Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological framework for analysing news discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and beyond

Abstract

This article introduces a new framework for the analysis of news discourse to scholars in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and beyond. It emphasises the importance of news values for linguistic analysis and encourages a constructivist approach to their analysis. The new methodological framework is situated within what the authors call a 'discursive' approach to news values. From this perspective, news values are seen as values that exist in and are constructed through discourse, and the primary research interest is in how texts construct newsworthiness through multimodal resources. This article first introduces resources that are used to construe news values in English-language news discourse, before illustrating the framework through two case studies of a 70,000-word corpus of British news discourse. The framework itself is intended for both multimodal discourse analysis and corpus linguistic analysis, although this article focuses more on the integration of corpus linguistic techniques. Thus, the discursive approach ties in well with two recent trends in CDA-towards multimodal and towards corpus-assisted discourse analysis. More specifically, the case studies show that corpus linguistic techniques can identify conventionalised discursive devices that are repeatedly used in news discourse to construct and perpetuate an ideology of newsworthiness. They further show that such techniques can provide a useful indication of the discursive construction of newsworthiness around a specific topic, event or news actor. The article concludes with an outline of further applications of the framework for (critical) linguistic analyses of news discourse.

A general pattern in the construction of economic newsworthiness? Analyzing news factors in popular, quality, regional, and financial newspapers

“…A content analysis, as conducted here, however does not suit this purpose (Bednarek and Caple, 2014;Eilders, 2006), because (a) news factors -except for proximity -are mostly subjective characteristics that rest on consensus (Staab, 1990), (b) sometimes are just elements of journalistic practice (i.e. news writing objectives, see Caple and Bednarek, 2013), and (c) a content analysis cannot uncover events that have not been selected to become news.…”

“…popular, quality) and its organizational conditions (e.g. target audience), therefore, are likely to translate into a particular construction of newsworthiness (Bednarek and Caple, 2014).…”

“…While Bednarek and Caple (2014) applied critical discourse analysis on the word level to analyze the construction of newsworthiness by means of news factors, we do so with a quantitative content analysis on the article level. This content analysis has been conducted with the help of 22 coders.…”

“…Faced with limitations of time and space, journalists need to convince both their editors and the audience of the newsworthiness of the stories that they are working on (Bednarek and Caple, 2014;Eilders, 2006). This newsworthiness can be found either in the inherent characteristics of a real-world event or may be constructed by the journalist who can ascribe certain news factors to an event (Staab, 1990).…”

“Apparently, women don't know how to operate doors": A corpus-based analysis of women stereotypes in the TV series <i>3rd Rock from the Sun</i>

“…Schiffrin, 1987) and, as pointed out by Baker and McEnery (2015: 3), "there is more than one way of doing discourse analysis". The discourse analysis approach adopted here incorporates a critical linguistic perspective (Baker, Gabrielatos, Khosravnik, Krzyzanowski, McEnery & Wodak, 2008;Baker & McEnery, 2015;Bednarek & Caple, 2014) when interpreting the results obtained through the application of the Appraisal Theory framework and corpus methodologies (cf. Baker et al, 2008).…”