Abstract
This study offers a critical evaluation of news values by four selected contemporary media outlets: BBC News, The Federalist, OneEurope and Dagbladet. The material covers the controversy around the Norwegian Child Welfare Service with cases of children being taken away from their families, thus it involves cultural and legal aspects of the issue. The analytic categories are based on news value research guidelines that were introduced in the study by Johan Galtung and Mari H. Ruge (1965). In parallel, the philosophical reference is construed through the works by Artur Schopenhauer and Anton Powell. This, in turn, allows evaluating the language that construes newsworthiness from an eristic perspective. The study demonstrates how the eristic application of news values may influence the fair presentation of an issue, at least when a case is presented as involving a controversy. The focus is on the eristic tools of news value enhancement which lead to channeling consumers’ attention in a desirable manner.
Highlights
In the current era of mass media, attracting consumers’ attention to information has become an utterly significant process
The aim is to prove that newsworthiness is an eristic technique deployed by a particular application of language, image and background knowledge to stir up controversy
This study offers an analysis of the Barnevernet controversy from the perspective of four English and Norwegian language newspapers
Summary
In the current era of mass media, attracting consumers’ attention to information has become an utterly significant process. This study is devoted to exploring the factors that make news stories newsworthy, and may distort the factual reality and manipulate news consumers. In this sense this study links with eristic argumentation, as it explores how controversial issues are reported not to reflect the essence of the argument, but to win it in the eyes of the audience. This study aims to analyze the quality of information based on the aforementioned guidelines on news values with the use of four distinct articles from international press. The study explores which eristic techniques stand for newsworthiness, among which there are journalistic, cultural and linguistic resources
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