| During the Iraq War, half of Americans reported turning to local television news for their information about the war. This loyalty to local news, even during times of national or international news stories, is often attributed to the existing parasocial relationship between viewers and newscasters. However, this explanation is applied generically to local news regardless of the event being covered, limiting the insights to more complex viewer-text relationships that may exist within local news during times of national crisis.; In an attempt to better understand these possible relationships, this dissertation examined the subject positions constructed by local television news' coverage of the Iraq War from March 18, 2003, to May 2, 2003. Based on a cultural studies/semiotic approach, this project analyzed textual codes of the newscasts to identify the perspectives from which they encouraged viewers to interpret news stories. These codes can be organized into three categories: codes constructing viewers' relationship to textual actors (newscaster mode of address and character portrayal), codes constructing viewers' position in relationship to textual elements (story topic/setting, visual symbols, camera point of view, and ambient sound), and codes structuring absence (signs absent from the frame). This analysis resulted in the identification of ten subject positions that repeated across stories with similar patterns used in the construction of object/subject relationships.; The findings suggest that all ten subject positions correspond with possible viewer feelings of helplessness related to the war. Some of the constructed subject positions afforded viewers an opportunity for action and, thus, agency, offering the potential to alleviate feelings of physical helplessness. Some offered relief from feelings of intellectual helplessness by reducing behavioral and cognitive uncertainty. Other subject positions potentially reduced emotional helplessness by emphasizing a unity-community perspective. This insight into the viewer-text relationship of local news presents a more complex understanding of how subject positions might function and offers one more vantage point from which to approach, analyze, critique, and understand the local news process. |
