British Newspaper Discourse The construction of news

British Newspaper Discourse

The construction of news

Functions of the headline

• Attract the reader’s attention to the story (or paper, if on the front page)

• Tell the reader what the story is about– summarising the content of the story– indicating the evaluation of the story– indicating the register of the story– indicating the focus of the story

Headline language: evaluation

• An emphatic triumph (Sun)

• A shattering blow (Mirror)

Headline language

• Specialised vocabulary

• Playing with words (puns)

• Creativity – metaphor / metonymy

• Playing with sounds

• Playing with knowledge

• Special grammar

Headline language: grammar

• ‘grammatical’ words omitted

• no verb

• present tense

• past participle

• to-inf for future

• extended noun phrases

Ambiguity

[police] squad helps dog bite victim

they help the person who was bitten by a dog

they help the dog to bite the victim

Headline ambiguities

• Crowds rushing to see pope trample 6 to death.

• Foot heads arms body

The construction of news

What gets in?

The construction of news

[t]he reporter does not go out gathering news, picking up stories

as if they were fallen apples, he creates news stories by selecting

fragments of information from the mass of raw data he receives

and organizing them in journalistic form.

(Chibnall 1982: 76)

Where does news come from?

News comes from a variety of sources

It then undergoes:

Selection, transformation and mediation

stance is a refracting and structuring medium

• Different newspapers and news broadcasts report differently, both in content and presentation

• They express affiliations and disaffections in the way they represent or mediate by means of transformation or differential treatment in presentation

• This is part of the social construction of news but before transformation and treatment there is the question of selection: the decision that something is worth including, is relevant

Selection : events become news when they are selected for inclusion in a

news report

• There is a difference between events that happen out there and ‘news’. News is not found or even gathered it is a creation of the journalistic process

• selection gives us a partial view of the world.

• texts come out of a context

so what makes an item newsworthy?

• Each source will have criteria for selection and choice of what is “newsworthy” or worth including

• it is a matter of certain criteria which have a gatekeeping function, filtering and restricting news input. a question of values known as news values

• According to Fowler(1991: 13) ‘the news media select events for reporting according to a complex set of criteria’ or values.

• The list includes conflict (war, controversy over issues), currency (of public concern), bizarreness (unusual), prominence (about prominent people), impact (number of people affected), proximity (who it affects and where it takes place) and timeliness (how recently it occurred) (Curtis 2011)

News values• Negativity

– Peace v war? disasters rather than triumphs• Immediacy /recency

– Breaking news v yesterday’s news? Single events rather than long processes• Proximity

– Small fire in town in Chile? Cultural proximity and relevance• Lack of ambiguity / simplicity

– Britney v Middle East easy to understand • Novelty

– Dog bites man v man bites dog? Unexpectedness and scarcity• Personalization

– Is there a human interest? To promote identification and empathy or disapproval• Eliteness

– George Bush v Donald Tusk elite people and nations• Others?? Composition intensity

(based on Bell 1998: 74)

changes

• Cardiff report on

• The quality and Independence of British Journalism

• Tracking the changes over 20 years

• Cardiff School of Journalism, media and Cultural Studies

Where news comes from

• Press release material is being used more often as a basis for

• articles, and phrases are frequently taken verbatim by the journalists from a

• limited number of press releases

• 60 percent of press articles come wholly or mainly from ‘pre-packaged’ sources

PR sources

• . The findings suggest that public relations often does much more than merely set the agenda: it was found that 19 percent of newspaper stories were verifiably derived mainly or wholly from public relations material, while fewer than half the stories appeared to be entirely independent of

• traceable PR

PR concerens

• . The most PR-influenced topic was health,

• followed closely by consumer/business news

• and entertainment/sport.

News imposes a structure

Not only is news judged during the selection process, it is then transformed ‘as it is encoded for publication’; news represents the world in language, and language is a semiotic code which ‘imposes a structure of values, social and economic in origin, on whatever is represented’ (Fowler 1991: 2-4

The news construct and values

Caldas- Coulthard (2003: 273) emphasises this point, stating that news is ‘not an objective representation of facts’, but a ‘cultural construct that encodes fixed values’.

Evaluation is pervasive in practically all forms of linguistic communication.

Once a topic is selected then the next thing…..

• Is who gets to speak:• news has to be gathered so there are a

number of sources, events and institutions which are frequently used as sources sometimes called ‘accessed voices’

• Sources monitored routinely: such as parliament, councils, police, emergency services, courts, diary events, royalty, airports, other news media

Accessed voices 2

• organizations issuing statements and holding press conferences (government departments, local authority departments, public services, companies, trade unions, non-commercial organizations, political parties, armed forces)

Accessed voices 3

• Individuals making statements, seeking publicity

• (prominent people, members of the public)

• The interesting thing is how they are introduced and how their words are used

Attribution and authorial endorsement

• The way accessed voices are reported is subject to the choice of the reporter

• the linguistic resources by which speakers/writers include, and adopt a stance towards, what they represent as the words, observations, beliefs and viewpoints of other speakers/writers.

Source specification

• how is the nature of the source specified?

• (personalized, impersonalized, institutional, named, anonymous, generalized, specific, generic, aggregate, collective, association)

Source status

• Sources are often associated with some level of status, authority or power in the current speech community (see accessed voices)

• source type has an impact and the type of source chosen indicates the values of the reporting source

Inclusion means evaluating relevance

• When a writer/speaker chooses to quote or reference the words or thoughts of another.

• By referencing the words of another, the writer, at the very least, indicates that these words are in some way relevant to his/her current communicative purposes.

• Thus the most basic intertextual evaluation is one of implied `relevance'.

extra-vocalisation – using others’ words

• There are a number of factors including the degree of authority which is indicated of the source and the degree to which the writer/speaker endorses (or dis-endorses) the attributed material.

• As X, perhaps the world's leading authority on Y, has demonstrated, ... (high authority / authorially endorsed, the writer indicates they share responsibility with the source for the proposition/proposal)

• X says that... (neutral with respect to endorsement) • Some Xs have claimed that...(dis-endorsed, author

disavows responsibility for the proposition/proposal)

Formulations of Attribution

• a range of variables, including the authoritativeness of the attributed source and the extent of authorial endorsement of the attributed proposition.

• An endorsement-neutral formulation such as `Some researchers argue...' is represented as simply one view among many.

• In contrast, endorsed formulations (for example, `As X has so compellingly demonstrated)

• the writer not only indicates their personal investment in the current argument, but adds to the argumentative force by representing the current view as one which is not theirs alone but one which is shared with, for example, the wider community or with relevant experts.

Disendorsement

• Even if writers/speakers choose to include what other people say they can also distance themselves from the utterance, indicating that they take no responsibility for its reliability.

• This is commonly done by the use of a quoting verb such as `to claim' and `allege', nouns such as ‘rumour’, adverbs such as ‘reportedly’.

Signalled choices?

• Does the writer indicate support for, acceptance of, or agreement with the views or observations provided by the attributed material?

• writers can either choose to remain neutral with respect to endorsement (neither endorsing or disendorsing)

• or they can choose to actively take a position (endorsing or disendorsing).

• The speech criticiesd those who falsely claim that Bush is just a Texas catle-rancher Disendorsement

• The Archbishop rightly describes the killing as evil. Endorsement

• The report demonstrates clearly

Endorsement

Responsibility

• Who is presented as taking responsibility for the utterance under consideration:

• sole responsibility (all unattributed material)

• no responsibility (as with dis-endorsed, attributed material)

• shared responsibility (with endorsed attributed material)

textual integration

• assimilation or insertion

• a clear separation between the words of the source and those of the source or whether the distinction has been blurred

• actual words

• or reformulation and paraphrasing

Direct and indirect quotation

• whether the writer purports to offer the reader the actual words of the attributed source or whether these have been reworked in some way, often with the result that the wording is more like that of the text than that of the original speaker/writer.

• At its most simple, this distinction separates direct quotation (where the attributed material is clearly separated from the rest of the text)

• and indirect quotation (where the words of the attributed are not so clearly demarcated and where there may be considerable paraphrasing.)

Indirect quotation

• through indirect speech of this type, the distance between external and the authorial voice is reduced.

• There is some degree of assimilation by the text of the attributed meanings.

• Such assimilation may be increased through the use of the various grammatical structures of attribution. (reporting verbs)

Attribution and text types

• There are marked differences between text types e.g. fiction vs. news reporting

• ambiguous attribution and blurred distinctions can be used for a series of rhetorical purposes

• the media also have a set of editorial rules regarding the accuracy of reporting

• in literary studies the distinction between indirect and free indirect speech has undergone a vast amount of research

Argumentative and persuasive genres

• the social purpose of these genres is to argue a case in such a way that the audience is convinced of the truth or merits of the viewpoint

• Exposition Thesis Arguments Reiteration• hard news is about events• comment is about issues and opinions• news which is created rather than just reported

can be part of a persuasive build up of argument