Broadcast Talk

Paddy Scannell worked for many years at the University of Westminster (London) where he and his colleagues established, in 1975, the first undergraduate degree program in Media Studies in the UK. He is a founding editor of Media, Culture and Society which began publication in 1979 and is now issued six times yearly. He is the author of A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1939 which he wrote with David Cardiff, editor of Broadcast Talk and author of Radio, Television and Modern Life. He is currently working on a trilogy. The first volume, Media and Communication, was published in June 2007. Professor Scannell is now working on the second volume, Television and the Meaning of ′Live.′ The third volume, Love and Communication, is in preparation. His research interests include broadcasting history and historiography, the analysis of talk, the phenomenology of communication and culture and communication in Africa.

This volume demonstrates the relevance of talk and its analysis to understanding the communicative process in television and radio. As the contributors to this book illustrate, the study of talk on radio and television addresses central questions of how institutional authority and power are maintained, how the media construct audiences and how audiences make sense of programme output. In terms of styles of discourse, the book covers the range of broadcast talk, both formal and informal. Theoretically, it draws on ideas from discourse and conversational analysis, pragmatics and critical linguistics, and on the ideas of Goffman, Garfinkel and Habermas.