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Biennale 1° anno: Ling. e Lett. Euro. Americ
Newspaper discourse: outline of all lessons presented
(A.A. 2014-15, and previous A.A)
LESSON 1
INTRODUCTION TO NEWSPAPER DISCOURSE (RICHARDSON 1-26)
1.
Newspaper Types
• Local / National Daily / Weekly / Sunday.
• Upmarket / Quality / Broadsheets
• Midmarket
• Red tops / tabloids
2.
Google: ABC (Audit Bureau of Circulation)
Richardson p.81: Social class of readerships
3.
Key points
Journalistic discourse has:
1) Specific relations to society
2) Specific types of text production and consumption
3) Specific textual characteristics
3. 1) Specific relations to society
i. Diffusion
(New media language airchson, white book 16) Probably the most read of all
written texts (less so today coz of on line newspapers – read in a different
way). Media in general: representation of the world . What effect does the
news media have on us?
Spatial compression: can view people on the other side of the world (in
Australia), or in dangerous places close up even though we’re distanced from
them. Hostile, dangerous places are domesticated.
Time compression: the reduction of the time between an event and its
reporting. Television news and online newspapers: events can be reported in
minutes.
Newspapers discourse is evaluative discourse. Support certain values:
nationalism, covert racism. Influence our beliefs, values and ideologies. Person
A deliberately kills Person B. Is person A a terrorist or a freedom fighter.
Journalists decide these meaning categories for us, and we usually accept these
meaning categories without questioning them.
ii. Audience design
Fairclough lanfg and powr 41,128: Newspapers address an ideal reader,
somebody who thinks and behaves in a certain way. Actual readers have to
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negotiate a relationship with this ideal reader. Feeling when reading a
newspaper that it’s not addressed to you -- it’s addressed to another kind of
reader.
iii.
‘manufacturing consent’ (Chomsky and Herman )
A ruling group of people, powerful gourp like a governement turn the news
into a propaganda machine. News = a deliberate distortion of the truth by
people who want to control our thoughts. Hyperdermic syringe model of
newspoapers: (schuson 23 newspapers inject information into a passive
readers. Too crude: newspapers don’t control society. Readers are not
rewarded for believing what they read, or punished for not believing it.
Newspapers don’t determine what the facts are. Instead they exert a subtle
cultural influence on our attitudes to information. So subtle that it can be
difficult to separate what the facts are and what the journalist’s attitude towards
the facts is. E.g., terrorist vs freedom fighter.
4. Key points: Journalistic discourse has:
1) Specific relations to society
2) SPECIFIC TYPES OF TEXT PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION
3) Specific textual characteristics
5.
i.
Facts versus values
Domains, discourses = different uses of language in different domains, In
academic-research domains, in medical Domains, legal domains and in news
media domains facts are kept separate from their evaluation values. But in
newspapers they exist: there are NEWS values such as (Bell 155) NEGATIVITY
(disasters, accidents, conflict, war), RECENCY : news means things that have just
happened, UNEXPECTEDNESS (surprise, not routine) PERSONALISATION (who is
responsible, or to blame: Costa Captain Schettrino. GOSSIP AND SENSATIONALISM
ii.
Objectivity
Journalists nevertheless believe that objective reporting – the separation of
facts that can be checked against the world (her cat is black) and values
(opinions – her cat is beautiful) is a virtue and realistic goal.
Two things to remember: First, Objectivity is the way journalists represent
their knowledge and justify what they do. Readers of newspapers accept this.
We wouldn’t read newspapers for news if we didn’t think they were giving us
at least some factual information. In other words, their credibility depends
upon their being seen as objective. Secondly, objectivity is linked to other
norms, conventions, standards that define journalists’ working practices and
professional code of ethics.
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So that’s the next point. PROFESSIONAL CODE OF ETHICS. Professional
reporting is seen as objective reporting. Good journalism is objective
journalism and yet objectivity can be a technique of persuasion, a rhetorical
strategy to make us accept information as fact rather than opinion.
iv. PRESS RELEASES – preformulation of news
Governments or multinational companies give journalists news in a written
format that is ready for publishing. Press releases are texts that mediate between
the news and the journalist, and these press releases can define the angle, the
perspective from which information is viewed. So when the Costa ship sunk, the
Costa company gave journalists press realeases in which Costa presented its
version of what happened.
v.
FRAMING press releases just one example of FRAMING (“schema2) : of giving
an overall coherence to the discourse, of linking it to familiar ideas or prejudices
that people already have. Frames allow reader to fit news, new information, into
familiar ways of viewing the world, or with common sense.
iii.
vi. Functions:
What is the purpose of newspapers? (Conboy)TABLOID newspapers: to
present information in terms of the idiom, the register, the familiar language of a
working class, popular culture. Disrespect for people who have power and
authority (such as politicans), and to simulate a bridge – a connection -- between
what happens in the world and the culture to which ordinary people belong.
Journalists entertaining.
BROADSHEETS (Stanyer 95, 97) used to see their audience as citizens, as
intelligent members of a political community that needed accurate information.
This function of broadsheets changed in the 1980s. Broadsheets are now market
driven: they look not for information that is the truth but for information that will
sell. Audiences are regarded not as citizens first and consmers second, but as first
and foremost consumetrs who want information, yes, but information that is
entertaining. Consequently there is now no longer a clear distinction between
factual reporting and commentary. Speak of INFO TAINMENT.
Mid-market in the middle
vii. Mediation: Editing (Selection and emphasis).
News in newspapers is sold on the basis that it collects and reproduces objective
truth, and that newspapers are a neutral window thorugh which you see the world.
News can be completely unbiased or neutral. News is inevitably, mediated: press
releases are only an obvious example of what is happeneing is more subtle ways.
Red Davies 112: ‘All news stories have to represent reality from some particular
point of view – just like somebody walking into a room has to view the room from
a particular point. Schuson: to say that a journalist’s job is to just to write down
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facts is like saying an architecxt’s job is just to put one brick on another brick. Its
true but it’s missing the point: architect’s also design houses.
Not only framing but also EDITING (= selection and emphasis). Editing is the
process by which one text is transformed into another. (Bell 66) .
Production processes shaped by constraints: meeting deadlines, filling space,
increasing the number of newspapers sold and increasing money from advertising.
.
4. Key points: Journalistic discourse has:
1) Specific relations to society
2) specific types of text production and consumption
3) SPECIFIC TEXTUAL CHARACTERISTICS
HEADLINES – function: to get the reader’s attention and to compress
information. Linguistic characteristics are firstly, ellipsis of articles,
prepositions and other non-content words, and secondly, information density
and pre- and post- modification in noun phrases. Richardson 203 interesting
statistics showing the different percentages of noun phrases and full clauses in
newspaper headlines.
‘My big bro wedding hell’ What’s the head in this noun phrase? (hell). How many
premodifers are there? What are they doing? Gving info and evaluating the head
hell
ii.
LEAD: first paragraph which ‘concentrates the news value of the story (177
bell). The story in microcosm (bell 174) and 183 a direc tional summary
i.
iii. INVERTED PYRAMID STRUCTURE: (bell 169) gather all the main points at
the beginning and progess through decreasingly important information.
iv. NAMING: should Palestine be called a country. Northern Ireland: sometimes
called the North of Ireland, or sometinmes called a region, or province of the UK.
Different names or adjectives that qualify those names can lead to different
interpretations of what is said. Vu compra or senaglese; mister respectable; mistress
not respectable. Foreigner = respectable; immigrant not respectable.
v. INTERTEXTUALITY: in newspapers journalists tell us what other people have said.
So they are a good example of how prior texts reside in present texts.
Direct reported speech: using written language to imitate, create a facsimile of
spoken language. Use of inverted commas, question amrks and exclamation
marks.
INDirect reported speech: paraphrase what somebody said. Often accompanied
by verbs of saying, verbi dicendi, He said, he told me, he advised me that…
Also ALLUSION : refer to something in a very indirect way. What hAPPended in
Capoterra in October 2008. Flood. Communicate something without saying it.
- (direct vs. indirect) reported speech
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- allusion
vi. PRESUPPOSITIONS (Richardson 22).
The baby cried. The mummy picked it up.
What is the relationship of ‘it’ to baby? What kind of reference. Anaphoric Creates
not only COHESION but also COHERENCE : fits into a FRAME we have of babies
crying and muumy’s picking them up to comfort and stop them. When did the
mummy pick it up? Immediately after it started crying ? Or two years later? But
there’s nothing in the sentences to contradict this reading.
vii. PUNS, especially in headlines: (two or more possible meanings. What are they?
Prostitutes appeal to the Pope
viii. On-line newspapers:
modularisation and visualisation of information
MODULARISATION: cutting of information into small chiunks – textual units --that the reader can choose to click and enter, or not to click and enter. So the reader
decides which textual units to read and in which order to read them. SHOW ONLINE
GUARDIAN
VISUALISATION OF INFORMATION. Jucker 19, skaffari textual elements have
lost their primary status, visual images are equally important.
Conclusion of Lesson 1: Key points
Journalistic discourse has:
1) Specific relations to society
2) Specific types of text production and consumption
3) Specific textual characteristics
LESSON 2
Richardson, pp.26-45
•
•
•
•
Power
Ideology
Hegemony
Critical discourse analysis
• Language produces and reproduces ideologies
• Ideology = «meaning in the service of power» (p.240)
Power (pp.30-32)
• One dimensional concept of power: A has power over B because he can get B
to do something he would not otherwise do.
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= conscious intention
• Two dimensional concept of power:
BIAS (not necessarily intentional)
= Use of language to defend and
promote my interests
• Three dimensional concept of power:
Bias not just ad hoc or occasional. It’s systematic.
• Three dimensional concept of power:
• Bias
• Creation of consensus: ‘the most insidious use of power is to prevent conflict
from arising in the first place’
Example (p.33)
• ‘the knowledge driven economy’
• ‘the economy driven knowledge’
• Ideology works through disguising its nature, pretending to be what it isn’t
• People aren’t necessarily conscious of ideology
Hegemony
Journalism can reproduce and reinforce (rather than question) common-sense
ideas (ideology)
____________________________________________
Critical discourse analysis
• Fairclough
• Language influences how people think and behave
• Relations between language and language users (= pragmatics)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Critical discourse analysis (p.37>)
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• Textual analysis
• Discursive practices
• Social practices
•
Textual analysis : 1) compare report and editorial in the Guardian (Syria); 2)
compare news report in the Guardian and the Mail (Afghanistan)
LESSON 3
(Richardson pp.46-64)
1. Text analysis
2. Discursive practices
3. Social practices
In lessons 3 and 4 we look at ‘Text analysis’ (Richardson 46-74) referring to
examples from newspapers.
Text Analysis Richardson (pp.46-64):
• Lexical analysis
• Sentences (syntax and transitivity)
• Sentences (modality)
• Presuppositons
Lexical analysis of single words and single multi-word units:
• Choice and meaning of words
• Naming and reference
• Predication
Choice and meaning of words:
• pp.47-48: The words FRAME the story in direct and unavoidable ways
• p.48: direct reference to the violence of the Iraqis
British soldiers represented only in terms of movement
Naming and reference:
• Social title: Mr, Mrs, Miss, Ms, Madam
• First name only: Peter
• First name + last name: Peter Smith
• Nickname: Becky
• Professional title: Professor, Doctor
• Formal title: Her Royal Highness…; The Right Honourable MP..
• Assumed name: Tony (for Anthony); Steve (for Stephen)
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• Group name: asylum seekers, football hooligans, immigrants
Referential strategies
• p.49 By choosing one name rather than another, the person is included in one
category and excluded from another
A person can be individualised (Paul Smith) or collectivised (a father, an expoliceman, a foreigner)
Referential strategies
• Establishes coherence relations with the way other social actors are referred
to …..
(p.50 reports of sexual violence in The Sun)
Who attacks? Who provokes? Who receives the action?
Referential strategies
• p.51 This illegal immigrant drink driver…
‘illegal’: criminalisation
‘immigrant’: de-spatialisation
Predication
= words to represent more directly the values and characteristics of people p.52:
Adjectives, appositions, comparisons, metaphors, allusions, etc. that are
attached to an indivdual or group
Predication:
example p.53: Maxine Carr
• Determiner deletion
• Object of possessive construction
Sentence construction
• Syntax and transitivity (p.54-59)
Who did the action?
To whom was it done?
• Modality (p.59-62)
Syntax and transitivity
• Participants (roles typically realised by noun phrases)
• Processes (verbal, mental, relational, material (transitive /intransitive)
• Circumstances (adverbials)
Transitivity
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• Figure 3.1 (p.55)
• Example: Afghanistan article para 2:
‘when their armed fighting vehicle was struck’
Transitivity (p.56) same event can be described in different ways:
• ‘Capital is mobile’ (Relational. Lacks agency) versus ‘Companies move
capital around the globe’ ( Material. Transitive).
• ‘Technology can migrate quickly’ (ascribes agency to technology itself
rather than to multinational companies)
• ‘Goods can be made in low cost countries’ (Transitive. No agent.)
Transitivity (p.58):
• ‘Five Israeli soldiers and a Palestinian were wounded’
( = Transitive action process. Passive construction without agent)
• ‘Israeli forces entered Jenin’
( = Israelis are moving into Jenin rather than acting upon its Palestinian
population)
Modality (p.59-62)
Truth / Epistemic modality. Degrees of certainty:
- modal verbs
- mental verbs (Afghanistan newspaper article, para 1: ‘believed killed’)
- nouns (‘the probability’), adjectives (probable) adverbs (‘probably
perpetrated’, Syria newspaper article para 4)
Modality (p.59-62)
• Obligation / duty (deontic modality)
Syria, editorial, para 4: ‘But it must also be admitted…’
LESSON 4
TEXT ANALYSIS CONTINUED, Richardson, 64-74
Rhetorical tropes:
 Hyperbole
 Metaphor
 Metonym
 Puns
Narrative
Rhetorical tropes (64>)
Journalism =
 an argumentative discourse genre
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 represents ‘opinion statements […] embedded in argumentation that
makes them more or less DEFENSIBLE, REASONABLE, JUSTIFIABLE OR
LEGITIMATE as CONCLUSIONS’
Hyperbole (65>)
‘Bambi turns killer’ (sensationalism in tabloid press headlines)
Disturbances > ‘riots’ / ‘mob war’
Stabbed > ‘hacked down and mutilated in a fury of blood lust’
Metaphor (66>)
An interpretative similarity: Juliet is the sun.
(= Juliet and the sun arouse the same emotions in Romeo)
Metaphor (66>)
A tiger economy / A bubble bursting
Metaphors of war for sport:
Out for the kill / shoot at the goal /slaughtered by the opposition
Metaphors for war:
 Games of Saddam (sport)
 Salute our brave boys (imperative + diminutive)
 Ethnic cleansing (euphemism)
 Little boy = Nagasaki atomic bomb (dysphemism)
 Friendly fire (neologism)
 Arbeit macht frei (cause and effect)
Metonyms (67>)
= a trope in which one word, phrase or object is substituted for another from a
semantically related field of reference:
The White House…
September 11th
Muslims
Neologisms (69>)
= recently created (or coined) word, or assignment of new meaning to an existing
word
Repetition: Watergate > Irangate, Lewinskygate, Camillgate
Conversion: Google and ebay as verbs rather than nouns
Blending: (motel = hotel + motorway)
Aristochavs = (aristorcrats + chav (white trash)
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Puns (70) especially in Tabloids
Tony’s Phoney War
Prostitutes appeal to the Pope
England expects better than this Becks (sport)
Narrative (71>)
- Narrative CONTENT (= the real sequence of events)
- Narrative FORM (= sequence in which events are presented)
- Inverted pyramid : ‘Wh’ questions
- Cataphoric reference (example, p.73). ‘The narrative draws the reader in…’.
Narrative form
- (71) 3-part structure (setting, event, outcome) lacking final resolution
- (74) Narratives are not simply 1 thing after another. They establish RELATIONSHIPS
between things and create NEWSWORTHY events
END
LESSON 5
THE DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF JOURNALISM (RICHARDSON 75-91)
Plan of lesson:
1. Definition of “discursive practices”
2. Conceptualizing the audience
3. Professional practices and ethics
4. Objectivity
5. Writing for the audience
1. DISCURSIVE PROCESSES
‘are the processes through which journalists produce texts, and readers use and
understand them’ (75)
The news production process:
Newsgathering
News writing
Story Selection
Editing
Presentation
News discourse: ‘the processes whereby news organisations select and organize
the possible statements on a particular subject’ (76).
News discourse is institutional discourse: ‘it is marked by particular relationships
between other agencies of political, judicial and economic power’ (77).
2. CONCEPTUALIZING THE AUDIENCE
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The audience as consumer / commodity (77>). A move from:
giving accurate and factual information to audiences who are citizens (voters) in a
democracy to
catering for the needs of different niche audiences who are consumers
News is a product that must be made appealing to readers.
Entertainment (gossip, gaffes, rows);
From news to views (personal columns, op eds)
Advertising-sponsored news media
Newspapers fear losing audience share
Readerships (see Richardson 80-81)
Broadsheet newspapers (The Times, etc.): the elite and upper-middle classes
Mid-market newspapers (The Daily Mail/Express): middle and lower middle
classes
Tabloids (red tops) (The Sun): working classes
Readerships
‘The less money you have, the less choice you have when it comes to buying a
newspaper that written with you in mind’ (Richardson 82)
3. PROFESSIONAL PRACTICES AND ETHICS (Richardson 82>)
Journalists work in a field of conflicting loyalties to readers, editors, advertisers,
sources, etc.
Ethics (see handout: NUJ code of conduct)
Seek and report the truth
Act independently of sources and other journalists
Minimise harm
Be accountable for their work
Tensions between these principles (84-85)
4. OBJECTIVITY (86>)
Media objectivity (photographic realism), especially America 1920s (Schudson)
Facts (which are open to independent validation) should be separated from values
(preferences and judgments)
Corollaries: accuracy, truthfulness, fairness, neutrality
Values enter into the process of knowing a fact. Example:
«The Tory share of the popular vote ended up only 4 percentage points greater than
that won by Michael Howard in 2005» (Independent 8.5.10). Whilst the use of a
statistic here evokes a fact that is open to independent validation, «popular», «only»
and «greater» have opinion-related meanings that involve connotation, emphasis, and
comparison and contrast respectively.
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Objective reporting can be a technique of persuasion, a rhetorical strategy (CohenAlmagor 138)
It’s ‘a way of getting you to accept the journalist’s account by saying “I’m just telling
you the way it is…so accept it because this is the way it is”
Evidentiality: (Cotter 256)
= The source of knowledge and the reliability of knowledge.
To whom or to what is information is attributed?
How does the journalist come to know something?
What basis is there for saying something is true?
(87>) News is institutional discourse (again): = language which sets up positions for
people to talk from and restricts some people’s access (Thornborrow 4).
Who gets to speak?
Access to being in the news is a power resource in itself.
Sources routinely reported: celebrities, politicians, councils, police, other emergency
services, courts, royalty, diary events (the Olympics), airports, other news agencies
(88).
Ordinary members of the public have the least access.
Sources anticipate the criteria of newsworthiness used by journalists and tailor their
press releases accordingly:
- Spin (interpreting a news event positively)
- ‘Tony Blair’s government produced 32,766 press releases in its first 5 years – an
average of one every 4 minutes, day and night, week in, week out, weekends
included. Each cost an average of £80 to produce, making a total of £2.6 million’.
(Marr, 180)
5. WRITING FOR THE AUDIENCE (91-2).
News values:
- frequency (daily?)
-threshold (scale or intensity of event?)
- unambiguity (easily describable?)
- meaningfulness (cultural proximity / relevance to readers)
- consonance (expectedness: Black Block > violence)
etc.
END
LESSON 6:
THE DISCURSIVE PRACTICES OF JOURNALISM, part 2 (RICHARDSON 91113)
Plan of lesson:
1. News values
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2. Linguistic style
3. Intertextuality
1. NEWS VALUES = journalists’ criteria for creating ‘news’ from a mass of daily
events.
Hetherington’s list (p.91): significance, drama, surprise, scandal, sex…. Note the
connection with entertainment: information >> infotainment >> entertainment.
Galtung & Rouge’s list (pp.91-92). Harcup & O’Neil suggest these values are not so
much characteristics of the event as a product of the way journalists construct the
news.
The precise manifestation of what these values mean to journalists sifting news from
mere events is wholly dependent on the (imagined) preferences of the expected
audience (p.92).
…journalistic meaning is communicated as much by absence as by presence; as
much by what is ‘missing’ or excluded [or hidden] as by what is remembered and
present (p.93).
Language offers a number of techniques for hiding information: i) the absent
quantifier e.g., ‘some/many/the students are gay’ = prejudicial overgeneralisation; ii)
nominalisation (the representation of a process (action) as a noun (thing) e.g., ‘panic
buying of petrol’; iii) adjectivisation e.g., the ambiguity of ‘AIDS is a student
problem’ = AIDS is a problem for students to solve? Or AIDS is caused by students?
Or AIDS affects students? (See Partington 2003).
2. LINGUISTIC STYLE
(p.95>) Different stylistic choices can communicate different relationships between
journalist and audience:
- formality v. informality
- solidarity v. deference (positive and negative politeness)
- relationship of equals or pedagogic role?
The ‘style guides’ of different newspapers:
p.96 Textual regularities can be the outcome of explicit style rules […] that are not
timeless and neutral, but that have a history and a politics. Compare the insertions for
swearing, prohibited language, and obscenities in these style guides :
The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/info/guardian-editorial-code
Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/about-us/style-book/
Associated Press:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2664713/Associated-Press-AP-Style-Guide-the-basics
3. INTERTEXTUALITY
p.100: = the principle that all texts are produced and consumed/interpreted in relation
to other texts. (Blommaert 1999: 5) ‘Every text incorporates, reformulates,
reinterptrets or re-reads previous texts…’. . p.101>: newspaper intertextuality: ‘Prior
texts reside in previous texts’. ‘This is particularly the case with newspaper reporting,
which must necessarily reproduce the actions and opinions [and hence words] of
others’. ‘When we read the instalment of a running story , we do so in the knowledge
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that this is the latest instalment – in other words, we are aware that the text is a link in
a chain’.
Internal intertextuality: (102>)
- direct quotation
- strategic quotation
- indirect quotation
- transformed indirect quotation
- ostensible direct quotation
- allusion e.g., ‘The British Prime Minister is no Hamlet’. Like ‘Waiting for Godot’.
Grammatical form of: i) direct quotation (inverted commas, possible verb of saying
or its nominalized equivalent: e.g., X confessed /X’s confession was “I’m guilty”);
ii) indirect quotation (backshifting of tense, more distal spatial and temporal deixis,
possible verb of saying or nominalized equivalent: e.g., compare ‘I’m here now’ with
‘He said he was there then’)
106: a continuum from direct quotation to ostensible quotation: the further the
quotation is removed from direct quotation the greater is the scope for distorting the
quotation.
Press agency copy (e.g., ‘Reuters’ or the ‘Associated Press’) and press releases from
companies, governments and other organisations. Examples:
- The News Distribution Service of the UK government: http://nds.coi.gov.uk/
- The ‘newsroom’ of the official website of the UK government:
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Nl1/Newsroom/index.htm
These are ‘prior texts’ that already ready for publishing in newspapers as factual
news reports. They “instruct” (example of strategic quotation!) journalists as to how
they should represent the words and point of view of an organisation/institution.
END
LESSON 7:
ECONOMIC, POLITICAL AND IDEOLOGICAL PRACTICES, AND
JOURNALISTIC DISCOURSE (Richardson 114-148)
114-115: The ways in which journalism has an effect on resisting or reinforcing
relationships of dominance, discrimination and exploitation
1) Economic practices: local and regional newspaper campaigns (e.g., an appeal
for money for cancer research)
116: newspaper campaigns (see Richardson footnote 2, p. 229: campaigns of
local regional newspapers are archived at:
http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/campaignsindex.shtml
119: how are “readers” conceptulaised?
120: requirements for a successful campaign
121: purpose of campaigns – encouraging reader loyalty
122: sensationalising a campaign issue
125: sentimentality – representing the problem from emotional perspective
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126: symptoms not causes
2) Political practices: (e.g., reporting the war in Algeria)
How news content is shaped by how and to what extent journalists have access
to information. Compare D. Hirst’s reports on pages 128-9 and 131; and editorials
in the Telegraph (p.131). Attributing responsibility; terrorists or the army? The
reproduction of stereotypes and misinformation.
3) Ideological practices: newspapers and the division of the British public along
class lines
135: why class division isn’t newsworthy
137>>: the working class in tabloid reporting: invisible non-persons (e.g.,
maids) and the hypervisible defects of persons (e.g., hooligans). Examples from
The Sun
143>>: the middle class: all those people whose economic and social status is
based on education rather than ownership of capital or property. 144:
presuppositions carried in the headline Why you shouldn’t feel guilty about the au
pair.
END
LESSON 8:
1. RICHARDSON CHAPTER 6 (149-177) : letters to the editor and argumentation
LETTERS
- 150 Richardson believes letters to the editor are primarily argumentative.
- 151 Since letters published are SELECTED, this says something about how the
newspaper wants to represent the (different?) opinions of its readers. Letters also
have to be edited in accordance with the newspaper’s “style guide” (96-100).
- 152 Reader’s letters do not necessarily represent the opinions of the general
public.
ARGUMENTATION
155> is active, social, a joint process, and adheres to certain standards.
158> Letters may well employ:
- at least one of Aristotle’s three types of rhetoric: forensic (the rightness or
wrongness of past actions), epideictic (the character or reputation of someone) and
deliberative (discussion of the (un)desirability of particular actions).
- at least one of Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion: ethos (a person’s wisdom,
experience or virtue); pathos (moving the audience to anger, pity, fear, etc); logos
(especially the premises that are absent in the enthymeme (162>), inductive
arguments that take form of a comparison or an analogy with something already
known to the audience, and causal argumentation – and therefore possibly
transitivity as well).
RULES OF REASONABLENESS and FALLACIES (165>)
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USEFUL SUMMARY: pp.176-77. The above argumentative strategies may also
employed by professional journalists.
2. SUMMARY OF BASIC POINTS/QUESTIONS COVERED IN THE COURSE
SO FAR.
i) How does the news media use language to set the ‘frames’ (i.e., the
‘cognitive window’ / ‘the schemata of interpretation’) through which public events
are seen, discussed and judged?
ii) Frames / schemata of interpretation are the means by which individuals
perceive / recognise / identify / categorise public events. Frames involve
consistent selection, emphasis and exclusion of units of information. They enable
journalists to ‘package’ information for efficient transmission to readers, and they
enable readers to process large amounts of information routinely and rapidly. See
also point v) below.
iii) Production and consumption of news involves three players: a) journalists
(+ others (editors, sub-editors, etc.) who are involved in selection and presentation
processes), b) sources of information and c) readers. All three are linked to each
other through shared beliefs about society that set the parameters of a broad
framework of evaluation : negative / positive; important /unimportant; expected
/unexpected, etc. (See Bednarek’s article ‘Evaluation in the news’ in study pack.)
iv) No longer does the broadsheet press see its readers as primarily ‘citizens’,
i.e., as members of a democracy who need to be given accurate and factual
information on which to base their voting decisions at election time. In
contemporary market-driven societies, readers are regarded as first and foremost
consumers whose appetite for analytical news is limited. Catering for readers’
various niche interests has become an important way of increasing circulation
figures and market-share. There is also a far greater emphasis on mixing ‘facts’
with opinions and commentary about public events that include gaffes, outbursts,
scandals and other alleged misdemeanours.
v) Newspaper-reading is an interpretative activity. Readers relate grammatical
and lexical features of the text to knowledge-bases in their memory. The study of
this involves attention to:
a) headlines (an ‘abstraction’ of the lead that attracts and focuses
attention)
b) the lead (the microcosm of the story that defines the ‘perspective’/
‘direction’ from which the event is viewed)
c) narrative structure and transitivity (who is doing what to whom?).
Richardson (54>, 71>).
d) lexis (naming, reference and predication),
modality and
presupposition (see Richardson Chapter 3)
vi) Discursive practices (Richardson Chapter 4): what makes news reporting
different from other genres? Answers include:
a) news values (91>) (criteria for judging newsworthiness) and defining
the audience
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(77).
b) news processes of gathering information, writing, editing and
presentation.
c) forms of intertextuality: e.g., press releases and press agency copy,
allusion and types of quotation (100, 102>). Reported discourse can be
insidious: it can consist of words/thoughts that cease to be those of the person
to whom they are attributed – even though this is not necessarily obvious. It
(reported discourse) therefore provides writers with scope for appropriation
and manipulation. Even if the source’s exact words are cited, their insertion in
a different context can radically alter the original intended meaning. (See in
study pack Bednarek’s article ‘Evaluation in the news’, pp.31-33, for a list of
types of reporting/attributing expressions.)
d) codes of professional practice: objectivity (86>): the journalist needs
to distance him or herself from the report but this is not the same as removing
all value judgements. ‘Objective reporting’ (i.e., the journalist providing the
reader with ‘facts’ that are apparently open to independent validation) can itself
be a strategy, a technique of persuasion, for getting the reader to accept the
writer’s point of view. (See article by Cohen-Almagor in study pack.)
e) news is a genre that has always been preoccupied with establishing
credibility – mainly via the attribution of knowledge to sources – and with
representing ‘new’ information as true. (Most people wouldn’t read
newspapers if they didn’t believe that what they are reading is true.) News is a
genre that uses language to answer such questions as: i) who/what is the source
of this information? /what is the basis of this knowledge?/what is the evidence
for this claim? ii) how reliable/certain is this knowledge? (epistemic modality);
iii) does the news-information conform to or deviate from expectations (e.g.,
‘expectational’ adverbs such as ‘surprisingly’, ‘amazingly, etc.); iv) is the
knowledge limited in some way? (e.g., i) concessive structures introduced by
‘although… / However… etc.’; ii) use of conditionals and counterfactuals (‘if
they had been….) to represent hypothetical and imagined worlds rather than
real worlds; iii) questions that point to a gap in knowledge.)
END
LESSON 9
RICHARDSON 178-202 WAR REPORTING
1. War propaganda
178 Typically war propaganda describes ‘conflict in a radically POLARISED
way……’
179-80 analysis of the inferential leaps in Tony Blair’s ‘choice’, as presented in
pro-Iraq war propaganda.
181> propaganda does not directly repress or censure information (as in Orwell’s
1984). ‘It controls emphasis rather than facts: it balances bad news rather than
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good’. ‘It is as much about confirming as about converting public opinion’. It
exists through consensus rather than through coercion.
2. 182> discursive practices of journalism that assist propaganda campaigns:
(i) ‘our country’. ‘our boys’.
(ii) information attributed to authoritative sources – this can mean asking
permission to access military or governmental sources. This kind of access comes
at a price….
(iii) the pressure on a newspaper to be the first with the news.
(iv) the pressure to avoid views critical of ‘our side’.
3. 186> Modes of proof /persuasion in the pre-Iraq war period (up to March 2003)
(i) 187> logos: reasoning.
(ii) 188> pathos: 189> T. Blair ‘I know that many of you find it hard to understand
why I care so deeply about this. I tell you: it is fear. Use of prolepsis: = responding
to the anticipated objections of one’s opponents. The way Blair transforms the
speech act of the imagined antagonist from an assertive (which entails opposition
to Blair’s argumentation) to a directive – a benign request (which implies we are
amenable to his standpoint. (189-90>) The assertive places the imagined antagonist
in a relation of opposing equals… while the directive implies a hierarchical
relation.
iii) 193> ethos: the ‘virtuous’ character of the arguer (Colin Powell)
4. 193> ‘embedded journalists’ who lived with the soldiers
Journalists’ identification with the soldiers: bonding. Use of deictic pronoun ‘we’
in news reports
5. 197> Reporting the invasion: action and agency in headlines
- patterns (regularities of meaning) across texts
- participants: (i) absence of the UN (United Nations) as an actor / (ii) actors of
unknown nationality referred to with only personal pronouns / (iii) representation
of the USA as an agent.
200 negative and positive presentations of ‘them’ and ‘us’. 201 the function of
metonymy: the user of the object is replaced by the object itself.
202 negative nominalisations.
END
Lesson 10
1) Processes
see table 7.3 (204)
202> 206 Tabloid versus broadsheets: ratio of noun phrase headlines to those
containing full clauses
204> relational processes in tabloids
2) Circumstances
207 prepositional phrases
209> how the ‘enemy’ are rhetorically constructed : ‘us’ and ‘them’
218 how ‘anti-war’ newspapers maintained opposition to the invasion but support
for British troops involved in the invasion.
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3) Conclusion to book
220 assumptions about newspaper discouse
222 social practices: points to consider
223 discursive practices: points to consider
224 text analysis: points to consider
4) Summary of lessons 1 – 10.
END