Publications
Publication details [#48407]
Ädel, Annelie and Gregory Garretson. 2008. Who's speaking?: Evidentiality in US newspapers during the 2004 presidential campaign. In Reppen, Randi and Annelie Ädel, eds. Corpora and Discourse. The challenges of different settings. (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 31). John Benjamins. pp. 157–187.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
This paper examines 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, the paper analyzes 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. It also examines 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 slight evidence is found of an apparent preference for one candidate or the other in certain papers, overall there appear to be no statistically significant differences that could be construed as bias.