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Table of contents
1. Introduction...2
2. Newspaper and newspaper audience ...3
3. Analysis of audience-orientation in The Guardian and The Sun ...6
3.1. The British newspapers: broadsheets vs. tabloids ... 6
3.2. Description of the material analysed... 7
3.3. Aspects of oral discourse solidarity vs. authority... 10
3.3.1. Typography and orthography... 12
3.3.2. Syntax and morphology... 13
3.3.3. Register... 16
3.4. Polarisation camaraderie vs. seriousness ... 18
3.4.1. Representation of Priklopil and Kampusch: vocabulary... 20
3.4.2. Representation of positive information concerning Priklopil and of Stockholm syndrome ... 22
3.4.3. Representation of the parents: specificity of negative ingroup information... 26
3.5. Different foci of Sun and Guardian articles entertainment vs. information... 30
4. Conclusion ...38
Appendix: analysed newspaper articles of The Guardian and The Sun (text only) ...42
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1. Introduction
Every day new things happen. With modern technology, news can be distributed all
over the world and faster than ever before. Additionally, the distribution of (and access
to) news has become much cheaper. Consequently, the number of sources we can get
information from has increased drastically throughout the last decades, as has the
amount of information. In our modern information society, the mass media have come
to play a decisive role. At the same time, it becomes more and more difficult to judge
the reliability of the news. One of the oldest forms of
mass media, which is still generally
regarded as trustworthy, is the newspaper.
When it comes to newspapers, people usually prefer one (or two) specific news-
papers to others. Every newspaper has its own specific image
which includes some
characteristics that
it is generally known for. If all newspapers provided all the news
there is and reported it in an objective manner, this would not make much sense.
Indeed, with the amount of potential "news" emerging every day and the restrictions of
the medium, it is impossible to cover everything the newspapers must choose what to
include in their coverage and what not
to. Similarly, it is an illusion to expect news to be
reported completely objectively. One reason for this is that the medium language
inherently conveys connotations and values, which makes a purely objective coverage
simply impossible. But apart from this restriction, it is a well-known fact that
newspapers all have their particular perspective from which they contemplate and
present news.
However, this is not solely the newspapers' choice. Since they are financially
dependent on their readers who buy their issues, they have to do their best in order to
meet their readerships' interests
1
. Considering that every newspaper has its own typical
kind of readership, it should be possible to identify the means they use and analyse how
they adapt to this specific group.
This paper will analyse one specific news story which was published in the course of a
few days in two newspapers known to write for opposite types of readers. The aim is to
1
However, newspapers do not only write in order to conform to their readers this would make them
entirely dependent on them. Every newspaper has its own attitudes and priorities, and it must not be
forgotten that the papers also try to influence their readers just as they are influenced by them.
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show how news can be reported differently and how these differences can be explained
in terms of an orientation towards different kinds of audiences. Before the actual
analysis, however, the communicative context of newspaper discourse will be briefly
contrasted to face-to-face discourse with special reference to the role of its audience.
2. Newspaper and newspaper audience
Newspaper discourse is in many ways different from face-to-face communication.
First of all, due to the nature of the medium, sender and receiver the producers of the
newspaper and their readers are separated temporally; the news only reaches the
readers some time after they have been written and gone through the publishing
process. Secondly, there is also a "disjunction of place" (Bell 1991: 85), which means
that the readers and the producers normally are not at the same place; it is, after all, a
feature of the mass media that they cover huge areas.
2
Consequently, this spatial
separation not only applies to producers and readers but also to the readership itself (cf.
Bell 1991: 85ff.). Since they are spread over a vast area, they do not normally know each
other and have no means to communicate. Similarly, their opportunities to interact with
the producers and provide them with feedback something essential in face-to-face
communication are extremely limited; and even these interactions (e.g. a letter to the
editor) have considerably less influence on the newspaper producers than audience
interaction in spoken communication
would have:
direct feedback by the audience is subject either to delay influencing
subsequent but not immediate production or to reduction: the audience
member's response remains under the editorial control of the communicators.
(Bell 1991: 87)
As a result, the newspaper readers do not have at their disposal the means that
audiences usually have to influence the writers' production.
Seen from another angle,
this also means that "[m]ass communicators are deprived of the usual access to
recipients' reactions" (Bell 1991: 87). The communicative situation of newspaper
discourse is thus characterised by a lack of interaction between sender and receiver and
between the receivers themselves.
2
This especially applies to the online editions of newspapers, because their availability is not dependent
on the printed newspapers' restricted area of circulation.
4
It is a general presumption that newspapers write for their audiences. Yet the
journalists who write the news stories have no possibility of knowing their readers. They
do have the opportunity to draw some information regarding their actual readership
from surveys, but these surveys can only be conducted after the newspaper's issue has
been finished and published, so that there always remains a temporal gap. Instead of
knowing their audience, the producers must work with expectations about their readers
when they design their newspaper; they adapt their output to a stereotyped image they
have of the audience:
Beliefs and stereotypes about recipients and their speech patterns are the sole
practical input to mass communicators' linguistic output. Mass communicators
can cater only to a stereotype of the audience's own language. (Bell 1991: 90)
Similarly, the readers do not know the authors of the texts they read; they, too,
stereotype the producers. Instead of seeing the text as a result of a complex process in
which many individuals are involved or the creation of one single individual, they rather
perceive the author to be newspaper as an institution, so that the newspaper's voice is
considered "institutional rather than personal" (Fowler 1991: 39) This institution is
connected to a specific stereotyped image which the readers bear in mind when reading
it. As a consequence of the impersonal communicative situation, both "writers as well as
readers work with stereotypes of the supposed Other" (Bednarek 2006: 14).
When journalists write their news stories, they have their expected audience in mind
and try to adapt to their expectations as best as possible. This influences both content
and presentation of their news stories. Firstly, newspapers obviously do not report on
everything that happens in the world; they have to select the events they want to
include in their issues. They do so according to a set of news values, which determine
the newsworthiness of events and originate from "general values about society such as
`consensus' and `hierarchy'; journalistic conventions; nature of sources; publication
frequency and schedule; and so on" (Fowler 1991: 13). They include, for example,
cultural proximity, which means that events which happen in countries with a similar
cultural background are considered more newsworthy than those happening in a culture
with different values. They also include unexpectedness which means that an event is
generally more newsworthy if it happens unexpectedly and is unusual (cf. Fowler 1991:
13ff.). Since these news values are constructed from social beliefs and attitudes and are
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shared between newspaper and readers, they "are to be regarded as intersubjective
mental categories" (Fowler 1991: 17). These categories are themselves stereotypes,
which sort events and individuals (and thus making them comprehensible) and are
presupposed by both parties (Fowler 1991: 17). These news values do
not only
determine "whether or not to report an event" (Fowler 1991: 19), but are also "features
of representation" (Fowler 1991: 19), deciding which details are included in the reports
and which features are to be emphasised. Since different newspapers, however, have
different kinds of readers, they will adapt the criteria determining the newsworthiness
of events to their respective readership, so that the individual newspapers will differ in
terms of selection of their news stories and in their content.
Secondly, the presentation of news stories is also closely connected with what the
newspapers believe that the audience expects. This involves the manner in which news
are presented, i.e. the language and style employed by the writers. The newspapers will
adopt a linguistic style which they belief comes close to the audience's expectations. For
a successful communication, the readers, on the one hand, bring to the text what
Fowler calls "a mental model of the expected style" (Fowler 1991: 40), which must be
recognised intuitively when reading a news story. On the other hand, the newspaper
must cater for it and take the corresponding linguistic options. This means that the
newspaper cannot write in an arbitrary way, but has to consider the kind of language
that the audience is used to and expects from it. The resulting linguistic style is what Hall
calls the public idiom of the media:
Of special importance [...] will be the particular part of the readership spectrum
the paper sees itself as customarily addressing: its target audience. The
language employed will thus be the newspaper's own version of the language of
the public to whom it is principally addressed: its version of the rhetoric, imagery
and underlying common stock of knowledge which it assumes its audience
shares and which thus forms the basis of the reciprocity of producer/reader.
(Hall 1978: 61)
This means that the newspapers employ a linguistic style they expect their
stereotyped audience to be familiar with in order to attract them and present the news
stories in a way which makes them easy to understand for it. Although it is the
newspapers' choice as to
what news they cover and how they present them, it must not
be forgotten that the audience plays a powerful role, too: they choose which newspaper
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they want to read, and if a newspaper's style does not meet their expectations, they can
easily switch to another one. The newspapers, after all, are economically dependent on
their readers. This means that, at the same time that the newspapers write for a specific
audience, "the media [also] attract the audiences which suit them" (Bell 1991: 107).
The readership thus is an important criterion in the production of news stories; the
newspapers' target audiences and their expectations about them is one of the factors
which determine what and how the newspapers write.
3. Analysis of audience-orientation in The Guardian and
The Sun
3.1. The British newspapers: broadsheets vs. tabloids
The British national daily newspaper market is traditionally divided into quality (also
called broadsheet) and popular press (or tabloid)
3
. While all the different newspapers,
whether broadsheet or tabloid, differ with regard to their political partisanship
4
, there
are also a number of differences characteristic for the two groups:
First of all, both types of newspapers aim at different readerships. As Bell (1991: 109)
points out, 80% of the readers of quality papers belong to the middle classes, while the
tabloids, conversely, draw about the same percentage of their readers from the working
classes. Consequently, the respective audiences differ in terms of financial means as
well as in terms of education and interests.
As already mentioned, this distinction has considerable consequences for both
"selection (content) and presentation (language, style)" (Bednarek 2006: 13), since the
newspaper producers try to appeal to their respective (stereotyped) audience: on the
one hand, they try to meet their interests as best as possible, e.g.
they select the news
they write about according to what they believe their readers consider most news-
worthy. This means that the quality papers, aiming at a middle-class audience, are more
likely to cover news about politics or economics, and foreign news, generally, than the
3
Among the national daily newspapers, the broadsheets are: The Guardian, The Independent, The Daily
Telegraph, The Times and The Financial Times; papers such as The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Daily
Mirror, The Star and The Sun are classified as tabloids (O'Driscoll 2000: 152).
4
For an overview over the political orientation of the national daily newspapers see O'Driscoll 2000: 153.
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tabloids, whose focus is more on "crime-based or personality-based news" (Bignell
2002: 82). On the other hand, the way the newspapers write is also influenced by the
audience: there are a number of differences in the form
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as well as in the kind of
language their articles employ. As far as language is concerned, it can be observed that
there is
"a close reflection of audience status in linguistic style" (Bell 1991: 109), which
means that tabloids use certain stylistic techniques in their articles which they believe
suit their target readership the working classes as best as possible. This includes
,
for
instance
,
the application of a less formal and detached kind of language. In other words,
as the newspapers are economically dependent on their audiences, they try to reflect
their audiences' inferred interests and expectations in both the choice of events or
topics they decide to cover, in structuring it in a way they find most attractive and in
resembling the kind of language that the readers are most likely to be comfortable with.
3.2. Description of the material analysed
The British are known to be a nation of newspaper readers. Two of Britain's daily
newspapers are The Sun and The Guardian. According to the National Readership Survey
(conducted between July 2005 and June 2006;
www.nrs.co.uk/open_access/
open_topline/newspapers/index.cfm
), The Sun, with 16.8 per cent of readers among all
Britons, is the tabloid selling the most copies, and is thus the most widely read daily
newspaper in the whole country. The Guardian, with a readership of 2.5 per cent, takes
the third place within the broadsheets, preceded by The Daily Telegraph with 4.2 per
cent and The Times with 3.7 per cent. These numbers also make it obvious that there is
a large gap between the quality and the popular press in terms of circulation: the
circulation of the most widely read broadsheet newspaper (The Daily Telegraph)
amounts only to a quarter of that of the most popular tabloid (The Sun).
The material analysed in this paper are articles from the online edition from The
Guardian on the one hand and The Sun on the other. They all report on the same events
and were published between 24
th
and 27
th
August 2006.
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This includes "quantity, design, typography, the use of photographs and other visual techniques"
(Bednarek 2006: 13)
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To find a news story both of the newspapers cover is not as easy a task as one might
imagine. Since the two follow different selection criteria, there is sometimes not a single
news event that is covered by both of them, or they vary considerably in length and
detail, so that they do not offer comparable material. The news story covered in the
articles here, however, obviously meets the selection criteria for both quality and
popular press: both The Guardian and The Sun published a significant number of articles
on it during the first ten days after the initial event, namely the escape of Natascha
Kampusch, an Austrian girl who had been kidnapped eight years before at the age of
ten, from her kidnapper on 23
rd
August. Both newspapers published an online news
update on the next day, when her reappearance was made public (G1, S1). During the
following days, as more and more details about the kidnapping itself, the subsequent
police investigations about the years she was kept prisoner and her escape become
known, the "story" about her reunion with her family begins to develop and the woman
starts reclaiming control of her life (e.g. by asking the media to stop revealing intimate
information about her). The newspapers continue to write
about it and as a
consequence of their distinct audience-orientation, focus more and more on diverging
aspects. For this paper, the material analysed will be restricted to the articles published
during the first four days, to the point where Kampusch asks the media to "[r]espect
[her] privacy" (G3: headline). It consists of three articles from The Guardian (G1-3)
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and
four from The Sun (S1-4).
The
Guardian
Headline
Date
G1
Kidnapped girl `found alive after eight
years'
24 August 2006
G2
Kidnapped at 10 and held for eight years.
The girl in the cellar
25 August 2006
G3
(The Observer)
`Respect my privacy' says kidnap victim
27 August 2006
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G3 was, in fact, published in The Observer. This can be accounted for by the fact that its publishing date,
27
th
August, was a Sunday. The Guardian is a national daily and is sold only on weekdays; on Sundays, it is
replaced by The Observer, which is part of the same group. For this reason, I do not make a distinction
there and consider this article as belonging to The Guardian.
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