“Silly and Superficial”: Headline Tone in Press TV and Voice of America Coverage of the U.S. Withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action

On May 8, 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump announced the United States would withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. President Trump had campaigned on removing the U.S. from the nuclear agreement, but the announcement still caught Iran and other parties to the JCPOA by surprise. This research analyzed three days of JCPOA-related news headlines from two international broadcasters: Press TV, headquartered in Tehran, and Voice of America, located in Washington, D.C. The majority of headlines published by both news organizations exhibited negative tone. Considering that reading a headline often substitutes for reading an entire news report, examining the headlines these international broadcasters used to present this event to their global audiences is a worthwhile pursuit. Keywords: Iran, United States, nuclear, headline, tone

Sadness, Negativity, and Uncertainty in Education During COVID-19 on Social Media

The global COVID-19 pandemic increased social media usage to obtain information and to share concerns, feelings, and emotions, turning it into a prolific field of research through which it is possible to understand how audiences are coping with the multitude of recent challenges. This paper presents results from a social media analysis of 61532 education-related news headlines posted by the major daily news provider in Portugal, Sic Notícias, on Facebook, from January to December 2020. We focus on how the news impacted on audiences’ emotional response and discourse, and we analyze the key issues of the most commented news content. The results show a prevailing sadness among audiences and a very negative discourse all throughout 2020, with a high degree uncertainty being expressed. The main concerns revolved around parents supporting children in their first remote learning endeavors, financial sustainability, the lack of devices, the disinfection of schools, and the students’ mobility, particularly in the non-higher education context.

Semantic study of the use of association, ambiguity, and lexical meanings, daily news headlines of Sinar Indonesia Baru Medan

This research was field research taken from the Daily News Sinar Indonesia Baru, Medan. The problems to be discussed were association, ambiguity, and lexical meaning. The purpose of this study was to explore or find out the meanings contained in the Daily News headlines in the Sinar Indonesia Baru Medan. To analyze the meaning of the Daily News headlines of the Sinar Indonesia Baru, a structural-semantic theory was used which referred to Abdul Chaer's view. The method used in data collection was the listening method by listening to the collection of existing materials on the daily news headlines of the Medan Sinar Indonesia Baru, then proceeding with the note-taking technique.After that, they were grouped based on the uses of association, ambiguity, and lexical meanings found in the headlines. The equivalent method was a method whose determination tool was outside and did not become part of the language in question (Sudariyanto, 1993:13). In this case, the basic technique used was the determining element sorting technique. As a continuation, a qualitative description method was used. This means that this qualitative method as a whole makes use of interpretive ways of presenting in the form of a description.

A Speech Acts Analysis of English COVID-19 News Headlines

News headlines are key elements in spreading news. They are unique texts written in a special language which enables readers understand the overall nature and importance of the topic. However, this special language causes difficulty for readers in understanding the headline. To illuminate this difficulty, it is argued that a pragmatic analysis from a speech act theory perspective is a plausible tool for a headline analysis. The main objective of the study is to pragmatically analyze the most frequently employed types of speech acts in the news headlines covering COVID-19 in Aljazeera English website. To this end, Bach and Harnish's (1979) Taxonomy of Speech Acts has been adopted to analyze the data. Thirty headlines have been collected from Aljazeera English news website. The findings have shown that constatives and directives occur more frequently than commissives. Other types, like acknowledgments, effectives and verdictives are not employed. The study has concluded that to pay a special emphasis on COVID-19 as an issue that preoccupied and endangered the world, headline writers of Aljazeera website uses specific speech acts, constatives and directives, more frequently than others. This makes it clear that using specific speech acts in writing headlines is an effective way for inspiring readers to easily understand the intended message.

Difficulties of Understanding English Breaking News Headlines by Iraqi EFL Learners at the University Level

Understanding breaking news necessitates a special attention, since they are written with a special style. The study aims at identifying the difficulties faced by the Iraqi university EFL learners in comprehending English breaking news. The study included 10 fourth year students enrolled at the Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Anbar. Thus, a questionnaire as a research instrument, was sent online to the students. The questionnaire points were related to the identification of difficulties faced by the learners in comprehending English breaking news. The data of the study were (10) headlines selected purposively from Euronews website. The data were qualitatively analyzed based on quantifying the quality procedure. The findings showed that (54%) of the total number of the students stated that the headlines are difficult to understand, and (46%) considered them easy. Based on these findings, the study has concluded that students faced four main difficulties: neologism, difficult vocabulary, ellipsis, and passive voice when reading news headlines. Neologism has scored the highest percentage (32.4324%), while passive voice has been the lowest (5.4054%).

Internet News Headlines: Ontological and Orthological Aspects

The author presents the results of a multidimensional analysis of Internet news headlines based on the headings of the Yandex news aggregator. The issue of the text status of news headlines is considered. When solving this problem, special attention is paid to the formation of correlative paradigms of headings, united by a common denotative meaning. Methods of semantic interaction of heading paradigms based on different types of topic-rhematic deployment are described. It is proved that the paradigms of headings, complementing each other in informational and pragmatic aspects, form the discourse of Internet headings. It is concluded that this way of functioning of headlines enhances their semantic and visual autonomy from the news text, which allows us to consider Internet news headlines as minitext. The frequency methods of lexico-syntactic transformations of the original headings are analyzed, on the basis of which the constituents of paradigms are formed. At the same time, attention is focused on the orthological aspect of Internet headers. The author comes to the conclusion that the focus on the variability and efficiency of headings leads not only to the appearance of lexical and grammatical errors, but also to their replication and consolidation in the mind of the addressee as a result of changes in the structure of cognitive models.

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE USED IN SAUDI NEWS HEADLINES RELATED TO CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19)

Figurative language is a part of Stylistics and there was much research on how figurative language was used in different contexts. The present research aimed at analyzing the figurative language used in Saudi news headlines related to Coronavirus (COVID-19). A descriptive qualitative research design was used in this study. The data source of this study was the Saudi Press Agency (SPA), and the data were headlines related to Coronavirus (COVID-19) published from the period from February 15 to March 31, 2020. The obtained data from this study were organized, classified, and coded. The findings of this study revealed that there were seven speech figures used in this study ( personification, hyperbole, understatement, paradox, synecdoche, apostrophe, and metonymy). The most used speech figure was personification and the least used one was metonymy. Each type of these speech figures had its own function such as to expand meaning, create intense emotions, and express a lot in a limited space. The researcher provides some recommendations for future research work in order to get more insights and contributions to this topic.

Deliberation in health-related headlines

Just how big of a difference will deliberated thinking make in the digital age when judging whether theheadline of a digital article is true or fake? Misinformation plagued the Chinese internet space, and fakenews, especially related to health tips, often went viral on the internet with rapid speed. A previous study 1was previously conducted on political articles measuring the influence of partisanship on thinkingdeliberately. In this paper, we conducted a study on how deliberation influenced the accuracy of Chinesenetizens distinguishing real and fake news headlines, using a similar experiment procedure from theabove mentioned study. We found that deliberation reduces the possibility of these readers beingmisguided by fake health-related headlines. A similar trend of accuracy was observed when participantsthought deliberately compared to the original study, despite using different topics on a differentpopulation of participants.