Hard News Reports Research Articles

Dialogic Positioning on Pro-Whaling Stance: A Case Study of Reported Speech in Japanese Whaling News

ABSTRACT Hard news is often assumed to be ‘objective’ and ‘factual’, with little or no trace of a ‘subjective’ authorial point of view. However, what is often forgotten is that journalists still choose what information to divulge, and how to communicate that information. This article explores how whaling news is presented in Japanese hard news reports, examining the types of ‘voices’ quoted and how these voices are presented. Analysing 176 quotations from 33 news articles published between 2014 and 2018 on news relating to controversies over Japan’s whaling policy in relation to the International Whaling Commission’s 2014 ban on whaling, this article found that in most cases, pro-whaling voices (43%) are quoted far more frequently than anti-whaling voices (24%). However, in news reports on Japan’s resumption of whaling in 2015, pro-whaling voices became completely absent, because the Japanese journalists chose to quote foreign external voices that reject a pro-whaling point of view. Japanese journalists also incorporated emotional statements from local residents and fishermen in order to dramatise the issue and seek sympathy for those whose livelihood was threatened by the whaling ban.

The function of square quotes in hard news: Metadiscoursal and generic perspectives

This paper is concerned with the issue of scare quoting in British hard news reports. It examines two types of scare quotes distinguished by voice origin – scare quotes originating with the internal voice and scare quotes attributed to an external voice (Dillon 1988, Schneider 2002, Predelli 2003, Bednarek 2006, Meibauer 2015, Nacey 2012). Scare quotes originating with the internal voice are comparable to code glosses (Hyland 2005, 2007) and they reflect the writer’s assumptions about the reader’s expectations regarding various aspects of the enclosed words, including meaning, register and style. Such scare quotes tend to co-occur with explicit verbal metadiscourse, partial quotes and contextualising authorial discourse with which they create functionally homogenous sections. Scare quotes attributed to an external voice overlap with partial direct quotes but the former are overlayed with an authorial attitude towards the enclosed words or the reported speaker; attitude is induced by the interaction between scare quotes and context, especially generic/discourse patterns such as contrast and repetition. The authorial comment signalled by code glossing and attitudinal quotation marks is implicit and thus in line with hard news generic conventions. The functions of scare quotes bear relevance to the novelty and negativity of reported events and are also reflected in the distribution across the generic structure (Urbanová 2013).

Chinese-English Translation of Hard News from the Perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis

The present study is a critical discourse analysis of Chinese-English translation of hard news, intending to disclose the relationship between ideology and hard news translation. Fairclough's three-dimensional model is employed to analyze five hard news reports published on Xinhuanet. Through the comparison of the source texts and their translations, the study finds that the impact of ideology can be observed in various stages of Chinese-English hard news translation, including text, discursive practice and social practice.

Interpretation of Political Inclination in Online Newspapers: An Ideological Disposition through Transitivity Analysis

The language of newspapers depicts the ideology of news institutions. The online alternative Malaysian newspaper, ‘Malaysiakini’, and mainstream online newspaper ‘The New Straits Times (NST)’ had shown different stances through grammatical terms during 100 days of Pakatan Harapan (PH), which leads to uncovering the news institutions’ ideology by observing their past performances and current representation. Norman Fairclough’s (1995) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) was employed on hard news reports, which were analyzed with the Halliday Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) tool. ‘Pakatan Harapan (PH)’ as a political party was found as main ‘doer’ in ‘100 days’ performance after winning election 2018 in both newspapers through their linguistic stances, which were collected from 5 (3,334 words) news reports from ‘Malaysiakini’ and 3 (2,478 words) from ‘NST’ based on social actor’s performances on 17th and 18th August 2018. ‘Malaysiakini’ had maintained its neutral stance, while ‘The New Straits Times’ had shifted its stance towards PH in their ruling government.

‘Stealing Money’ OR ‘Embezzling Public Funds’: Construing sleaze in the Ugandan press via legalese

This study examines the construction of news reportage relating to normative breach. It analyses news stories on major corruption incidents involving embezzlement and the misuse of public funds by government officials in Uganda. The study employs a discourse analysis to explore how corruption is constructed and construed in the print media. It invokes Appraisal Theory to analyse hard news reports recounting corruption occurrences, proceedings or findings of commissions of inquiry into corruption incidents and arrests of suspects, public hearings and court proceedings of suspected corrupt persons across two daily newspapers published in English. The study explicates the nature of linguistic evaluative resources that news writers invoke to map feelings, and to evaluate news actors, processes and phenomena. The analysis reveals that news reporters heavily rely on external texts and voices to recount corruption stories. These sources are couched in legal language (legalese), which in turn impinges on the linguistic resources employed to evaluate news actors. Whereas this rhetorical strategy enables the news report to achieve ‘objectivity’, it appears to protect the journalist against defamation or slander. Appraisal analysis reveals dominant instances of negative inscriptions of the social sanction of propriety, namely overt negative evaluations of non-compliance with the civic responsibilities and state laws. The news reportage exhibits positive attributes of corrupt persons in relation to their material wealth and social capital. Finally, the study also reveals the journalistic stance towards corruption, which is covertly shown via modes of meaning intensification.

The role of ‘culture’ in the construction of news values: a discourse analysis of Iranian hard news reports

ABSTRACT This paper addresses ‘Positivity’ as a news value in a corpus of Iranian crime and misbehaviour reports. Crime reports, as the typical form of ‘negative’ news in Western news discourse analysis, have been chosen in order to find out if and how Positivity is constructed discursively in such reports. The context of ‘Iranian’ newspaper journalism and the field of ‘crime and misbehaviour’ are both among under-researched areas, especially from a discourse analysis perspective. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data showed that Positivity is constructed regularly in the Iranian crime corpus. Qualitative analysis of the crime reports showed that Positivity is constructed through the headline and lead to the rest of the news report and is usually construed via positive assessments of the police force and their actions. In addition, there are various terms referring to ‘forgiveness’ and ‘mercy’ which construe Positivity in such news reports. Generally, the abundance of Positivity in Iranian crime reports lends support to the proposition of this news value as a separate category. Also, its construction in the Iranian crime corpus seems to be highly influenced by the institutional power (i.e. police here) and the ‘cultural’ norms of the society.

When “We Believe that ...”: The Role of Collective “we” in the Dialogic Negotiation in Hard News Discourse

Abstract The present paper examines the occurrence of collective self expressed by the first person plural “we” in British broadsheet hard news reports. Given that “we” typically embraces “I” and the “non-I”, and is viewed in contradistinction to “others”, it is subjective and dialogic (inter-subjective) in nature (Baumgarten et al.; Benveniste). This study, grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics and the theory of engagement, examines the coupling, i.e., co-occurrence, of one dialogic signal “we” with other dialogic meanings (entertain, proclaim and disclaim) used for the dialogic negotiation of content and writer-reader engagement (Martin, “Beyond Exchange”; Martin and White). Couplings are interpreted from the point of view of the overall rhetorical strategy they are put to, referred to as syndromes of meaning (Zappavigna et al., “Syndromes”; Zappavigna et al., “The Coupling”). The rhetorical functions of syndromes reflect the basic dialogic meanings of the examined engagement categories such as a tentative suggestion of an opinion (entertain), a strong statement of an opinion (proclaim) and a rejection of a dispreferred opinion (disclaim). Finer variations within the individual rhetorical strategies are related to the difference in the source of dialogic positioning (an individual versus collective voice) and the referential scope of the pronoun (a precisely defined reference versus reference with a more general and diffused scope).

Manipulation of translation in hard news reporting on the Gulf crisis: combining narrative and appraisal

This paper explores the manipulation of translation for propagandistic purposes in the Gulf crisis, which has led to the economic blockade of Qatar since June 2017. It focuses onAl-Ittihad, an Arabic daily newspaper owned by the United Arab Emirates. The data under analysis is extracted from a hard news daily section thatAl-Ittihadhas dedicated to Qatar since the outbreak of the crisis. Combining Narrative Theory with the Appraisal Framework provides an insightful account of the ideologically motivated manipulation and weaponization of news translation. Going beyond the reductive claim of domestication in News translation studies, this dual theoretical approach allows for further articulation of the socio-political context with translation strategies, by combining macro- and micro-analysis. This approach also uncovers the workings of propaganda inAl-Ittihad’s translational news reporting. From the transediting of foreign attributions to the intersemiotic design of the newspaper’s layout, translational news reporting involves embedding personal and shared narratives into the micro- and macro-levels of the hard news section to construe a negative evaluation of Qatar. Behind a façade of detachment and neutrality, hard news reports and the translation on which they rely feed into the propagandistic discourse of hawkish parties.

Uncovering Ideology in News Coverage: Ideologically motivated trans-editing of hard news reports

Uncovering Ideology in News Coverage: Ideologically motivated trans-editing of hard news reports

Right to a fair trial: could hard news reports influence jurors?

ABSTRACT The “trial by media” phenomenon that describes the media frenzy accompanying a high-profile court case, and that may be at odds with a defendant’s right to a fair trial by an impartial jury, has been widely researched. The aim of this project is consequently to investigate whether jurors could be influenced by their readings of the media in trials receiving less media attention. Using the systemic functional linguistics framework, this study uses a murder trial held in Sydney, Australia, and contrasts the crime story, as described in the court’s Decision, with an article published in the Daily Telegraph at the time of the offender’s arrest. The aim is to explore whether the jurors who were appointed to this trial could have been affected by their reading of the article. The findings highlight the ways in which the news report is made persuasive through a range of features, such as its ideational structure, rhetorical organisation, use of circumstantial details, transitivity and agency patterns, as well as the ways in which the journalists seek to involve their readership through their use of attitudinal meanings and engagement, as well as their differentiated use of the crime participants’ names.

The evolution of the “hot news” perfect in English

This paper deals with the “hot news” use of the English present perfect. Previous research has suggested that this use marks the end point of the perfect category, paving the way for further grammaticalisation to a perfective or past tense. To examine its historical development in Modern English, verb forms in the leads of hard news reports in the New York Times and the Sydney Morning Herald were examined, with comparison made between two time periods, 1851–1900 and 1951–2000. Attention was given to contextual influence on the choice between the present perfect and the past tense for expressing hot news meanings. The quantitative findings show that the hot news perfect has not taken over the ground of other tense forms, but has become increasingly associated with unspecified, recent past time. The evolution of the English present perfect in general is characterised by register-mediated functional specialisation.

PRESENTING AND REPRESENTING EMOTIONS IN NEWS AGENCY REPORTS

The paper examines news agency journalists' stance on Affect, in view of the journalistic ideals of factuality and objectivity. News journalists resort to Affect values quite frequently; in hard news reports, however, journalists' own emotions have to be excluded. Recently, Peter White and other scholars have introduced the term ‘observed’ Affect as opposed to ‘authorial’ Affect, to distinguish between Affect which is attributed to some third party and Affect which is the journalist's. I find that term too broad, and suggest the following, more sophisticated taxonomy: Affect is first divided into two subtypes, attributed and non-attributed. Both attributed and non-attributed Affect have three subcategories: observed, interpreted and constructed. Attributed Affect includes a fourth subcategory: experienced Affect. To demonstrate how these new tools can be applied to the analysis of news discourse, examples from Associated Press and Reuters news agency dispatches are explored.

(Un)Patriotic Nuances? Evaluating the Nature of the ‘Reporter Voice’ in Hard News Reports on the Renewal of ‘Sanctions’ in Zimbabwe

On the eve of the heavily contested 2002 harmonised Zimbabwean Presidential and Parliamentary elections, the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU) imposed ‘sanctions’ on Zimbabwe. In the course of time, subsequent annual renewals of the sanctions were effected by the same imposers. This article analyses the discourse linguistic notion of ‘objectivity’ in ‘hard’ news reports on the renewal of these USA and EU imposed ‘sanctions’ in Zimbabwean newspapers. The article compare the textuality of ‘hard’ news reports from two English language Zimbabwean daily newspapers, The Herald and NewsDay , by analysing how language and linguistic resources are used evaluatively in manners that betrays authorial attitudes and ideological stance. Specifically, the analyses focus on the way(s) in which the news reports uphold or flout the ‘objectivity’ ideal as explicated through the ‘reporter voice’ configuration of Appraisal Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). This is done through the analysis of how the linguistic choices made by the reporter(s) at lexical, lexicogrammatical, syntactic and syntagmatic levels betray conscious subjective evaluative uses of language and in the process further some assumed ideological position/stance.

What’s in a name? The representation of illegal actors in the internal conflict in the Colombian press

This article examines the linguistic patterns associated with the forms of representation of Marxist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries, the main illegal actors in the internal Colombian conflict, on the reporting in the Colombian press of their violent actions. The analysis is based on a 300,000+ word specialised corpus of hard news reports on the conflict from four major Colombian newspapers. The analytical tools used are Van Leeuwen’s network for the representation of social actors and an adaptation of Hasan’s cline of dynamism. In addition, the epistemic modality of ownership of the crimes reported is examined. The results reveal remarkable differences in the reporting of the actions of both groups.