We examine a corpus of texts drawn from 11 US newspapers and related to the 2004 US presidential election, focusing on hearsay evidentiality, the reporting of what one has heard from others. Motivated by the general question of whether bias exists in news reporting, we analyze the sources to whom statements in the corpus are attributed, in order to determine who gets to speak through the press, and whether there is balance between the two sides in this election. We also examine the ways in which speech is reported, asking questions about the use of direct vs. indirect speech, the explicitness of source identification, and the effects that the choice of reporting word can have on the portrayal of a source. Although we find slight evidence of an apparent preference for one candidate or the other in certain papers, overall we find no statistically significant differences that could be construed as bias.
2023. A critical discourse analysis of Al Jazeera’s online coverage of the war in Yemen before and after the 5 June 2017 Gulf crisis. Discourse & Communication 17:5 ► pp. 553 ff.
Bednarek, Monika & Georgia Carr
2021. Computer-assisted digital text analysis for journalism and communications research: introducing corpus linguistic techniques that do not require programming. Media International Australia 181:1 ► pp. 131 ff.
Grund, Peter J.
2012. The Nature of Knowledge: Evidence and Evidentiality in the Witness Depositions from the Salem Witch Trials. American Speech 87:1 ► pp. 7 ff.
2021. Characterizing partisan political narrative frameworks about COVID-19 on Twitter. EPJ Data Science 10:1
Michael, Hendrik & Valentin Werner
2023. Hybrid News (in the) Making: A Content and Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis of Political Live Blogs on the 2020 US Presidential Debates. Journalism Practice► pp. 1 ff.
Nádraská, Zuzana
2017. The functions of external voices in hard news Appraisal: A dialogic perspective. Topics in Linguistics 18:2 ► pp. 63 ff.
Nádraská, Zuzana
2022. The function of square quotes in hard news: Metadiscoursal and generic perspectives. Discourse and Interaction 15:2 ► pp. 101 ff.
Reyes, Antonio
2011. Strategies of legitimization in political discourse: From words to actions. Discourse & Society 22:6 ► pp. 781 ff.
Rezaee, Abbas Ali & Mohammad Mozaffari
2023. “Where got I that truth?” An analysis of external sources in English and Persian news reports on Syria. Discourse and Interaction 16:1 ► pp. 118 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.