The Language of Journalism

A Multi-Genre Perspective

Angela Smith, Michael Higgins

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501351693
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Language of Journalism (2nd edition) provides lively and accessible tools to understand and analyse the language of journalism. The authors explain how language develops across divergent media platforms, old and new, by looking at the differences across various forms of journalism – including broadcast, magazine, newspaper, sports, radio, and online and citizen. As well as introducing the reader to the principles and methods of discourse analysis and how it can be applied to media, the book addresses the dynamic interplay between the emerging linguistic forms of social media and the journalistic field. With this new edition, the authors draw upon a range of international examples, including from the USA, India, Australia, China and the UK. They focus on an exploration of how social media is incorporated into the journalistic output of print media, with a particular focus on 'clickbait'. This edition also focuses on the global ambitions of online newspapers – such as the Daily Mail and the Guardian – which are UK based, but have Australian and US subsections.

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Introduction

Why should we study the language of journalism?

Journalism serves as the very oxygen of public life. Most of what we know about issues from the goings-on in neighbouring countries, to the activities of the US president, to the taxes we are likely to pay, we get from media reports. More than this, journalism extends beyond Edward Egglestone’s celebrated description of ‘organized gossip’ to provide us with much of the raw material we draw upon to engage the world in a confident and informed manner. It is therefore not surprising that almost everyone feels able to offer normative assessments of journalistic performance, with their own instincts on what characterizes good and bad examples of the craft. However, in order that we might think about journalism in a genuinely informed and evidence-based way, comparing journalistic texts with one another, thinking about the history and practices of the profession, assessing its contemporary state, we need to have a set of tools to look at and discuss journalism in a systematic fashion. It is these tools this book hopes to provide.

Any examination of journalism is likely to be interested in what journalism covers. The items that make up the news agenda are not randomly assembled, nor are they the outcome of a natural and unchanging order. Rather, journalism is a matter of selection. Moreover, this is informed selection on the part of journalists themselves and the institutions for which they work. The procedures of selection draw upon particular criteria, which we will discuss later in the book as ‘news values’. Knowledge on our part of these news values and their limits provides a framework for understanding why some things are thought of as having ‘news’ potential while most things are not. The craft of journalism is not just finding stories that meet the criteria for news, but being able to construct an account of these events that give prominence to their most newsworthy characteristics.

This leads us to the language of journalism. The analysis of journalism’s language allows us to look at how journalism builds stories, how these stories function as arguments and how the linguistic construction of the story shapes the way in which it is to be understood. But the role of language is more complex than providing the component parts. Language is, after all, the most essential tool of the journalist, and it is one of the marks of the exceptional journalist that they are able to use language with creativity and style. Along with the professional practices of investigation, interviewing and fact-checking, the accomplished journalist knows that it is the ability to work with language and manipulate its emotive thrust that gives the story its shape and resonance. Without language, journalism would be no more than a picture book or a silent film. This is why it is important for us to study the language used.

To begin with, we will look at five interrelated ways in which language operates, and which emphasize its place at the centre of our understanding of journalism.

Language is social

Language is what makes us human. From our earliest months of life, we strive to communicate with the world around us through language and try to develop new skills and an expanded vocabulary in order to do this. This means that the language we acquire is one that is associated with our immediate community. As Paul Gee (1999: 82) explains, language simultaneously reflects reality (‘the way things are’) and constructs it to be a certain way. In this way, language is dynamic and constantly changing to reflect changing social contexts and our need to communicate within these. We expand our repertoire of linguistic styles and registers as our experiences of our social worlds increase. Accordingly, despite a considerable degree of linguistic competence, the preschool child has limited communication skills compared with those of the average university student. The language we use in the pub when talking to friends is very different from that we would use when giving a presentation in class to that same group of friends. We have sufficient linguistic competency to realize that there are different requirements placed upon us in different social contexts.

Because these competencies are rarely explicitly taught to us and yet are common conventions, we can say that we have assumptions and attitudes about language use which will reflect our attitudes about language users. This can be at a basic level of accent and dialect, where in British national TV news it is still unusual for the main news presenter to have a regional English accent that is not closely associated with Received Pronunciation (RP) (particular dispensation appears to be given to the Scots, Welsh or Irish accents of the home nations). Indeed, such is the stigma associated with certain regional accents of England, even in the twenty-first century, mainstream news broadcasters shy away from regionally identified accents, preferring the region-neutral but socially specific RP (Smith, 2009; Crystal, 2010).

The background knowledge of the reader or listener is also called upon to create a sense of common social identity, such that journalism fosters community by drawing upon a linguistic repertoire in common with the audience. The importance of this common frame of reference is never more apparent than when disputes over meaning arise, such as in the following extract from a longer interview between UK Channel 4 news presenter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and politician Godfrey Bloom on the meaning of the phrase ‘bongo bongo land’:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

GB KG GB KG GB KG GB KG GB KG GB KG GB

not real;lly because (.) ah I didn’t feel that I’d done anything wrong I mean I’m sixty-three years o:ld (.) ah that’s the sort of phraseology we used years ago: (.) no unpleasantness (.) is at at all (.) but if [inaudible] [so it’s just a product of being old [don’t want me to use it (1.5) [laughs] I think it probably is (.) yes (.) ah I won’t use it again because (.) ah I don’t want to upset my party boss and my party chairman (.) so I shalln’t use it again [cause Nigel Farage clearly thinks bongo bongo land is a racist phrase doesn’t he (2) ah I think he does and again it’s a generation thing ‘know I’m an olde:r man don’t see it that way but if he says it must be so And you still don’t understand why it is (3) no ah well I mean so that’s a pretty big bone of contention I mean the thing aboutbongo bongo land is refers to sub-Saharan Africa doesn’t it (2.5) if you say it does

(from Higgins and Smith, 2017: 27).

What we see here is a clear dispute on the meaning of a phrase, with consequences for its function as an item of public discourse. The interviewer Murty maintains that ‘bongo bongo land’ is a prejudicial description of sub-Saharan Africa that reproduces a set of racist and colonialist attitudes to international politics. For his part, Bloom tries to argue that the term is a legitimate, if outmoded, term for corrupt and irresponsible regimes overseas, with particular aggressive military spending arrangements. From Bloom’s perspective, the purpose of the term is to characterize governmental malpractice on an international stage. For Murty, ‘bongo bongo land’ not only lacks the clarity of meaning and legitimacy necessary for its use in news discourse, but is such a grossly offensive expression that its employment occasions a quite different news story on the attitudes and motives of the speaker.

Language enacts identity and the right to speak

The next factor that we need to understand is that language apportions a particular identity to the person writing or speaking. Often, this is unrelated to the original source of the text. Even where the person who writes a script may not be the person who delivers it, it is the one delivering the script who is responsible for it. We see this happening on a daily basis in politics, where speechwriters are often anonymous but their words can have far-reaching effects with the speaker being held accountable for what they say. John Searle (1969: 54) describes these demands as the ‘felicity conditions’ that we attach to utterances. Not only should something be true, but the person who is speaking should have the right to say it. This enactment of identity means we come to anticipate certain people performing certain linguistic acts, as well as being responsible for commenting on given events in their capacity as the appropriate social actor. Just as a priest is professionally entitled to declare a marriage if the appropriate conditions are met, so is a journalist entitled to express public outrage.

Through the examples to come we will find that our consideration of the appropriateness of utterances should be thought about alongside the management of personality and professional reputation amongst journalists as public figures. As Higgins (2010) has pointed out, broadcast journalism in particular includes a performative repertoire, from conveying the relative gravity of news items to animating the emotional component of an interview exchange. Accordingly, the journalists themselves are often expected to maintain a public persona in keeping with their journalistic duties, which means that a shift from one field into another, such as into campaigning or advocacy, can excite critical remark. Of course, it is also available to the interviewee to try to occupy a particular persona to their advantage, as we saw in the example above when Godfrey Bloom claims to animate the expressive lexicon of an older, and implicitly wiser and more experienced generation.

Journalistic language denotes agency and power

Just as we began by telling you that journalism is important, you can be equally assured that the vitality of journalism forms part of its very expression. In large part, this is offered as power on behalf of the readers or listeners, where language is used to imply a degree of interactivity between journalists and individual readers. Sometimes this can be through exposing wrong-doing or arguing for or against something, whereby the dynamic verb choices are often associated with leaders such as ‘The Sun says …’ and ‘Have your say’, even ‘Sign our online petition’. In this way, journalists imply there is a social influence to their profession and they pursue their responsibilities diligently.

However, the distribution of this power is hierarchical and dependent upon the needs of the story, and the opinions of certain people can be taken to be more creditable and authoritative than those of others, depending on the circumstances (Montgomery, 2007). For example, in anti-war stories, news journalism is more likely to feature the voices of mothers of service personnel who have died in Iraq or Afghanistan than the voices of anti-war campaigners who have less personal involvement in the conflict. These experiential voices carry more emotional weight for audiences and can be treated as expert opinions. Expert opinion in other contexts might come from the voices of scientists whose opinions are sought on topics such as climate change. Where the interview moves to global policies to deal with climate change, then accountability interviewees may be called in, people such as politicians and business leaders who can be held institutionally accountable for dealing with such policies. Journalism is thereby implicated in both the distribution and the exercise of power, and uses language strategically in discharging both of these.

We will find that power and identity are important components in the language of journalism. As Maxwell McCombs (2004) famously notes, journalism has the potential to influence the ways people think by setting the agendas of public discussion. News can reinforce people’s beliefs about such issues as immigration, which is widely regarded in the right-wing British press as being wholly negative. It can shape opinions, such as attitudes towards political parties. Britain’s best-selling red-top tabloid newspaper, The Sun, famously declared ‘It’s the Sun wot won it’ after backing Tony Blair’s New Labour Party prior to victory in the 1997 general election. To give a brief example of the implication of language in this, The Sun’s style of headline writing employs non-standard English which reflects and reaches out to the working-class social identity of its perceived readers.

Language is political

As we see through all of these factors, language can be used to persuade, argue, inform and expose: it is never altogether neutral. Journalism expresses and speaks to communities of understanding, and so its language always contains layers of meaning that go beyond mere point of view. As we will see in the course of this book, journalism can only ever strive to be neutral or objective, and linguistic analysis can help to uncover the strategies and pitfalls of this endeavour. For example, we will look at how certain linguistic choices of word or phrase or grammatical structure can reveal point of view. Sometimes this is clear, such as in the reporting of the Iraq War, where initially this was referred to as the ‘US liberation of Iraq’, only for ‘victory’ being less than conclusive and thus that conflict came to be referred to as the ‘US-led invasion of Iraq’. Elsewhere, news reporting of the 2008 Israeli–Palestinian conflict was articulated as Israel invading Gaza, or as Israel defending its borders. Or to take another example, the insidious demonization of young people finds stories of party-goers rearticulated as ‘drunken teenagers’, or more specifically in the case of women, ‘ladettes’, who are the subject of moral panics over a perceived decline in moral standards amongst young women.

As we suggest, language is an instrument that is shaped according to material circumstances and the purposes it is needed to serve. Language is this medium of power and can be used to legitimate inequalities and unjust social relations for political ends. It can thus be used to empower as well as disempower. Commonplace public discussion can often centre on whether a story is biased in some way, but it is through linguistic analysis that we can uncover just how this comes to be.

How to analyse language

In this book, we will be using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the main analytical model. This has developed as an area of linguistic analysis under such theorists as Kress (1985), Fairclough (1989) and Fowler et al. (1979) to explore areas of social activity and the complex relationships between language and social practice. The more dialectic view of this approach to research allows for the investigation of language as reflecting and also shaping and maintaining social realities. As developed by Fairclough, CDA is heavily influenced by Marxism and, in particular, the impact of Foucault’s work on power and discourse is significant. CDA’s explicitly political agenda seeks to raise awareness of the ideological frameworks that inform language choice, and the construction, representation and positioning of its subjects in discourse. This will be discussed in more detail below.

Discourse, ideology and power

The definition of discourse is open to several different views. In the area of conversation analysis, ‘discourse’ can be used to refer to spoken interaction. In this usage, we can ‘discourse’, that is, speak. In CDA, the use of discourse follows that found in cultural studies as used, but not defined, by Foucault. In this sense, discourse refers to not only language but sets of social and cultural practices. In the early development of CDA, Fairclough and Wodak (1997: 258) argued that ‘d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface to second edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Broadcast journalism
• 3 Magazine journalism
• 4 Newspaper journalism
• 5 Sports journalism
• 6 Digital journalism
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint