Culpability across borders: print media of the DSK affair from an SFL perspective

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the interactions between culture, linguistic choices and hard news journalistic practices, focusing on the Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) affair of 2011 as the basis for a comparative analysis across three cultures: France, America and Guinea. The present study is motivated by the growing application of linguistic approaches to media studies and cross-cultural research, whose findings affirm the position that language is a resource capable of articulating and reproducing beliefs, judgments and even ideologies about social realities. Through the lens of systemic functional linguistics, patterns of linguistic choices that vary across the French and English language corpus are identified and then analysed with reference to the key discourses generated by the DSK affair. The results demonstrate the value of grammatical description in unveiling cultural, societal and individual ideologies that ordinarily have limited scope for expression in the hard news genre. Consequently, these findings suggest a tension between the presupposed neutrality of the legal process and the power of the media’s rhetoric in its capacity as an additional yet covert trial participant.