Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen

DIPLOMA THESIS

A Linguistic Analysis of BBC Radio News

submitted to the
Linguistic Section of the English Faculty

by

Hanswolf Hohn

19 May 1995

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1 INTRODUCTION ... 1

2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND ... 2
2.1 Radio as a medium of news language ... 2
2.2 The importance of the news slot ... 6
2.3 What is news? ... 7
2.3.1 News selection ... 10
2.3.2 Hard news vs. soft news ... 11
2.3.3 Home news vs. foreign news ... 12

3 INSIDE THE British broadcasting corporation ... 13
3.1 The formation of BBC news ... 13
3.1.1 Origins (1922-26) ... 13
3.1.2 The pre-war period (1927-39) ... 14
3.1.3 The war-years (1939-1945) ... 15
3.1.4 The post-war period (1946-1960) ... 16
3.1.5 The recent past (1961-present) ... 17
3.2 Taste and standards ... 19
3.3 BBC English ... 20

4 The PROFILES of BBC radio STATIONS ... 22
4.1 BBC Radio 1 ... 23
4.1.1 News on Radio 1 ... 25
4.2 BBC Radio 4 ... 25
4.2.1 News on Radio 4 ... 26

5 The language sample and its peculiarities ... 27

6 MACRO-STRUCTURES OF BBC RADIO 1 AND 4 NEWS ... 29
6.1 The design of news bulletins on Radio 1 and 4 ... 29
6.2 News content ... 32
6.3 Updating in radio news ... 35
6.4 The structure of radio news stories ... 40
6.4.1 The make-up of the lead ... 40
6.4.2 The inverted-pyramid-principle ... 45
6.4.3 Attribution to news sources in radio news ... 46
6.4.4 Direct comparison of a comparable news item ... 48

7 MICRO-STRUCTURES ... 49
7.1 Sentence types ... 49
7.1.1 Alternative means to measure complexity ... 53
7.2 Noun phrases ... 57
7.2.1 Premodification ... 58
7.2.1.1 Premodification by adjectives ... 60
7.2.1.2 Premodification by nouns ... 61
7.2.1.3 Premodification by participles ... 63
7.2.1.4 Premodification by genitive ... 64
7.2.1.5 The distribution of premodification types ... 64
7.2.2 Postmodification ... 65
7.2.2.1 Postmodification by relative clauses ... 66
7.2.2.2 Postmodification by appositive clauses ... 67
7.2.2.3 Postmodification by nonfinite clauses ... 67
7.2.2.4 Postmodification by prepositional phrases ... 68
7.2.2.5 The distribution of types of postmodification ... 70
7.2.3 News actor labelling ... 71
7.2.4 Determiner Deletion ... 73
7.2.5 Nominalisation ... 77
7.3 Verb phrases ... 78
7.3.1 Types of verbs ... 78
7.3.2 Tense ... 80
7.3.3 Voice ... 84
7.3.4 Speech act verbs ... 86
7.4 Contractions as an indicator of audience design ... 89

8 CONCLUSION ... 91

REFERENCES ... ... 93

1 INTRODUCTION

Everyday, many people tune in to radio news. In Britain alone, every week over 12 million listen to news bulletins from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on five radio networks. Whereas BBC Radio 1 (henceforth referred to as R1) is still the most popular radio channel, particularly since its music output is aimed at a young audience, Radio 4 (henceforth R4) sets the national agenda in domestic and international news, as well as current affairs.

The language of the news media, especially of radio news, offers a plethora of areas which are worth researching and investigating. Bell (1977), for instance, built a corpus consisting of 35 hours of radio news broadcasts studying "style, audience and subediting variation" on radio stations in Auckland (New Zealand). Burchfield, Donoghue and Timothy (1979) assessed the standard of spoken English on BBC radio. Leitner (1980) gave an account of the differences between "BBC English" and "deutscher Rundfunksprache". Aditionally, he investigated the "social background of the language of radio" (1983b). Jucker (1986) carried out an extensive study of the conversational structure of news interviews on BBC R4 programmes. Floreano (1986) compared "quality" and "popular" newspapers with news bulletins on R1 and 4. In addition to this list, we should not forget Schlesinger (1987) who compiled an unequalled study of the production of radio and television news at the BBC. However, to my knowledge, so far there has not been a study concentrating exclusively on the language of BBC R1 and 4 news broadcasts.

An investigation of the linguistic features of the language in radio news - similar to any other investigation - needs a definition of what is to be studied. The problem I faced when I prepared this paper was to precisely define the amount of data, which, on the one hand, would be comprehensive enough to draw conclusions, but, on the other, limited enough as to remain manageable.

I shall start by studying the peculiarities of radio as a medium of news language. After an assessment of the significance of radio news not only for the listener but also for programme-makers, I shall take a "look behind the scenes" of the BBC beginning with the sluggish start of radio news and ending at a stage when, contrary to large parts of the British press, British broadcasting had long reached a "worldwide reputation" (Allaun 1988: 28) for its independence and authority. Today, the Corporation is widely considered as "one of the great creations of social and cultural policy in the 20th century" (Seymour-Ure 1991: 63).

After this foundation, I shall have a look at similarities and differences on R1 and 4. In the first part I shall investigate macro-structures concentrating on what type of stories appear in the news broadcasts on the two channels and see how the bulletins are arranged and presented stylistically. In the longer section on micro-structures following thereafter, I shall describe the radio news output of the two radio stations in linguistic terms and I expect to find striking differences here. A full transcription of the corpus material can be found in the appendix.

Clearly, because of the limited scope of the present paper, one cannot produce a representative investigation, but rather an exploratory study of radio news. True representativeness and, thus, highest possible reliability could only be achieved by large-scale random samples. However, due to my profound interest in the language of radio, in particular the structure of radio news and my curiosity over how the British, especially the BBC, make use of the fastest mass medium, I have nevertheless decided to undertake this study on the linguistic features of BBC R1 and 4 in the hope it would at least be possible to show different stylistic and linguistic approaches, whether they are of conscious or subconscious nature, of two distinct radio stations.

2 THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
2.1 Radio as a medium of news language

In the 1920s, when radio was introduced as the first electronic mass communications medium, it was unrivalled both in immediacy and audience figures. It could also claim to be the mass medium of the Second World War. For instance, BBC radio was listened to by over 70 per cent of the British population during Winston Churchill′s audience appeals in 1941 and 1942 (cf. Tunstall 1983: 111).

Whilst today nobody would seriously question that radio is still the fastest medium able to almost instantly informing us about the latest developments on earth, no one would doubt either that, for the majority in Western countries, television has long replaced radio as the main source of news. People, rather naively, tend to trust television news more than radio news "on the basis that if they see something happening, it must be true" (Edwards 1994: 6). Table 1 illustrates the continuous rise of television in the 1980s contrary to radio, which, after its heyday during the war, has been marked by an opposite trend (Seymour-Ure 1991: 148):

Table 1 Sources of most world news (in %)

[...]

Despite this development, no fewer than 12.1 million people tuned in to BBC radio news on Radio 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 Live at least once a week in the first quarter of 1994, which is an increase of 17 per cent as against 1993.¹

Depending on whether we deal with radio, television or other media, the same event will be formed and trimmed differently. This is to say that the medium itself works as a type of "gatekeeper" shaping a news item in a way so that it fits the distinct medium′s purpose and its target group(s). For instance, if we consider the flood disasters affecting Germany and other countries at regular intervals during late winter and early spring, television is particularly strong when it comes to conveying an overview of the situation "enriched" with gripping pictures of streams turned into rivers carrying cars with them. Radio, on the other hand, could try and create pictures here (but it remains doubtful whether it could ever reach television′s impact concerning the given example). It makes some sense, therefore, that, as will usually happen in this context, radio journalists concentrate on their medium′s peculiar trump card which is immediacy (cf. Fleming 1993: 104) and provide the latest information on water levels, announcements of road disturbances and the like. Horstmann (1993: 51) summarises radio′s particular strengths as opposed to other media as follows:

[...]

1 These figures were given to me by the BBC News and Current Affairs Publicity Department.