Abstract
In this article, we introduce a linguistic approach to studying affectivity as a fundamental feature of news journalism. By reconceptualising affectivity beyond emotive storytelling, intentional stance-taking or evaluative expression, we propose a methodology that highlights how conventions related to mediating, modulating and managing affectivity permeate journalistic genres. Drawing from conversation analysis, Bakhtinian theory of language as dialogical and notion of affective meaning-making, we investigate how selected linguistic forms and structures – namely evidential and epistemic modals and lexical items signalling affective intensity (such as emotive and evaluative words and metaphorical expressions) – participate in affective meaning-making in news journalism. A scalable computational methodology is introduced to study multiple linguistic structures in conjunction. In investigating a case study – the news reporting and commentary on a highly charged, year-long political conflict between the right-wing conservative government and the trade unions in Finland (2015–2016) – the approach allows a focus on the ways in which affectivity operates in journalistic texts in response to both generic expectations of the audience and journalistic conventions. Our findings include identification of the intertwining of strategic rituals of objectivity and emotionality, recognition of metaphoricity as a key source of affectivity and detection of different news article types having their own conventions for managing affectivity. We also observe a connection between emotive and evaluative words and the grammatical constructions used to express degrees of certainty, which suggests these modal constructions play an important part in how affectivity informs journalistic texts.
Highlights
In the contemporary context of hybrid media and networked publics, affect is discussed as an increasingly important issue for journalism
Examining how affectivity was located and modulated in the articles, we first tested the claim associated with the ritual of emotionality that, in journalistic texts, emotion is often outsourced into quotes
Our aim in this article was to develop an approach for studying affectivity as a fundamental feature of news journalism: a question of form and structure, rather than intentional stance-taking, emotive storytelling or evaluative expression
Summary
In the contemporary context of hybrid media and networked publics, affect is discussed as an increasingly important issue for journalism. Beckett and Deuze (2016: 1) coined the notion of an ‘affective media ecosystem’ to describe how the technological changes and simultaneous pressures on the media economy reframe journalism as ‘an emotionally charged networked environment’. This article engages in this discussion of the importance of affect in journalism by offering a revised understanding of the concept. Rather than confirming or questioning any narrative of change in journalism, this article proposes an approach to affectivity as a quality permeating journalistic language through multiple linguistic constructs and introduces a scalable computational methodology to study it. We address two theoretical and methodological questions: What is affectivity in journalism?
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