Bakhtinian aesthetics and authorship in the journalism of National Public Radio

This dissertation is an application of Mikhail Bakhtin's literary theory to the reporting of three correspondents for National Public Radio. Bakhtin's work is well suited for the analysis of journalism because his theories call attention to the vital role that authorship and aesthetics play in all communicative situations---including the news text---while encouraging a healthy respect for generic, technological, and other constraints---the context---within which all communicators labor. In turn, public news broadcasting is particularly fitting for a Bakhtinian analysis, in that Bakhtin's ideas about the power dynamics within language help us to better understand what role a public media institution can play in a landscape dominated by for-profit corporations.;An analysis of the 'heteroglossia' (similar to the 'dialects' of English) within the broadcasts of correspondents Nina Totenberg, Ari Shapiro, and David Greene reveals that Bakhtin's arguments about the appearance of everyday speech in literature are not unique to the genre of the novel: journalism is constructed from the same building blocks as modern prose literature and as such has the same approaches to representing language that some of the most revered modern authors of fiction have had. A Bakhtinian critique of the differences between the types of syntax correspondents choose to use when reporting the speech of sources reveals that there are ways in which some sources are granted the authority to present their perspectives as valid (i.e., as credible), while others are denied that authority and as a result do not have their perspectives represented in a way that would encourage audiences to take them seriously. Furthermore, a careful examination of the aural qualities of reporters' 'monophonic' intonations, which are not as homogenous as might be assumed, demonstrates that the diffusion of authority within a dialogic aesthetic can either be reinforced or undercut by a polished delivery style. Thus without a consideration of the aesthetics of reported speech, both syntactically and aurally, granting access to an individual or a group to voice their perspectives within a news report isn't by itself sufficient to grant those voices the authority necessary to make their inclusion meaningful.