Analyzing Verbal Narratives in TV News and Commercials
Content analysis is one of the most frequently used research tools by mass communication scholars, along with survey research and experiments. While the range of content analysis topics has been wide, two content areas that have received considerable attention have been news and advertising.1
Traditional content analysis has employed manual reading/viewing of content by multiple coders, followed by inter-coder reliability checking to assure that the coders are applying the coding categories and definitions in consistent and replicable ways. The entire process is slow and highly labor intensive, thus placing pragmatic limitations on the amount of content analyzed. It is understandable, therefore, that many scholars have been switching to computerized analysis of textual material. This chapter will review the successful use of one such software program, DICTION 5.0 and 6.0, as well as one other program, to analyze network TV newscasts for political bias, and also to analyze rhetorical choices in a large sample of presidential campaign commercials.
Both of these mass communication areas, TV news and TV commercials, are naturally assumed to be heavily visual in terms of information---and their texts or narratives are assumed to be relatively unimportant. Intuitively, TV content on the surface, would not seem to be a good area in which to conduct lexical analyses. This chapter will argue that the lexical content of TV news and commercials is often at least as important as the visual content, and for some research purposes, it is more important.