Browsing by Author "Ahti, Ilona"

Animal activists have been criticized in the media ever since the animal rights movement was born in Finland in the 1990s. Justice for Animals filmed undercover footage of tens of Finnish pig farms in 2007-2011 and released the footage on A-studio, and on their website. The disturbing images caused a heated debate on factory-style farming and animal rights in Finland. The conduct of the animal activists was met with both praise and criticism. On one hand, they were seen as criminals, on the other hand, they were given the role of heroes, whose actions revealed shortcomings in the food production industry. The prevalence of narrative elements in television news has been debated, because they are not seen to have a clear plot or main characters. Traditional narrative methods often synthesize retrospective main narratives that hide counter-arguments and hierarchies. The deconstruction antenarrative method, instead, focused on the analysis of power struggles by examining substories. The research process aimed to examine the kinds of roles that Justice for Animals was given in the substories of Yle television news. The other research question asked what kinds of dramaturgical inequalities were found in the news stories. The data consisted of news stories from Yle Fem and Yle TV1 in December, 2009. The deconstruction method consisted of eight steps that broke the text down into dualisms and hierarchies, among others. The last step considered the grand narrative formed by the separate news stories. The analysis revealed that Justice for Animals was given contradicting roles even within the same news story. Some of the visual and verbal substories portrayed them as heroes, while others questioned their legitimacy. The drama analysis revealed three forms of dramaturgical inequality that were connected to capitalism, sexism and the drama between people living in cities and the countryside. The roles given to animal activists in television news were more positive than they were in the 1990s. Animal activists were not equated with criminals to the same extent, but instead they were even portrayed as heroes at times. This may be linked to the heterogenization of Finnish culture and changes in the media field. The most surprising result of the analysis was that there were such significant differences in the roles that Justice for Animals was given in the visual and verbal substories of Yle Fem and Yle TV1.