Critical reading of online news commentary headlines: Stylistic and pragmatic aspects

Abstract

In doing a critical reading of news commentary headlines drawn from a corpus, this study uses critical stylistics as an initial tool for delineating the headlines’ textual, ideational and interpersonal features and also for categorizing them according to the main type of triggering located in their respective textual-conceptual functions. Presuppositions are found to be a key device in constructing the headlines’ ideational “text-worlds”, which can strategically activate readers’ “belief systems knowledge” and rapidly validate or shape their attitudes regarding social reality, even when a headline is being scanned and read autonomously on a mobile device platform. To better understand the contextual and representational role of these news commentary headlines in contemporary journalistic knowledge production and reception, this research examines their stylistic and syntactic design, identifying accompanying characteristics such as embedded ideological perspectives and propositional interpretive frameworks, while noting the headlines’ specialized positioning as cohesive interpolating texts in the digital news ecosystem.

A systematic review of Hyperpartisan News detection: A Comprehensive Framework for Definition, Detection, and Evaluation

“…For this systematic review, we only considered automated text-based strategies applied to articles because hyperpartisan features in the sources are intrinsically expressed within language. We are making this distinction since even manual detection of news has been proposed and it focused mainly on discourse analysis (Sousa- Silva, 2022;Dykstra, 2019;Xu et al, 2020). Although they prove to be efficient, this approach does not scale with the voluminous amount of daily news.…”

Proper Names Matrix in the Headlines of the Modern Indian Newspapers

“…To our mind proper names functioning in the headlines help to implement these functions and a key question might be whether the idea of persuasiveness is achievable with proper names in the headlines. Secondly, there exists the opinion that presuppositions which can be considered as the statement in which implicit information is contained are "key elements in nominalizing conceptions of information" 45 and proper names are often used in such way 46 .…”

“…All in all, in the headlines of the newspaper The Times of India, such subclasses of onymy were presented in such a ratio: toponyms (274), anthroponyms (235), ergonyms (169), ideonyms (153), chrononyms (45), other proper names (124)have been presented in the headlines of the newspaper The Times of India.…”

The Rhetoric of “Whataboutism” in American Journalism and Political Identity

“…2 Specifi cally, we can further examine the impact of "whataboutism" terminology as a textual choice being made in constructing, modifying and representing alternative ideological conceptions/positions, because when "looked at systematically, such choices cumulatively build a specifi c rhetoric that characterizes a given news producer/mediator in terms of their dominating strategies 2. These rhetorical features in opinion journalism can also be examined at a critical stylistic level to note how strategic ideological conceptualizations are triggered (Dykstra 2019) and explored with critical epistemic discourse analysis to note how knowledge, power, and manipulation intersect in the discourse (van Dijk 2011). for textualization of social reality" (Molek-Kozakowska 2016, 279).…”