Cover not available
Part of
Engagement in Professional Genres
Edited by Carmen Sancho Guinda
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 301] 2019
► pp. 67–86

Chapter 4
Challenging the concept of pure objectivity in British and Spanish hard news reports

The case of the 2006 Lebanon War

| Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus, Spain
| Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
This article provides a linguistic analysis of facts and viewpoints in a British-Peninsular Spanish sample of newspaper reports written about the Second Lebanon war (2006). Almeida’s (1992) category system for the analysis of factuality and nonfactuality, and Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal framework were used to analyze journalistic ideological subjectivities underlying all factual statements in the news reports. Results show differences in how writers align their readers based on the political ideology of the newspaper, confirming Patterson and Donsbach’s (1996, 466) conclusion that “partisanship can and does intrude on news decisions, even among journalists who are conscientiously committed to a code of strict neutrality.” Thus, the results of this study are of interest to discourse analysts and media researchers.
Keywords: news reporting, journalistic objectivity, fact, viewpoint, Appraisal Theory, media discourse, Critical Discourse Analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: Engagement in the hard news genre
    • 1.1The notion of objectivity in the press
  • 2.Methodology
    • 2.1Almeida’s category system (1992)
    • 2.2Appraisal framework
    • 2.3Corpus
  • 3.Procedure
  • 4.Appraisal instances in factual statements
  • 5.Discussion: Engaging the reader through aligning ideology
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 24 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.301.04mcc
References (41)
References
Almeida, Eugenie P. 2011. “Palestinian and Israeli Voices in Five Years of U.S. Newspaper Discourse.” International Journal of Communication 5: 1586–1605.Google Scholar
1992. “A Category System for the Analysis of Factuality and Nonfactuality in Newspaper Discourse.” Text 12 (2): 233–262. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alonso Belmonte, Isabel, Anne McCabe, and Daniel Chornet-Roses. 2010. “In Their Own Words: The Construction of the Image of the Immigrant in Peninsular Spanish Broadsheets and Freesheets.” Discourse & Communication 4 (3): 227–242. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alonso Belmonte, Isabel, Daniel Chornet and Anne McCabe. 2013a. “Burden or Benefit? The Press Representation of Immigrant Workers during the Spanish Economic Recession.” In Discourse and Crisis, ed. by Zuraidah Mohd Don and Antoon de Rycker, 363–393. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2013b. “Ideological Stances in Internet Users’ Discursive Construction of Immigration, Race and Racism: An Online Newspaper Case Study.” In Discourses on Immigration in Times of Economic Crisis: A Critical Perspective, ed. by María Martínez Lirola, 61–88. Newcastle, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Bednarek, Monika. 2010. “Evaluation in the News – A Methodological Framework for Analysing Evaluative Language in Journalism.” Australian Journal of Communication 37 (2): 15–50Google Scholar
. 2006. Evaluation in Media Discourse. Analysis of a Newspaper Corpus. London/New York: Continuum.Google Scholar
Bell, Allan. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Bowman, Leo. 2006. “Reformulating ‘Objectivity’.” Journalism Studies 7 (4): 628–643. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coffin, Caroline. 2002. The Voices of History: Theorising the Interpersonal Semantics of Historical Discourses. Text 22 (4): 503–528. [URL]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coffin, Caroline and Kieran O’Halloran. 2005. “Finding the Global Groove: Theorising and Analysing Dynamic Reader Positioning Using APPRAISAL, Corpus, and a Concordancer.” Critical Discourse Studies 2 (2): 143–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cunningham, Brent. 2003. “Rethinking Objectivity.” Columbia Journalism Review 42 (2): 24–44.Google Scholar
Dirks, Una. 2006. “Critical Discourse Analysis of the Iraq Conflict in the British and German ‘Quality’ Press.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 19: 101–123. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elorza, Izaskun. 2009. “Positioning Readers in Newspaper Discourse: A Contrastive Case Study.” BISAL 4: 1–22.Google Scholar
Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.Google Scholar
. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gentzkow, Matthew and Jesse M. Shapiro. 2006. “Media Bias and Reputation.” Journal of Political Economy, 114, 280–316. [URL]. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haddington, Pentii. 2004. “Stance Taking in News Interviews.” SKY Journal of Linguistics 17: 101–142.Google Scholar
Hampton, Mark. 2008. “The ‘Objectivity’ Ideal and Its Limitations in 20th-Century British Journalism.” Journalism Studies 9 (4): 477–493. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kandil, Magdi A. 2009. “The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in American, Arab, and British Media: Corpus-Based Critical Discourse Analysis.” PhD Diss., Georgia State University. [URL]
Kaplan, Nora. 2009. “‘Héroes, Villanos y Víctimas’: La Construcción Discursiva de Personajes en las Noticias Televisivas sobre Eventos Conflictivos.” Haciendo Discurso. Homenaje a Adriana Bolívar. ed. by Martha Shiro, Paola Bentivoglio and Frances D. Erlich, 453–468. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela.Google Scholar
Kiparsky, Paul, and Carol Kiparsky. 1970. “Fact”. In Progress in Linguistics, ed. by Manfred Bierwisch and Karl E. Heidolph, 143–173. The Hague: Mouton.Google Scholar
Maddalena, Antonello, and Isabel Alonso Belmonte. 2011. “Unveiling the Writer-Reader Interaction in Peninsular Spanish and American English Newspaper Editorials: A Cross Linguistic Study.” Journal of Pragmatics 43 (3): 891–903. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marín Arrese, Juana and Begoña Núñez Perucha. 2006. “Evaluation and Engagement in Journalistic Commentary and News Reportage.” In: J. Mateo Martínez and F. Yus, eds. Special Issue on Linguistics and the Media. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 19: 225–248. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, James R. 2004. “Mourning: How We Get Aligned.” Discourse & Society, 15 (2–3): 321–344. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Martin, James R., and Peter R. R. White. 2005. Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McCabe, Anne, and Karl Heilman. 2007. “Textual and Interpersonal Differences between a News Report and an Editorial.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (20): 139–156. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mindich, David T. Z. 1998. Just the Facts – How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Neiger, Motti, Eyal Zandberg, and Oren Meyers. 2010. “Communicating Critique: Toward a Conceptualization of Journalistic Criticism”. Communication, Culture & Critique 3: 377–395. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Norrick, Neal. R. 1978 Factive Adjectives and the Theory of Factivity Tübingen: Niemeyer.Google Scholar
O’Donnell, Mick. 2015. UAM CorpusTool. [URL].
Patterson, Thomas E., and Wolfgang Donsbach. 1996. “News Decisions: Journalists as Partisan Actors.” Political Communication 13: 453–468. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Saurí, Roser. 2008. “A Factuality Profiler for Eventualities in Text”. PhD Diss., Brandeis University.Google Scholar
Saurí, Roser, and James Pustejovsky. 2009. “FactBank: A Corpus Annotated with Event Factuality.” Language Resources and Evaluation 3: 227. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thomson, Elizabeth A., and Peter R. R. White, eds. 2008. Communicating Conflict: Multilingual Case Studies of the News Media. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Thomson, Elizabeth A., Peter R. R. White, and Phillip Kitley. 2008. “‘Objectivity’ and ‘Hard News’ Reporting across Cultures: Comparing the News Report in English, French, Japanese and Indonesian Journalism.” Journalism Studies 9 (2): 212–228. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thorsen, Einar. 2008. “Journalistic Objectivity Redefined? Wikinews and the Neutral Point of View.” New Media and Society 10 (6): 935–954. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tran, Van T. H. and Elizabeth Thomson. 2008. “The Nature of ‘Reporter Voice’ in a Vietnamese Hard News Story.” In Communicating Conflict: Multilingual Case Studies of the News Media, ed. by Elizabeth Thomson and Peter R. R. White, 51–64. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Van Dijk, Teun. 1991. Racism and the Press. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2008. Discourse and Power. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
White, Peter R. R. 1997. “Death, Disruption and the Moral Order: The Narrative Impulse in Mass Media ‘Hard News’ Reporting.” In Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School, ed. by Frances Christie and James R. Martin, 100–133. London: Cassell.Google Scholar