Multimodal News Text

Mary Macken-Horarik has explored the how multimodal grammar ought to allow us to understand composite texts that produce meaning in its interaction with visual, verbal, typographic and layout. She explains that a great number of political argumentation channeled through media is depending on its effectiveness on visual data. She uses the events leading up to the second Gulf War, where the United States used visual ‘evidence’ of Iraqi ‘dishonesty’ in relation to their interests in weapons of mass destruction. She illustrates that the photos taken of the camouflaged bunkers would have not made much impact without the verbal clarification.

Macken-Horarik elucidates the powerful effect that lies in the interaction between communicative resources, and she belives that it is linguists have a responsibility to develop tools for analyzing multimodal texts. By looking at an interoperation of news created being a direct result of the interaction between a photograph and story. A great misuse of multimodal text was committed by an international news agency Central News Network (CNN) in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001. While verbal text explained the reaction of people across the world were diverse, but most were shocked by the horrific event developing in New York and Washington, a short visual motion picture was shown by a Palestinian woman eating cake and jumping for joy. Later it was exposed that the short video of this woman was recorded long before the events of 9/11.

The author has looked into Michael Clyne’s analysis of the linguistic dimension of hatred agains asylum seekers. He has investigated the narrowing of terms for refugees and also the excluding terms used, such as ‘illegal refugees, ‘queue jumpers’ or ‘illegals’. In Norway, similar use of multimodal is used by the media, where if an person with immigrant background commits any criminal act is referred to as ‘Man, 19, with immigrant background’. However, if an ethnic Norwegian commits the same crime, the media referrers to the case as ’Boy, 22’ or ’young man’.

She goes into more detail with the affair of ‘children overboard’ incident from Australia, however I feel that the Bush-administrations use of multimodal text in the UN, where Colin Powell gave the story which complimented the satellite pictures and 3D animations, is the best example.