The 'other’s' gaze: the discursive construction of journalists’ profes-sional identity across Italy and the US

The book combines the tools of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis in the attempt to investigate the discursive construction of professional identity on the part of journalists from Italy and the United States of America. More specifically, the ultimate objective of the study is to examine the discursive resources enabling journalists to construct their professional persona as experts exerting their authority in a community of practice, while they gaze at the ‘other’. In this case, this ‘other’ is represented on the one hand by Italy in the gaze of the United States of America, and on the other hand by the US from Italy’s lookout point. The analysis thus focuses on news articles from quality papers from Italy and the United States where each other’s country is represented. With this primary aim in mind, the volume is intended to address the following leading questions: i. How is the ‘other’ (Italy in the US and the US in Italy) represented? ii. How do journalists use language in order to craft their professional identity as they observe the ‘other’? iii. How is this operation subtly encoded in the language of texts traditionally credited with a balanced recount of facts, i.e. news articles?The volume offers linguistically-grounded insights about the professional ethos of journalists from both sides of the Atlantic as they use language in looking at each other: for instance, the study of verbal tools and nominalisations in context reveals that American and Italian journalists tend to converge towards a range of well-established resources to encode their professional identity into discourse, even if they project distinctive images of themselves because they appear committed to divergent views of political credibility (as for American journalists), and sticking to consolidated expectations about the ‘other’ (as with Italian news articles). In addition, the analysis is extended to other key-features informing the discursive practices reflected by collected news articles, namely stance adverbials and other evaluative markers, and the role of headlines as a strategic component of the writer’s strategy of ‘other’-representation. Finally, the book discusses the findings by highlighting the striking elements of continuity in the data: the cline from markers of authorial distance from the reported news items, to the gradually neater emergence of the writer’s willingness to step into text, thus narrowing the purported gap between news articles and editorials