Author(s): Edina Špago-Ćumurija / Language(s):
Issue: 03/2008
This paper is only a short review of basic concepts that create a basis for communicative cooperation of CNN as a major US news network and American viewers. A parallel can be drawn between these concepts and values that entire American society is based on, and these are namely leadership, even globally, reliable, technically most advanced, one that enables and initiate changes, both traditional and also very modern, cool, and a news network (society) that listens carefully to messages of its recipients/members and reacts to their needs. Briefly, that network (society) is powerful.
In all this, relation it has with its customers is very personal, its message being directed toward each individual, every single recipient (who even has a name in the commercial on Mindy).
The very language used here is often at a needed level of denotation, appropriate to informative image, with minimum polysemy, except for the cases where a figure of speech, mostly metaphor, can be recognized as a conceptual category imprinted in human perception of the world.
As Bugarski (1975) said:
The doors of each culture can be opened with the key of its language. In certain sense, a network of cultural tendencies of one civilization has its register in language by which that civilization expresses itself. It is illusory to think that we are able to conceive characteristic shape of a culture by only observing it, and without help of its language symbolism.
Such a conceptual basis is a good trigger for memetic function of multiplying and copying of these values that can be linked with entire CNN image, including everything that is said, promoted and especially advertised, since memes are best hidden in adds that, by their own nature have a function of spreading and integrating themselves into lives of a great number of people that will accept them only if they recognize them as a well known, conventional sign.
It will be interesting in future work to look at a bigger picture of a communication code of American society reflected in adds by CNN, and how American values are integrated into (language) code of an advertising message, as well as how real is matching of traditional and modern American values in the code that is used by big news networks like CNN for communication with American and world citizens. Or, in case we all recognize American values as globally leading, where is a pragmatic basis for USA to meet a global inhabitant?
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