“Crew, don’t go anywhere near this man!” the co-construction of celebrity and responsible capitalism in broadcast interviews with a chief executive officer
{"title":"“Crew, don’t go anywhere near this man!” the co-construction of celebrity and responsible capitalism in broadcast interviews with a chief executive officer","authors":"Lillian Boxman-Shabtai","doi":"10.1177/14648849241246932","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Celebrity CEOs espousing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are receiving increasing media attention. However, researchers have not yet examined how CEOs and journalists co-create meaning about CSR in broadcast talk, an unscripted genre of news making, rife with contestation and cooperation. This paper presents a Conversation Analysis of six interviews featuring Dan Price, a CEO who pledged to “solve income inequality” by restructuring salaries in his company. Findings suggest that CSR anchored a process of double branding in which the CEO promoted himself and journalists reaffirmed their news philosophy. Price’s warm embrace by journalists across the political spectrum demonstrates a collaborative process of “celebrification”. Price created a transferable persona that appealed, through a mixture of political targeting and strategic ambiguity, to diverse audiences. Journalists elevated this persona by serving pseudo-criticism and showing identification. The story thus provided corporate media with the opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to “responsible capitalism”.","PeriodicalId":51432,"journal":{"name":"Journalism","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.7000,"publicationDate":"2024-04-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journalism","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14648849241246932","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Celebrity CEOs espousing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) are receiving increasing media attention. However, researchers have not yet examined how CEOs and journalists co-create meaning about CSR in broadcast talk, an unscripted genre of news making, rife with contestation and cooperation. This paper presents a Conversation Analysis of six interviews featuring Dan Price, a CEO who pledged to “solve income inequality” by restructuring salaries in his company. Findings suggest that CSR anchored a process of double branding in which the CEO promoted himself and journalists reaffirmed their news philosophy. Price’s warm embrace by journalists across the political spectrum demonstrates a collaborative process of “celebrification”. Price created a transferable persona that appealed, through a mixture of political targeting and strategic ambiguity, to diverse audiences. Journalists elevated this persona by serving pseudo-criticism and showing identification. The story thus provided corporate media with the opportunity to reaffirm their commitment to “responsible capitalism”.
期刊介绍:
Journalism is a major international, peer-reviewed journal that provides a dedicated forum for articles from the growing community of academic researchers and critical practitioners with an interest in journalism. The journal is interdisciplinary and publishes both theoretical and empirical work and contributes to the social, economic, political, cultural and practical understanding of journalism. It includes contributions on current developments and historical changes within journalism.