Part of a larger study on style and cultural representation in the online news of three European countries, this article examines a corpus of news articles from the online versions of The Guardian and The Telegraph about the terrorist attack that took place in Nice, France in July 2016. Specifically, modality, use of the term 'jihad', and treatment of 'integration' and of Muslims are analyzed, and instances of alliteration and metaphor observed, to determine how these elements contribute to shaping journalistic representation of the event, Muslims and French society more generally. Preliminary findings suggest that both English news sources sometimes use modality to give suppositions a patina of fact, but that The Telegraph uses 'reportedly' and 'alleged(ly)' more often. In addition, The Guardian journalists sometimes misuse the term 'jihad' and its derivatives, despite the clear indications about this term that are provided in the editorial guidelines, while this does not occur in The Telegraph articles. The news sources also address the topics of integration and Muslims in diverging ways, which in turn lead to distinct portrayals of French society. These differences may be tied to the political affiliations of the sources or to journalist identity, and merit further research.

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This article extends the methodology and findings of an earlier project (Riggs, 2020) which conceived of cultural representation as translation and investigated the role of stylistic features of news in (mis)representing the cultural 'Other'. In that study, I analysed news texts about a specific violent event 1 and emphasized the negative consequences of journalists' stylistic choices, namely, how they were likely to exacerbate fear, divisions and prejudices vis-à-vis the 'Other' (in this case, French society, and Muslims). In the present article, I continue to examine online news texts from the UK, Switzerland and Spain but focus on news articles from the first day of the news cycle (15 July), and in particular on the language of the headlines, and accompanying visual material, as this would have been likely to be 'read' with each headline. These textual and visual elements translate the event as newsworthy and as a terrorist act. Differences across the news cultures represented are discussed, and the case is made for extending cross-cultural research on stylistic and visual features of news texts.Cet article étend la méthodologie et les résultats d'un projet antérieur (Riggs, 2020) qui conçoit la représentation culturelle comme une forme de traduction et étudie l'influence des caractéristiques stylistiques des articles de presse en ligne sur la représentation de l''Autre'. Dans cette précédente étude, j'ai analysé des articles de presse traitant d'un événement violent spécifique et j'ai souligné les conséquences négatives des choix stylistiques des journalistes, à savoir, comment ces éléments étaient susceptibles d'exacerber la peur, les divisions et les préjugés vis-à-vis de l''Autre' (dans ce cas, la société française et les musulmans). Dans le présent article, je continue d'examiner des textes de presse en ligne du Royaume-Uni, de la Suisse et de l'Espagne, mais je me concentre sur les articles du premier jour du cycle d'information (15 juillet) et en particulier sur le langage des titres et les éléments visuels qui les accompagnent, car ceux-ci sont souvent 'lus' avec les titres. Ces éléments textuels et visuels traduisent l'événement comme étant digne d'intérêt (newsworthy) et comme étant clairement un acte terroriste. Les différences entre les presses nationales représentées sont abordées, et j'appelle à étendre la recherche interculturelle sur les caractéristiques stylistiques et visuelles de textes journalistiques.

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