{"title":"Why news organizations “platform” illiberal politics: Understanding news production, economic insolvency, and anti-democratic pressure through CNN’s 2023 Trump Town Hall","authors":"Nikki Usher","doi":"10.1177/17504813241266584","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241266584","url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses how the economic insolvency of the contemporary mainstream media makes it particularly vulnerable to manipulation by illiberal political actors. Through a case study of CNN’s 2023 Trump Town Hall event, this article argues that democratic backsliding itself has become a potent constraint structuring news production routines and news decision-making. The metajournalistic discourse about the event maligned the role of CNN in “platforming” the former president, underscoring how platform logics have hijacked newsroom decision-making and news judgment. Journalists and other commentators pointed to the continuing power of Trump to dominate coverage and the continued inability of mainstream media to cover his threat to democracy via traditional norms of press/politics. Because news values continue to prioritize coverage of knowns over unknowns, news production routines highlight politicians with illiberal politics, who are in turn able to use the media’s discursive power to undermine democratic norms.","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142186842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Elizabeth Stokoe, Saul Albert, Hendrik Buschmeier, Wyke Stommel
{"title":"Conversation analysis and conversational technologies: Finding the common ground between academia and industry","authors":"Elizabeth Stokoe, Saul Albert, Hendrik Buschmeier, Wyke Stommel","doi":"10.1177/17504813241267118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241267118","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142186843","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Special issue of Discourse & Communication on news today: Introduction","authors":"Monika Bednarek, Teun A. van Dijk","doi":"10.1177/17504813241269212","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241269212","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142186870","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bridging the gap between conversation technology and conversation analysis","authors":"Robert J. Moore","doi":"10.1177/17504813241267092","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241267092","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-08-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142186629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Lenny the bot convinces you that he is a person: Storytelling, affiliations, and alignments in multi-unit turns","authors":"Marc Relieu","doi":"10.1177/175048132411271437","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/175048132411271437","url":null,"abstract":"This research delves into the world of conversation analysis, focusing on the unique conversational agent, Lenny. In contrast to most modern AI-based chatbots, Lenny employs a minimalistic approach, utilizing pre-recorded turns to engage with unsolicited callers and extend interactions. The study aims to dissect how Lenny’s long turns contribute to displaying ‘his’ personhood. By analyzing Lenny’s long turn in interaction, we uncover how it consolidates Lenny’s relatable character. Through analysis of a corpus of recorded interactions, the paper highlights the role of turn design in simulating human-like interactions. Ultimately, this research offers insights into the interplay between scripted content and human understanding in live conversations.","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142186631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"User practices in dealing with trouble in interactions with virtual assistants in German: Repeating, altering and insisting","authors":"Silke Reineke, Henrike Helmer","doi":"10.1177/175048132411271494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/175048132411271494","url":null,"abstract":"Moments of trouble and miscommunication occur regularly when users interact with virtual assistants like smart speakers. To add to the understanding of how users treat moments of trouble in everyday interactions with a virtual assistant (VA) in German, this paper reports on a conversation analytic study of practices that users deploy after a request to a VA has failed. The repair sequences that we analyse show users orienting to different trouble sources and employing a range of practices to resolve trouble, including repeating, altering their formulations and formulating related (new) requests. Most often, troubles are resolved after one instance of repair. Other repair sequences include several instances of repair and show more complex and diverse practices being employed. In some of these sequences, users ‘insist’ on their initial goal and/or strategy and do not always observably orient to the VA’s local reactions. In these cases, the interactional history with the VA and previously successful requests seem to play a role as well in the users’ local conduct.","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142186630","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The establishment and breakdown of trust in human-bot marketing calls","authors":"Rosina Márquez Reiter, Mandie Iveson","doi":"10.1177/17504813241266905","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241266905","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we explore human communicative behaviour in unsolicited commercial telephone calls between human telemarketers and ‘bots’ that exhibit human characteristics. Drawing on a corpus of recorded telephone conversations between telemarketers and a spam-interception service, we examine some of the communicative dimensions through which telemarketers make sense of their interactions with this technology as trust, or rather the illusion of it, is established, severed and restored. The analysis shows how trust is established early in the calls through an authentic human voice, the illusion of progressivity and purported intersubjectivity, including ‘doing-being-human’ excuses. In cases where telemarketers realise they had not been talking to a human, verbal abuse towards the bot, and expressions of surprise and embarrassment oriented to their professional face are articulated as the call is used as a training opportunity to identify bots. The article contributes to understanding some of the technology enabled contemporary communicative practices human beings engage in as part of their everyday lives. It raises questions about how humans negotiate trust and validate authenticity in an increasingly automated and technologically driven world.","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-08-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142186632","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Rejecting a robot’s offer: An analysis of preference","authors":"Lucien Tisserand, Heike Baldauf-Quilliatre","doi":"10.1177/17504813241271486","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241271486","url":null,"abstract":"Since the development of commercial robots dedicated to service or social encounters, there have been numerous appearances of such devices in public spaces or corporate buildings. However, their purpose might not be self-evident and the modalities for using it might not be self-explainable. Moreover, ‘talking’ to a robot that imitates a receptionist could raise practical problems, given the fact that ‘talk’ among humans is an interactional resource for performing actions that carry social dimensions. This paper focuses on the dimension of ‘preference organization’; specifically, offer rejections that are dispreferred among humans. Based on conversation analysis of human-robot interactions recorded in a university library, we examined 95 occurrences of how library users rejected offers of assistance initiated by a humanoid robot, Pepper. We identified three embodied rejection practices embedded in other courses of activity among groups of library users. Such practices show how users index their own orientation towards the transposition (or not) of human interactional norms that are borne with rejections as marked social moves.","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2024-08-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142186634","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}