British Newspaper Discourse

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British Newspaper Discourse

• The construction of news

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Functions of the headline

• Attract the readers 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

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Headline language evaluation

• An emphatic triumph (Sun)
• A shattering blow (Mirror)

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Headline language

• Specialised vocabulary
• Playing with words (puns)
• Creativity metaphor / metonymy
• Playing with sounds
• Playing with knowledge
• Special grammar

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Headline language grammar

• grammatical words omitted
• no verb
• present tense
• past participle
• to-inf for future
• extended noun phrases

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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
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Headline ambiguities

• Crowds rushing to see pope trample 6 to death.
• Foot heads arms body

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The construction of news

• What gets in?

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The construction of news

• the 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)

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• Where does news come from?

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News comes from a variety of sources

• It then undergoes
• Selection, transformation and mediation

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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

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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

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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

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• 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)

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News values

• Negativity
• Peace v war? disasters rather than triumphs
• Immediacy /recency
• Breaking news v yesterdays 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)

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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

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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

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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

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PR concerens

• . The most PR-influenced topic was health,
• followed closely by consumer/business news
• and entertainment/sport.

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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

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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.

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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

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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)

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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

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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.

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Source specification

• how is the nature of the source specified?
• (personalized, impersonalized, institutional,
  named, anonymous, generalized, specific, generic,
  aggregate, collective, association)

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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

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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'.

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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)

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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.

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• 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.

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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.

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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).

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• The speech criticiesd those who falsely claim
  that Bush is just a Texas catle-rancher Disendor
  sement
• The Archbishop rightly describes the killing as
  evil. Endorsement
• The report demonstrates clearly Endorsement

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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)

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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

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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.)

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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)

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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

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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