Vox Pop Research Articles

Applied Linguists and Institutions of Opinion

Public opinion research is not an area that has received much attention from applied linguists. But language lies at the heart of the procedures used to define, elicit, and report opinions, whether through such methods as polling, interviews, and focus groups, or through the less obvious channels of vox pop interviews, letters to the editor, radio phone-ins, or public hearings. In this paper I consider ways in which work in language studies—by linguists, conversation analysts, and social psychologists—might help us understand, improve, or question these procedures, and also give a new perspective on what opinions are. The relation of this new perspective to existing knowledge of academic and professional practitioners in the field may have parallels in other applications where applied linguists encounter experienced professionals and large organizations. Institutions of opinion feed back into political processes, so it is important that we consider them, not only as researchers and professionals, but also as citizens.

A LITERARY VOX POP

Literary vox pop looks at the reception of South African novels in the British market, explores possible reasons behind the current limitation in the export of titles from South Africa to Britain and suggests directions and changes in writing practice and attitude that might ameliorate this situation. The paper takes into account a number of recently published novels, reviews of the novels and interviews with publishers and agents whose opinions and engagements have a bearing on South African literature. It argues that South Africa is inextricably connected to a sense of the mundane yet simultaneously suffers from a sense of national shame. The moral confusion of South Africa’s contemporary problems has not made her literary output popular. The paper also examines negative attitudes within South Africa about publishing abroad. In conclusion it suggests that the development of a new post‐apartheid identity in South African writing is essential but South Africans should be aware of the danger of alienating themselves from their own experiences by “writing for strangers”, i.e. writing primarily with international publication in mind.

The Media Representation of Public Opinion: British Television News Coverage of the 2001 General Election

This article examines the ideological assumptions and consequences of the media representation of public opinion through a study of television news coverage of the 2001 British general election. It discusses how a certain type of poll (the voting intention or ‘horse-race’ poll) is privileged, while other types of opinion surveys are ignored. But it also identifies less obvious means through which public opinion is invoked. First, casual and often unsubstantiated assertions about the attitude of the public are regularly made by anchors, reporters or politicians. Second, the views of individual members of the public are made to stand in for public opinion overall, either through vox pops or through the interaction of members of the public with politicians on the campaign trail. The article concludes that the consequence of the media representation of public opinion in the 2001 British general election campaign is to legitimize the hegemonic definition of politics as a sport played by political and media elites, thus reducing citizens to the limited and passive role of spectators.

The 2000 US Presidential Election in Salon .com and the Washington Post

This article examines the contentious post-election discourse that followed the balloting in the 7 November 2000 US presidential election. More specifically, I discuss the post-election coverage in two news media: the venerable Washington Post and the upstart internet daily Salon .com. In developing a comparison between the two, I characterize media-state relations in the US and, second, tease out differences between "old" and "new" media. With these explanatory frameworks in place, I compare the two media with respect to the degree of formality that they present in their coverage of the post-election, the extent to which they do or do not adopt "vox pop" and "insiderly" storylines, and their respective critiques of media as media. The article then directly addresses the content of each publication's coverage of the post-election. I argue that, along with channeling some of the "legitimate controversies" that circulated around the post-election, Salon exceeded the Post in developing an explanatory framework in the aftermath of 7 November. Alongside some op-ed words of circumscribed criticism, the Post closed ranks and garnished the Supreme Court's favorable decision for George W. Bush with legitimacy. By contrast, several of Salon 's op-ed pieces addressed their critique to a multidimensional right-wing effort to dictate the political weather with strict construction of the constitution as its final instrument.

The Anti-Racism Radio Show: Steps to an ecology of culture

This paper describes the process of developing an anti-racism project with South Sydney Youth Services (SSYS) as part of the author's work as an English/ESL/ Drama teacher at Cleveland St High School in inner Sydney, which has some 60% Aboriginal and 20% Islander students. The work is framed in the context of a cultural ecology as a way to approach the unity in diversity issue of multiculturalism, by drawing attention to the relationship between culture and the landscape. With some 20 students from Years 9 and 10, the author planned to run a series of workshops and to include a cultural camp where they would visit Aboriginal Sacred Sites and have an opportunity for more intense work. The leaders imagined that the students would write radio plays, songs, poems, conduct interviews, vox pops, and consider strategies for dealing with racism. In the end they would produce a half-hour radio show that would be recorded on CD and played on Radio Skid Row , a local community radio station. All the participants would end up with their own CD. Two other objectives of the project were: to teach strategies for dealing with anger and conflict non-violently, especially in relation to their experience of racism; and to teach the techniques that are necessary for producing a radio show. The Anti-Racism Radio Show developed its own self-organising system through the workshop process. In particular, the project allowed the participants to become more aware of their 'ecology of culture'. It helped to challenge both the alienation and the shame that arise from racism. Above all, it provided a group of inner city youths, who are often classified as 'at risk', with a voice to communicate something of their thoughts, feelings and stories to the wider community - a voice that spoke of the branches of racism as well as its roots and causes. An ancient pond A frog jumps in The sound of water Basho

Radio reader: essays in the cultural history of radio

1. Re-Thinking Radio Michele Hilmes 2. Radio and Political Transition: Public Service, Propaganda and Promotional Culture Kate Lacey 3. Critical Reception: Public Intellectuals Decry Depression-era Radio, Mass Culture and Modern America Bruce Lenthall 4. Retuning the Farm: Rural Radio Listening and the State in Wisconsin, 1920-1932 Derek Vaillant 5. Vox Pop: Network Radio and the Voice of the People Jason Loviglio 6. The Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt: Regulation and Irregular Sexuality in Golden Age Radio Comedy Matthew Murray 7. Man of the Hour: Walter A. Maier and the Religion by Radio on the Lutheran Hour Tona Hangen 8. Scary Women and Scarred Men: Radio Suspense Drama, Gender Trouble and Postwar Change (1943-1948) Allison McCracken 9. Radio's 'Cultural Front' 1938-1948 Judith E. Smith 10. Radio and the Political Discourse of Racial Equality Barbara Savage 11. A Dark(ened) Figure on the Airwaves: Radio, Racial Representation and The Green Hornet Alexander Russo 12. American Radio Propogandists for the Axis Powers William F. O'Connor 13. Bells of Freedom: American Influenced Radio Programming during the Allied Occupation of Japan Susan Smulyan 14. Before the Scandals: The Radio Precedents of the Quiz Show Genre Jason Mittell 15. The 'Radio-Active Housewife': Suburban Consumers, Cold War Homes, and the Demise of Daytime Serials in the Age of Television Jennifer Wang 16. Radio, Music, Culture and Business in Transition: 1947-1962 Eric Rothenbuhler 17. Turn On ... Tune In: The Rise and Demise of Commercial Underground Radio Michael Keith 18. National Public Radio and the Idea of Public Service Jack Mitchell 19. The Alienation of the Public from Public Radio: The Low-Power Alternative Paul Riismandel 20. Scanning the 'Stations of the Cross': Christian Right Radio in Post-Fordist Society Paul Apostolidis 21. Black Liberation Radio John Fiske 22. Talk Talk Susan Douglas 23. Radio's Digital Future: Preserving the Public Interest in the Age of New Media Michael McCauley

A fair deal?

A pay rise of 3.6 per cent plus other increases may help recruitment, but the nurses in our vox pop are not impressed with this year's pay review body recommendations

Entitlement and sincerity in broadcast interviews about Princess Diana

Vox pop interviews were used extensively in British broadcast coverage of the death and funeral of Princess Diana. They were one of several ways that public expression of emotion was defined as an important part of the events of the week. Some commentators criticized this attention to the public response, rather than on new information and formal events, as an excessive and sentimental part of a loss of proper perspective. This criticism raises two issues in the relation of media events to everyday experience - entitlement of members of the public to feel overpowering emotion at the loss of someone they knew only through media, and the sincerity of expressions of emotion when ordinary people are faced with microphones and a camera. I argue here that such criticisms miss the ways interviewees packaged their responses with an awareness of just such criticisms. Interviewees showed entitlement by presenting themselves as speaking for ordinary people, linking their responses to the place and time, and tying their stories into their everyday activities or to historic events. They showed sincerity by presenting their feelings as atypical for them, by acknowledging apparent clichés, and by emphasizing Diana's own sincerity. Analysis of interviewees' reflexive sense of performance shows how `intimacy at a distance' can make public involvement a component of media events.

Vox Pop conference in London

Vox Pop conference in London

Vox Pop: Degree Showdown

Vox Pop: Degree Showdown

Vox Pop: Curate's Egg

Vox Pop: Curate's Egg

Vox Pop: Your Art in Their Hands

Vox Pop: Your Art in Their Hands

Vox Pop: Irish Days

Vox Pop: Irish Days

Vox Pop: Art of Participation

Vox Pop: Art of Participation

Technological Metaphor and Social Control

N 1969, during the big student demonstrations in Washington, the BBC showed a television news sequence (I think it originated in CBS). The sequence consisted mainly of edited clips of vox pop interviews with middle-aged bystanders, who talked about the demonstrations as a healthy letting off of steam by the young, a valve to relieve society's pressures, and so on. But the final clip was of one of the student leaders, addressing the crowd: You've heard them all say we're the safety valve-but I say they're dead wrong. We're the explosion! In recent years, there has been a notable increase in interest among philosophers of science in the cognitive functions of metaphor.' The process whereby we construe an uncertain, obscure, or puzzling area of experience in terms of one both familiar and apparently (in at least some respects) similar, the displaced pattern acting as a metaphorical redescription of the unfamiliar, has been shown to be central to many key scientific innovations.2 Technological devices are significant com-

Let Us Stop Teaching Imaginary Languages

N OT long ago an advertisement in a magazine represented two tough characters burglarizing a warehouse in the middle of the night. The leader was demonstrating to his colleague that some of the merchandise bore the label of the advertiser's brand and some did not, and he was earnestly instructing the novice: Don't take nuttin' widout dis label! The advertisement carries, to teachers of languages, a message besides the one that the advertiser's brand is the best. Three words used by that burglar--nuttin', widout and dis-will not be found in any English dictionary. Oh, of course all Americans recognize them easily as merely substandard or ignorant pronunciations of nothing, without and this. But suppose English were not your native language and you had not been brought up in a place where the two forms of each word presented themselves in comparison for your unconscious assimilation. Would you identify them so easily? Suppose by dint of study and practice you had learned to comprehend the English words nothing, without and this; would you automatically understand nuttin', widout and dis? You certainly would not. For you they might as well be totally different words; and for all you could understand of the conversation of the tough character who used them, he might almost as well be talking Gaelic as English. These three words are, of course, merely symbolic of a whole system of pronunciation characteristic of the English of our tough character and people like him. Now, we who are in charge of foreign language instruction in schools seem always to have gone on the assumption that individuals who do not use the pronunciation of their language--the usage of the cultured and educated-are deservedly ignored. But the awkward fact is that what is called the standard pronunciation of a language is always the pronunciation of a very small minority of its native speakers. Listen to radio programs like Candid Microphone and Vox Pop and, comparing the talk of the speech-trained interviewers with that of the ordinary people interviewed, even a phonetically untrained ear will notice that the speech of the average American is amazingly different from even the American of English pronunciation. Now the points I want to emphasize are: first, even slight differences in pronunciation levels, of which the native is not even conscious, mean for the foreigner very appreciable differences in comprehension; second, the present tradition of attuning the student's ear only to the standard pronunciation

Vox Pop Can Pilot Your Paper

Vox Pop Can Pilot Your Paper

Vox Pop Can Pilot Your Paper

THE BASIC idea behind any newspaper readership survey is to bring the audience before the editors as a committee of the whole and from it learn how the paper is meeting the readers' needs. Since it is questionable whether the customary newspaper survey does this well, the present plan is offered. It is based on many conferences with editors and publishers and on five years of magazine readership study where improved technics are used.

Vox Pop in the Classroom

Vox Pop in the Classroom