Between Fact and Fiction: Semantic fields and Image Content in Crime Infotainment programs

Gaëlle Ferré (1)

1 LLING - Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes

Crime infotainment is a hybrid type of television program in which each episode is based on a real criminal case and presented to the audience under the form of a reconstructed narrative. Research has shown that although violent crime is ubiquitous in other types of media, leading to an over-representation of violent content, crime infotainment is the most fear-inducing type of media as compared with newspaper coverage and television crime drama. This leads people to believe their lives are at risk and they consequently support cultural conservative politics of anti-crime measures which are excessive considering the risk. It is therefore important to understand how crime infotainment content is built to induce fear. Adopting the framework of Ideological Discourse Analysis developed by van Dijk (1995a, 1995b, 2006), the study presented here proposes an analysis of three French infotainment stories, comparing the semantic fields in their speech with the semantic fields developed in related newspaper articles. The study also proposes an analysis of image content in infotainment which leads us to the conclusion that the blurring of the lines between what is presented as (discursive) fact or (imagistic) fiction may well have a consequent impact on the audience.

Mots clés: Crime infotainment; semantic content; multimodality; Ideological Discourse Analysis

Domaines: Linguistique

Gaëlle Ferré. Between Fact and Fiction: Semantic fields and Image Content in Crime Infotainment programs. Multimodal Communication, 2016, 5 (2), pp.127-141. ⟨10.1515/mc-2016-0018⟩. ⟨hal-01422539⟩