It’s Time to Do News Again: the Case of RT USA show “The News with Rick Sanchez”

What is it about?

Abstract: The study analyses the RT USA show “The News with Rick Sanchez” to identify persuasive and manipulative communication strategies realised by the host’s integration of speech and co-speech gestures. What cognitive systems, conceptual processes and schemas does the speaker employ to construct and communicate viewpoint? What linguistic and gestural units enable certain viewpoint construction? What role does social context play in the interpretation of these units? After a quantitative overview of the use of body-directed and related outwarddirected gestures in 180 minutes of RT recordings, the study offers a fine-grained qualitative analysis of viewpoint construction behind four situations from these RT data. It develops an advanced cognitive-linguistic approach anchored in conceptual blending (Fauconnier and Turner 2002) and the cognitive system of force dynamics (Talmy 1988, 2000). The study argues that this approach is successful in revealing speech-gesture integrations as triggering viewpoint blending for the purpose of manipulation and is useful for transferring manual qualitative analysis to analysis at scale. Keywords: multimodal communication, media, RT USA show host, co-speech gesture, body-directed gesture, viewpoint blending, force dynamics, multimodal viewpoint blending triggers

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