The Annihilation of Sympathy in English-Language Journalistic Texts

Abstract

This article examines empathy annihilation in English-language journalistic texts. As a rule, this type of text is characterised by two indispensable factors: informativeness and impact on the recipients of the information. According to linguists’ traditional views, journalistic texts possess expressiveness, emotionality of language units, the author’s openness in relation to the recipients, and specific vocabulary. Following the famous Soviet and Russian linguist V. G. Kostomarov, the authors of this article admit that the specificity of journalistic texts is formed by the combination of the standard and expression. The article explores the conditions of sympathy annihilation in the communicative behaviour of Americans with reference to journalistic texts of American Internet publications. The article verifies the researchers’ thesis that Americans tend to show empathy towards their close people and dealing with strangers, participants of communication in the USA usually show restraint. The authors refer to the theory of compassion annihilation of American psychologist P. Slovic and suggest that it be transferred to the situation of empathy expression/non-expression due to the similarity of the given emotiogenic factors. The study demonstrates that empathy annihilation in American journalistic texts can cause the following situations: a positive effect of this phenomenon (self-care); empathic care (care for others); perceived impact (mutual intention of the communicating people not to show empathy towards each other).