made clear. The journalist is obviously active in constructing the events – he brings two reactions together and makes them mutually relevant, and moreover he re-formulates ‘the problem’. In the TV debate there was a tension between whether the problem was simply the Romanies or the social situation. Here the journalist takes a position and in his headline the problem becomes just the ‘Criminality of Romanies’, not the ethnic conflict or racism.
The specific action that the government eventually took was to send police troops to the affected districts.
(37) Mladá Fronta Dnes 13/1/1993
Police will be moved into north of Czech Republic
The Procurator is content with the results of his initiative
Praha (jem) – The transfer of police troops should begin from the next week to the places in the Northern Bohemia which are most endangered by the increased criminality. This was announced yesterday by the Minister of Interior of the Czech Republic Jan Ruml, following a meeting with the Czech Minister of Justice Jiří Novák, in which they were trying to find the way to ensure the security of citizens in the north Bohemian and Moravian districts. [...]
Jiří Šetina characterised the fact that the Czech government or its minister of interior Jan Ruml himself will be dealing with the increased criminality in the north of Moravia and Bohemia as a completely satisfactory outcome of his initiative towards the Czech parliament. He stated also that the proposal of the so called migration law, which he put before the deputies was in the first place a bold gesture. The office of the procurator used it to bring to attention the critical situation in the north of the Czech Republic. J. Šetina also admitted that now he would not have written in the first sentence of the exposé: the concentration of the Romany population, but of migrating population. He stressed also that the proposed law was to concern any citizen who restrict human rights and freedoms of others or disturbs public order. He therefore rejected the accusation that by his proposal he offended the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms.
The important aspect of the article is that the journalist joins the action of the government with reactions to it. In a face-to-face conversation one would expect a three-part sequence, such as appeal-response-acknowledgement. By analogy, here the reactions of those who originally appealed to the government might now be reported. This, however, does not happen, and instead the reaction of the proposer of the migration law, the General Procurator, appears. His proposal will clearly never become a law, but he is ‘completely content’ about the outcome. Consistent with his previous statements, he is categorising the proposed migration law as a ‘bold gesture’. (Recall that he referred to the town notices as ‘well meant provocations’.) He also clearly reacts to the numerous accusations in the network that he offended the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and that the proposed law was racist. Now he would have used a different language (but perhaps to say the same). If this is taken to be an ‘other initiated self repair’ then there is not just one initiator but many.
Concluding Remarks
We had three main aims here. One of them was to extend our work on how the media present Romanies in Central Europe. Our previous work addressed this issue in the settings of TV debates. We found that the category was contested, but the predicates bound to it by many Czech participants were negations of what they found positive about themselves (see Leudar and Nekvapil, 2000). Here we investigated the category Romany in debates about the proposed migration law and did so in various media of communication. Our task was to show what methods and resources participants used to present the law as sensible, adequate or flawed and racist. We found, again, that the arguments were based on the assumption that criminal activities are bound to the category Romany, and that Romanies are a source of social disorder. This default assumption was, however, contested by the Romanies and some Czechs. We were also interested in whether membership categorization analysis can be sensibly extended to objects other than persons without altering its concepts substantially. With respect to the proposed migration law, we found that the participants ascribed to it a number of ‘predicates’, depending on whether they were opponents or partisans of the proposal. The proposal was characterised alternatively as racist, but predicates such as ‘valuable initiative’ or ‘bold gesture’ were voiced by others. The proposed law was also grouped with other abstract objects in ‘collections’, such as ‘legislative acts displaying state racism’. The problem though requires systematic attention, especially to consider categorisation of actions.
Our second aim was to continue to develop the concept of ‘dialogical network’ which we have formulated in our previous work. The network we investigated here is not simply our invention, but something to which the participants themselves oriented. Does our work justify this conclusion?
One methodological problem we had was, where to start the analysis? We did so with the materials which were published on 6.1.1993, but why not, for instance, with something written on 8.1.1992. Another problem was, which materials to include in our analysis and which to leave out? Methodogically our working principle was to collect the events which the participants themselves make mutually relevant.
The central item, and the one which we in fact began this investigation with, was the television debate which took place in 10.1.1993. The participants themselves made relevant certain events, which we found were previously reported in the media. We then turned to those reports and found that they in turn mentioned other events. For instance, one event we included in our analysis was the press conference of the ROI on 9.1.1993. The participants in the TV debate reacted to what was said there and we took this to be evidence that the press conference was a part of the network.
As a consequence of our method, we included individuals in the network if they were ‘recruited’ by other participants – that is addressed by them or their actions mentioned. In this way, working backwards, we moved towards the beginning of the network. This included reports in several Czech national newspapers on 6.1.1993, which all concerned the proposal by the General Procurator of the Czech Republic to constrain migration of people in the Republic, and the Jirkov notice. In general, the inclusion of the materials in our analysis was determined by the concerns of participants themselves, and we only included those events which they themselves made relevant.
The temporal extent of the network was also sometimes indicated by the participants themselves. We want to stress now that the speakers and the writers of articles orient themselves at the dialogical network as an expanding interaction, which has past, present and future – that is as something which was taking place, and thanks to their verbal activities is just taking place, and which may have further (verbal) consequences. Our stress on the ongoing aspect of communication extends the approach of Eglin and Hester (1999) to analysing newspapers presentation of events.
Even though we show that the events in the network are presented as mutually relevant by the participants themselves, this does not mean that their position and ours as analysts are exactly the same. The position of participants is practical, ours is theoretical. The participants are not concerned with the network as a whole either.
So what did we find out about dialogical networks in this investigation? First, networks have thematic cohesion, in this case it was the migration law proposal. The cohesion was partly a matter of commonalities of expression, but also of re-used argumentative structures. The main glue, though, was the sequential structures. In terms of types, those we observed in the networks were the same as one finds in face-to-face conversations. The difference was that some slots in sequences could be filled by several contributions. These could be by different participants, and mutually contradictory.
One reason for introducing a new concept is that it makes understanding easier, another is that it turns attention to aspects of a phenomenon under study, which otherwise would not be obvious. Is the concept ‘dialogical network’ satisfactory in these terms? It certainly made clear the inter-textual character of the talk on public occasions, such as press conferences and political TV debates. We saw that sometimes participants were, so to speak, involved in two ‘conversations’ at the same time – with those present and those absent. The concept also made clear the way journalists composed their articles – in particular the contexts into which they put events they reported were to be understood in terms of the unfolding network.
The third main aim was to provide an alternative to the cognitive account of how the media affect their readers and viewers. Our argument was that it is unlikely that they do so by moulding private psychological attitudes, but rather by providing argumentative resources in the form of texts (see Leudar and Thomas, 2000, Ch. 8). So our strategy was to show how such texts are used in everyday conversations. We found that irrespective of the original intent in the text, the text was used in a locally occasioned manner to further the purposes of participants.
Transcription conventions used in the analysis of conversations
? rising
intonation
. falling intonation
, continuing intonation
: lengthening of the
previous syllable
(.) a very short,
still audible pause
(..) a longer pause,
(...) a long pause
- a cut-off of the
prior word or syllable
(but) items enclosed
within single parentheses are in doubt
( ) no words could be
distinguished in the talk enclosed within single parentheses
((with laughter)) in double
parentheses there is a comment by the transcriber
+ at this point the comment
is no more effective (mark of scope of the comment)
out underlining
indicates emphasis
[ ] the onset and
the ending of simultaneous talk of two speakers (overlap)
= subsequent utterance
follows without an audible pause (latching on)
X speaker who could
not be identified
… the utterance continues
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Jiří Nekvapil (email: nekvap@praha1.ff.cuni.cz) teaches sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, and pragmatics at the Department of General Linguistics at Charles University, Prague. His research interests are in the issues of language interaction. Recently he has published a number of papers dealing with the Czech mass media, interethnic relationships, and language planning in Central Europe. His current research focuses on language biographies of Czech Germans and ethnomethodologically informed analysis of media discourse.
Ivan Leudar is a Reader in Psychology at the University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, England, email I.leudar@manchester.ac.uk. His book Voices of Reason, Voices of Insanity was recently published by Routledge.