‘Stealing Money’ OR ‘Embezzling Public Funds’: Construing sleaze in the Ugandan press via legalese

Journalism ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 146488492096541
Author(s):  
Levis Mugumya
Keyword(s):  
Appraisal Theory ◽  
Public Funds ◽  
Material Wealth ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
State Laws ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Commissions Of Inquiry ◽  
Court Proceedings

This study examines the construction of news reportage relating to normative breach. It analyses news stories on major corruption incidents involving embezzlement and the misuse of public funds by government officials in Uganda. The study employs a discourse analysis to explore how corruption is constructed and construed in the print media. It invokes Appraisal Theory to analyse hard news reports recounting corruption occurrences, proceedings or findings of commissions of inquiry into corruption incidents and arrests of suspects, public hearings and court proceedings of suspected corrupt persons across two daily newspapers published in English. The study explicates the nature of linguistic evaluative resources that news writers invoke to map feelings, and to evaluate news actors, processes and phenomena. The analysis reveals that news reporters heavily rely on external texts and voices to recount corruption stories. These sources are couched in legal language (legalese), which in turn impinges on the linguistic resources employed to evaluate news actors. Whereas this rhetorical strategy enables the news report to achieve ‘objectivity’, it appears to protect the journalist against defamation or slander. Appraisal analysis reveals dominant instances of negative inscriptions of the social sanction of propriety, namely overt negative evaluations of non-compliance with the civic responsibilities and state laws. The news reportage exhibits positive attributes of corrupt persons in relation to their material wealth and social capital. Finally, the study also reveals the journalistic stance towards corruption, which is covertly shown via modes of meaning intensification.

Encoding polysemy in the news

Journalism ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146488492110459
Author(s):  
Lillian Boxman-Shabtai
Keyword(s):  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Media Audience

Although media-audience encounters are always potentially open to different interpretations, little is known about the textual mechanisms that encourage polysemy. Focusing on a story about a CEO who pledged to drastically cut his pay to increase his employees’ salaries, this study compared news reports that covered the same event but were met by different levels of polysemy in their reception. Through a combination of frame and semiotic analysis, the study pinpoints differences in content and style between news stories that were met by interpretive convergence from audiences (low polysemy) and those that were met by interpretive divergence (high polysemy). Based on these differences, a typology of three textual mechanisms is offered to explain the range of polysemy in the news: the attributes and representation of characters, the use of empiricism versus mythology in structuring conflict, and the level of closure versus uncertainty in the story’s conclusion.

Spiritualism and the Resurgence of Fake News

2020 ◽  
pp. 222-237
Author(s):  
Kristy A. Hesketh
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Fake News ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The World ◽  
Spirit World ◽  
Social Media Platforms ◽  
Media Platform ◽  
False News

This chapter explores the Spiritualist movement and its rapid growth due to the formation of mass media and compares these events with the current rise of fake news in the mass media. The technology of cheaper publications created a media platform that featured stories about Spiritualist mediums and communications with the spirit world. These articles were published in newspapers next to regular news creating a blurred line between real and hoax news stories. Laws were later created to address instances of fraud that occurred in the medium industry. Today, social media platforms provide a similar vessel for the spread of fake news. Online fake news is published alongside legitimate news reports leaving readers unable to differentiate between real and fake articles. Around the world countries are actioning initiatives to address the proliferation of false news to prevent the spread of misinformation. This chapter compares the parallels between these events, how hoaxes and fake news begin and spread, and examines the measures governments are taking to curb the growth of misinformation.

The discoursal construction of candidates in the tenth Iranian presidential elections

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 537-557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali R. Abasi ◽  
Nahal Akbari
Keyword(s):  
Presidential Elections ◽  
Qualitative Case Study ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Appraisal Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
News Discourse ◽  
Sociopolitical Context

This qualitative case study investigates dissent in the news discourse of a major pro-reform newspaper covering the Iranian presidential election debates that took place in June 2009. Drawing on appraisal theory as its analytical lens, the article examines the evaluation of the three major candidates in the paper’s coverage of the debates. The article begins with the broader sociopolitical context situating the watershed debates and a description of the legal framework within which the Iranian press operate. The analysis next details the function of attitudinal resources in the discursive representation of the political actors. As central to an ideologically invested strategy, evaluative linguistic resources are found to sharply dichotomize the political actors along a range of positive and negative value positions that dissent from those advanced in the narratives of the dominant power.

Infanticide in 19th-Century England

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolá Goc
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Fallen Woman ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
News Discourse ◽  
The Times ◽  
History Of Journalism ◽  
Insight Into

Throughout the history of journalism the notion of a mother killing her infant child—committing an act of infanticide—has always been high on the news values scale. In the 19th century, sensational news reports of illicit sexual liaisons, of childbirth and grisly murder, appeared regularly in the press, naming and shaming transgressive unmarried women and framing them as a danger to society. These lurid stories were published in broadsheets and the popular press as well as in respectable newspapers, including the most influential English newspaper of the century, The Times of London. In 19th-century England, The Times played a powerful role in influencing public opinion on the issue of infanticide using lurid reports of infanticide trials and coronial inquests as evidence in stirring editorials as part of their political campaign to reform the 1834 New Poor Law and repeal its pernicious Bastardy Clause, which had led to a large increase in rates of infanticide. News texts, because of their ability to capture one view of a society at a given moment in time, are a valuable historical resource and can also provide insight into journalism practices and the creation of public opinion. Infanticide court and coronial news reports provided details of the desperate murderous actions of young women and also furnished potent evidence of legal and government policy failures. The use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) in studying infanticide reports in The Times provides insight into the ways in which infanticide news stories worked as ideological texts and how journalists created understandings about illegitimacy, the “fallen woman,” infanticide, social injustice, and discriminatory gendered laws through news discourse.

Ideological positioning in news translation

Target ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Pan
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Appraisal Theory ◽  
Three Dimension ◽  
Chinese Reader ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Rights Issue

This article investigates the Chinese translations of several English news reports on China’s human rights issue carried in Reference News, a Chinese authoritative state-run newspaper devoted to translating foreign reports for the Chinese reader, and aims to establish how evaluative resources are resorted to by the translators to facilitate ideologically different positioning in presenting events and identifying participants in the translated news. The translations are compared with their English source texts using Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005) as the micro analytical framework and Fairclough’s (1995a, 1995b) three-dimension model of Critical Discourse Analysis as the explanatory framework.

scholarly journals Linguistic Evaluation of News Reports on Islamophobic Incidents

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. p46
Author(s):  
Noor Alaa Abdul- Razzk ◽  
Huda H Khalil
Keyword(s):  
Linguistic Theory ◽  
Appraisal Theory ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Global Media ◽  
Fox News ◽  
Global Institutions ◽  
News Reports ◽  
News Agencies ◽  
The World ◽  
Global Perception

This research paper aims at figuring out the way in which the world perceives the Islamophobic incidents. Such a global perception can be obtained from employing a kind of pervasive discourse that is emitted from global institutions and directed to the world in general. Thus, the conducted linguistic evaluation has targeted the news reports as a kind of global media discourse. The linguistic theory employed for language evaluation is Martin and White’s (2005) theory of appraisal. Three categories are classified in the appraisal theory: attitude, engagement, and graduation. Attitude is subdivided into effect, judgment, and appreciation; engagement into monogloss and hetergloss, and graduation into force and focus. The methodology works on three variables in the Islamophobic incident: the aggressor, the victim and motive. The orientation of investigation works to identify the attitude of affect directed from the report towards the victim, judgement towards the behavior of the aggressor, and appreciation towards the motive of the incident. The research also identifies the features of these attitudes as being negative or positive, the types (sub- classifications), engagement (monogloss or heterogloss), and graduation (force and focus) of the spotted attitudes. The data consists of twelve news reports selected, according to their topic, from three News agencies: BBC, Independent, and Fox News. The analysis has revealed that, contrary to many claims, news reports tend to adopt a neutral stance towards Muslims and Non- Muslims. They tend to portray the Islamophobic incidents as close to reality as possible.

scholarly journals 459 Saudi Iranian Conflict in English and Arabic Translated News Reports

لارك ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (34) ◽  
pp. 459-464
Author(s):  
Muhannad Hadi Abdul-Ameer ◽  
Tahseen Ali Hussein Al-Romany
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Appraisal Theory ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Major Purpose ◽  
News Reports

AbstractThe present study aims at investigating the Arabic translations of several English news reports on Saudi Iranian conflict to show translators draw on their ideological positioning in introducing events. In the present study, Appraisal Theory and Fairclough's trilateral model of Critical Discourse Analysis have been used to compare the English source texts with their translations into Arabic. The examples have been selected from BBC news reports published in the BBC Website at different dates. The major purpose of this study is to merely highlight the linguistic features of news reports about the Saudi Iranian conflict.

‘Masculine Normal Guy Here' – Lonely Hearts and ‘Normal' Gays in Cyberspace

2010 ◽  
pp. 164-179
Author(s):  
Martin Paviour-Smith
Keyword(s):  
Small Scale ◽  
Rhetorical Strategy ◽  
Linguistic Resources ◽  
Gay Male

This chapter examines the discourse of dating advertisements on a small-scale dating site, NormalGay.com. I analyse the deployment of linguistic resources of identity-making, in particular, the term, normal, and how members take up or reject this position. Examining the profiles as strategically managed displays of capital on the dating market reveals normal to have a number of meanings which are encoded in different ways. Many profile creators deploy the rhetorical strategy of the enthymeme to covertly define the term with respect to heterosexual norms. Others, who see the dating site as an extension to their off-line lives, define the term against the backdrop of “the gay scene”. The interpretation of identity terms such as normal requires construing the positions taken up with respect to their imagining of the community, heteronormative masculinity and understandings of gay male sociality.

The Press Grew More Interpretive

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin G. Barnhurst
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Public Radio ◽  
Network Television ◽  
News Content ◽  
News Stories ◽  
News Reports ◽  
The Press ◽  
Science News ◽  
The Right ◽  
Interpretive Turn

This chapter discusses the growing pressure for news to become more interpretive. The Left worries about commercial and public relations influences, and the Right about reporters' biases, but both sides call for news that gives more context. They say the press should also do a better job of explaining where information comes from. News content producers want to supply more and better interpretations and have called for more context that “makes the complex coherent and meaningful,” decried a growing tendency of science news reports to manipulate facts, and warned against surrendering “their functions of analysis and explanation”. A closer look at news stories shows a broad interpretive turn toward modern news, with explanations along with judgments and opinions increasing in the news content of daily papers, network television, public radio, and mainstream sites online.

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