What Was Said? A Discourse Analysis of a Famous Finnish Radio Journalist’s Virtuous Monologues

The aim of this article is to study a well-known radio journalist and media-educator Hannu Taanila’s radio programs in a state-owned Finnish Broadcasting Company. Hannu Taanila is an influential media person whose radio programs were famous and popular. This article concentrates on Hannu Taanila’s radio monologues. The research data includes 16 radio programs broadcast in 2005. Each program lasted for 45 minutes and all of them were recorded, transcribed, and analysed by discourse analysis. This article focuses on describing and discussing this famous radio speaker’s image, his language and editorial practice: What kinds of interpretative discourses did Hannu Taanila construct in his radio speeches and which were his positions of media education in his radio program? The results of this research show, that the radio as a public media still has the possibility to fulfil the basic educational purposes of national broadcasting.