Beware of the Stereotype: Categories, Generalizations and Clichés in Journalistic Language and Journalism Practice

Rachel Sterken (University of Hong Kong) 

Generics and the Language of News

Generic generalizations (e.g., 'refugees strain public services', 'women are nurturing', 'tigers have stripes') are pervasive in journalistic language. Generics are linguistically distinctive: they make no precise commitment about how many members of a kind bear the given property, are acquired early and effortlessly, resist counterevidence, and readily transmit essentialist and normative assumptions about kinds. For these reasons an influential programme across linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science treats generics as a privileged vehicle of stereotyping and essentialising. Journalism, which trades fundamentally on generalizations about social groups, is a revealing test case for how generics function in public communication, yet the generic has attracted little attention from journalism studies. If generics are indeed a distinctive conduit of stereotyping and essentialism, journalism may not be merely reporting or describing the social world with generics, but may be implicated in entrenching the (problematic or harmful) generalizations the public comes to internalize.

This talk offers a survey and constructive proposal. It will survey the linguistic and cognitive profile of generics, and argue that the link between grammatical form and social harm is more complex than the standard stereotyping and essentialising view assumes: generics in news can be used to define kinds, negotiate what counts as characteristic of and ideal for them, and confer epistemic authority on the result. The issue is also one of representational and definitional power. Used normatively and definitionally, generics are an important, largely unnoticed mechanism by which journalism engineers categories and generalities. The upshot is methodological and practical: newsrooms should recognize their use of generics oftentimes as acts of conceptual and normative engineering. 

Bruce Mutsvairo (University of Utrecht)

Going back to the Basics: Championing Systemic Responsible Journalism in an age of Deep Societal Divisions 

With contemporary societies increasingly polarised, fragmented and stratified, the need for responsible journalism has become more critical than ever. Yet what counts as responsible journalism remains heavily contested. In an era dominated by political podcasters, social media influencers and so-called newsfluencers, the real difference that journalism can make is open to interpretation. Yet journalism’s role in modern societies should be incontestable: journalism should build communities, not break them. Accordingly, my talk seeks to draw our attention to journalism that goes beyond gatekeeping, fostering community cohesion with journalists taking the civic connectors role. It is journalism’s role, I argue, to organise itself in ways that makes it accountable to its audiences.  Specifically, I posit that it is not enough to call out stereotyping or rebuke prejudices when newsroom source lists are dominated by the same groups or individuals. This demand for accountability should target the entire journalism ecosystem including investors and owners, not just reporters. The talk highlights the importance of journalism that builds trust, holds power to account and promotes intersectional reporting. I argue that journalism should stand tall to protect democracy in the face of multiple adversaries that we face today. Furthermore, I champion journalistic interventions that prioritise public service rather than algorithmic validation. I show why in quest for neutrality and truth, journalism has often received criticism for dividing communities. I also highlight the dangers of sticking to one truth and suggest future pathways for centering journalism that promotes systemic responsible journalism. 

Building on its longstanding engagement with journalism theory and practice, the Brussels Institute for Journalism Studies (BIJU) launches its sixth international conference, devoted to the study of categories, generalizations and clichés in journalistic language and journalism practice. The conference is explicitly multidisciplinary and welcomes contributors from, among others, communication and media studies, discourse and conversation analysis, (cognitive) linguistics, corpus linguistics, translation studies, epistemology, social psychology, and the political and social sciences to share their insights with us on the way stereotypical representations, generalizations, and clichés occur in journalistic language and practice, and on how they are reproduced.

True to tradition, we approach our central theme from two angles: communication studies and linguistics. 

The relationship between ‘stereotype’ and ‘mass-mediated communication’ can be traced back to the term’s origins in the printing industry, a genealogy it shares with the notion of the ‘cliché’. Since then, stereotypes and clichés have come to signify processes of repetition, reduction and standardization in both everyday and scholarly discourse. Often credited with pioneering the idea of the ‘stereotype’ as a mental category – closely related to the concept of the ‘schema’ – Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion, already engaged with the interaction between journalism, public discourse and what was famously described as ‘the pictures in our heads’, over a century ago. 

Alongside a descriptive understanding of stereotypes as cognitive shortcuts fundamental to human communication, a critical perspective has foregrounded their reductionist, evaluative and potentially exclusionary effects. In this view, stereotyping is closely tied to power, inequality and ‘us versus them’ narratives structured around markers such as gender, race, nationality, culture or class. So understood, stereotyping intersects with broader themes of identity politics, social or epistemic (in)justice, hegemony, pigeonholing and disinformation. 

These issues persist in contemporary societies considering increasing affective polarization and antagonism as well as a heightened sense of (self-)reflexivity and critical awareness of positionalities and normative boundaries. Across both descriptive and evaluative interpretations, and whether occurring within or beyond news media, the meaningful yet complex relationship between stereotyping and social reality ultimately feeds into fundamental epistemological and ethical debates.

Given their intrinsic entanglement with processes of knowledge production, legitimation and public discourse, both descriptive and normative inflections of the ‘stereotype’ are closely entwined with journalism as an epistemic and socially situated meaning-making practice. From perspectives on news production, journalistic texts and audience reception, research has variously shown how standardized categories and generalizations function as structuring principles in news gathering, selection, representation and interpretation. These dynamics have acquired renewed urgency in a digital news environment characterized by speed, automation, algorithmic curation and efficiency-driven production processes.

Beyond – and closely related to – their role in journalism as a communicative practice, stereotypes also permeate the journalistic profession as a social field. As such, they variously affect newsroom organization, staff diversity and recruitment, shape (gendered) genre hierarchies of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ news, and confine role perceptions and task allocations. By the same token, at a meta-level, clichés about journalism and archetypical conceptions of journalists, are both reproduced and contested in the public imagination, influencing common perceptions of journalism and its public value, for better or worse. 

For a linguistic approach of categorization and generalization, the use of generic language will be worth examining. From a linguistic perspective, categorization and generalization are fundamental to meaning making. Generic language enables speakers and writers to refer to categories, formulate general claims and abstract from individual cases. This naturally entails the risk of overgeneralization and stereotyping, or drawing inferences based on overly limited observation, experience or evidence.

This conference aims to critically examine how journalistic language contributes to the formation, circulation and contestation of stereotypes and overgeneralizations, as well as how such processes shape journalistic knowledge production and public discourse.

Stereotypical or biased language in journalism, in connection with gender, religion, nationality, the generic use of pronouns like you and we, the way presuppositions and inferences are conveyed, these are just a few examples of what a linguistic approach to the topic of our conference can focus on.

• Linguistic Aspects of Expressing Point of View in Journalism (Language and Communication)
• The journalistic I: Mediating Subjectivity in Contemporary Journalism Practices (Journalism Practice) 
• Book volume News Values from an Audience Perspective
• What’s (the) News? Revisiting ‘News Values’ as a Concept and Methodology in the Age of Digital Networked Journalism (Journalism Studies)
• Post-truth and the political: Constructions and distortions in representing political facts (Discourse, Context & Media)
• Constructive journalism: Concepts, practices, and discourses (Journalism)
• Hybridity and the news: Blending genres and interaction patterns in new forms of journalism (Journalism)