Kritik als erzählung über eine erzählung: Analyse von fernsehbeiträgen über waldzertifizierung anhand eines aktantenmodells narrativer semiotik

The article uses the narrative semiotics developed by Algirdas GREIMAS to analyze the deep semiotic structure of public delegetimation processes. The theory of narrative semiotics is applied to the analysis of the critical reports about the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) and two FSC certified companies Stora Enso and IKEA that were produced and broadcasted by the German public broadcasting networks. For these three organizations, their legitimacy and acceptance by consumers and stakeholders is extremely important. Empirically, the article analyzes three short reports that were broadcasted in the First German Television ARD (one of the two federal German public broadcasting networks) between February 2011 and August 2012. The article shows that the actantial model from GREIMAS' narrative semiotics can be applied to describe and explain these critical reports. According to this model, the reports can be seen as a critical story about a story. Thus, several levels in the reports can be identified (see Fig. 2). Actants are structural and functional roles or positions in a story: subject, object, sender, receiver, helper and opponent (see Tables 1-2 for story levels 1 and 2). The paper also describes how the reports relate to the actants on different narrative levels (see Fig. 1 and 3), as well a set of strategies that the journalists employ in order to make their critique credible and effective.