PUBLICATIONS

Narrative speech inevitably positions the narrator with respect to political and moral questions. One cannot help but attribute some socially-located voice or other to the characters one describes, and narrators inevitably take up some political or moral stance with respect to their characters. This is as true of political reporters as it is of everyday narrators. When reporting the speech of politicians, reporters inevitably select from among the things politicians say. And they implicitly evaluate the politicians being quoted.

This is not to accuse political reporters of unprofessionally failing to maintain objectivity. If by "objective reporting" we mean a reporter who takes no social position at all, I would argue that such a thing cannot happen. We should not accuse reporters of failing to meet this unreasonable standard. As a linguistic anthropologist I am interested, instead, in describing the linguistic resources through which reporters, like the rest of us, inevitably take political and ethical positions on the political candidates they cover. The publications in this section describe some of those linguistic resources.