Are they talking to us? A study of the authoritarian discourse of the Financial Times

This paper describes a work in progress which aims to demonstrate how one example of the specific domain of financial journalism is increasingly employing a more monologic authorial style, in which the writers communicate their knowledge and ideas, employing discourse structures which reduce or eliminate aspects of discourse which typically serve to create a textual relationship between writers and readers. The work arises from previous research in which the case was argued for considering the Lex column in the Financial Times (FT) as a genre in its own right (Anderson 2007), basing its definition of genre on Bhatia (1993), “a recognisable communicative event characterised by a set of communicative purpose(s) identified and mutually understood by the members of the professional or academic community in which it regularly occurs. Most often it is highly structured and conventionalised with constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their intent, positioning, form and functional value” (Bhatia; 1993:3). The Lex column has evolved stable discourse features which make it a recognisable communicative event and the textual pattern facilitates its communicative goals of analysis, comment and evaluation. During the research into the Lex column we noted a shift to an increasingly more authoritarian discourse style. In order to investigate whether this shift was also taking place in other established areas of financial journalism, we decided to analyse the editorial section from the FT.