News as Discourse

Outline of the class:

 The selection and presentation of news. News Values.

 The Nature of News
 The Discourse of News. Types of News Discourse
 Critical Discourse Analysis. Van Dijk’s model for news description.
 News Article Analysis.
 Journalistic techniques. Syntactic manipulation. Lexico-semantic
manipulation. Metaphors.
The selection and presentation of news. News Values.

 Factors important to newsgatherers when deciding what is news:

• Frequency or time span of the event.
• Meaning.
• Significance.
• Clarity.
• Closeness to home.
• Person-centred approach.
News peg - a news story that forms the basis of or justification for a feature
story, editorial, political cartoon, or the like.
 Galtung and Ruge, explain that “[news] favours the immediate, the
concrete and the personal rather than the abstract and the complicated
process. It needs to be culturally relevant and unambiguous in its import,
and it often focuses on powerful or elite persons or groups or blocs”
 Lewis (1996) explains that the information critical to news making ought to be
about a subject of public significance, the size of the public being a
principal determinant of news worth.
 Van Dijk (1988) classifies news values into three categories: economic, social
and ideological and suggests a number of constraints determining them.
The Nature of News

 Etymologically, the word news dates back to the Old English words
“newes” or “niwes”. It was first used in 1432 and became common only
after 1500.
 The Oxford Dictionary of English gives it the sense of “newly received or
noteworthy information, especially about recent events” . The word centrally
entails the dissemination (the act of spreading news, information, ideas,
etc. to a lot of people) of information about events.
 In the field of media, news is delineated as a “report of a current happening
or happenings in a newspaper, on television, on radio, or on a web site”
(Danesi, 2009, p. 212)
The Discourse of News

 “Discourse in context may consist of only one or two words as in stop or no smoking.
Alternatively, a piece of discourse can be hundreds of thousands of words in length, as
some novels are. A typical piece of discourse is somewhere between these two
extremes,” (Hinkel and Fotos 2001).
 “Discourse is the way in which language is used socially to convey broad historical
meanings. It is language identified by the social conditions of its use, by who is using
it and under what conditions. Language can never be 'neutral' because it bridges our
personal and social worlds," (Henry and Tator 2002).
 "Discourse can...be used to refer to particular contexts of language use, and in this
sense, it becomes similar to concepts like genre or text type. For example, we can
conceptualize political discourse (the sort of language used in political contexts) or
media discourse (language used in the media).
 News reports, whether in the press or on TV, constitute a particular type of discourse.
 Van Dijk (1988) defines news discourse as “a text or discourse on radio, on TV
or in the newspaper, in which new information is given about recent events”

 Claridge (2010) shows that there are institutional features which mark
news discourse being a form of mass communication. It is publically available
and is offered periodically or regularly with the help of technology and
media. It targets a large, diverse and anonymous audience, representing
an asymmetric communication process, as news producers do not receive
direct feedback on what they report
Types of News Discourse

 The printed news discourse.

 Broadcast news discourse.
 Online news discourse.
Kornetzki (2012) explains that e-newspapers are characterized by relatively
similar design to print newspapers (apart from hyper-textuality) and more
profound content and archiving possibility, which permits their users to search in
databases for earlier articles.
The Discourse Analysis Perspective

 Bell (2006) notes that it was only in the 1990s that the main lines of modern research on news
language were established within the discipline of “Critical Discourse Analysis”.
 Against the multidisciplinary nature of discourse analysis itself, news as discourse is not
approached in the same fashion by discourse analysts
Bednarek and Caple (2012) distinguish seven paradigms of study:
-The conversation analytical approach (conversation-linked linguistic features )
 The systemic functional linguistic approach (the functional and structural properties of registers
and genres in the study of news discourse)
 The pragmatic/stylistic approach (genre status, style and register)
 The practice focused approach (journalistic practices involved in news construction)
 The corpus linguistic approach (statistical in perspective)
 The diachronic approach (historically oriented)
 The critical approach (critical discourse analysis -institutional and socio-cultural contexts which
underlie news discourse production)
 The most influential and systematic studies on news as discourse have been
conducted by Van Dijk, Bell and Fairclough.
 Following the critical approach, Van Dijk suggests a broad analytical
framework for the description of news language. He adopts the structural
levels and dimensions which discourse analysts set for the treatment of
various discourse types. These include micro-linguistic dimensions
(sounds, words, sentences, meanings), pragmatic dimensions (speech
acts), macro-structural dimensions (syntactic and semantic), stylistic
dimensions (authorial choices) and rhetorical features (figurative and
persuasive).
News Article Analysis

3 most common types of news articles:

1. Straight News Article
2. Feature Article
3. Opinion Article
Journalistic techniques
(by Gudmund Hernes):
• sharpening: summing up and selection of what angle to use,
• concretisation: avoidance of abstractions and favouring the specific at the expense of
the general,
• simplification: a complex reality is made comprehensible to the reader,
• polarisation: attention is called to opposites,
• intensification: attention is called to conflicts rather than to consensus, and
• personification: events are being described from the point of view of an individual,
often with unusual or interesting qualities. (Asp 1986:360)
• stereotyping: what is depicted must fit into a given set of roles, for example that of a
villain or a saint. (Bengtsson 2001:79)
• concealment: withholding relevant information, that is not telling the whole truth,
• distortion of various degrees: manipulation of facts by exaggeration, minimisation or
equivocation,
• falsification: presenting untrue facts, that is lying (Ng 1993:117f)
Syntactic manipulation

 Active and passive voice

 Modality (different ways of expressing attitudes towards sth with the help of
modal verbs, is adverbs displaying attitude, or modal adjectives)
 Permutation (the first word of a sentence often captures the reader’s
attention and, therefore, is decisive of how the reader will interpret the rest
of the sentence)
 Innuendo - a statement about a person, a situation, etc. combined with a
qualifier (a denial or a question) about the statement
Lexico-semantic manipulation

 The most obvious method of lexico-semantic manipulation is probably to use

words with emotional or cultural loading.
Critical reading of newspapers may in fact disclose undesirable views concealed
in the word choice; views otherwise unnoticed and, consequently, unchallenged.
Metaphors

 (when a word or a phrase is used to establish a comparison between one idea

and another). Two common sources of metaphor in politics, used both by
politicians and journalists, are sport and war: for example ‘be on the
offensive’ and ‘launch an attack on’. (Beard 2000:21)
Thank you!