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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
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