This paper discusses the potential of semantic, pragmatic and grammatical devices used in the Israeli television news coverage of a dispute to promote one agenda, negate a contradictory one and position the correspondent as a participant in the dispute. Moreover, it is argued that viewers of news identify at least some of these devices and attribute an argumentative role to them. To support this, questionnaires are analyzed in which native speakers relate to a specific news item, focusing on the three most common devices interpreted: implicatures, emotionality and textual planning. The discussion sheds light on dialogical interactions between, first, correspondents and their addressees; second, between the correspondents’ words and their co-texts, contexts and other occurrences of these words or their synonyms in public discourse. The corpus includes 19 items on a struggle between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews in Israel broadcast in 2009 on Israel’s Channel 2 television news.