Few would doubt that mass-media journalism has the potential to exert a powerful influence on contemporary society, shaping, as it does, the way we talk about our past, present and future, the way we debate ethical, political, economic and cultural issues and the way we view our relationship with the wider world. It is perhaps not so surprising, then, that journalistic discourse is so often the target of criticism and the focus of vigorous, sometimes heated debate. The debate is complicated even further, I believe, because as a society, we seem to operate with diverse, sometimes contradictory understandings of what news journalism is and should be. On the one hand, the news media are held up as one of the pillars of democratic society, the so-called "Fourth Estate" acting to inform, to educate, to provide a forum for debate and to expose corruption, injustice and incompetence in government and big business. On the other hand, the actual texts produced by the media are seen to be biased, inaccurate, commercially motivated, voyeuristic and sensationalist. While journalists declare that their texts are `objective', that they offer reliable, impartial and neutral records of events suitable for `first drafts of history'1, media theoreticians and academic analysts2 contend that no text can be `objective' and that all news reporting necessarily interprets and evaluates the events it depicts according to particular socially and culturally determined points of view.
The concern of this set of notes is with the linguistic make-up (both verbal and visual) of journalistic texts from the domain of `news' and `current affairs'. It includes in its scope both news reporting and news commentary. Its primary focus is upon print journalism (newspapers and online publications) and upon English-language texts drawn from the journalisms of north America, the UK, Australia and the Indian sub-continent. Where possible, attention will be paid to how journalistic discourse may vary across these different English language journalisms. A few sections will also address the question of how journalistic textual conventions may vary across different languages (some comparisons will be made with French, Japanese and Chinese journalism).
The purpose of the course is to provide analytical tools for characterizing the distinctive stylistic properties of journalistic news reporting, analysis and commentary and for developing arguments about the communicative and ultimately rhetorical functionality of these texts. Here I use the term `rhetorical' in its broadest sense to refer to the way in which particular uses of language can operate to influence, reinforce or change readers/listeners' understandings, beliefs and expectations.3
In setting out this framework, the course will concern itself with the following types of issues:
1 Consider, by way of example, the following depiction of English-language news reporting by the authors of a training text for French journalists. They claim that the model English-language news report is `precise and neutral', that it eliminates all subjectivity and that `the only things on show are the raw facts' (Husson &Robert 1991: 63, my translation). In a similar vein, the eminent British journalist, Harold Evans (a one-time editor of the Sunday Times) was reported as telling a gathering of UC Berkeley journalism students that `When you report you are providing not only the first draft of history but the raw material.' (source: www. journalism.berkeley.edu/ events/evans.html, June 2000)
2 See, for example, Fowler 1991: 2
3 The term `rhetoric', in its narrower and perhaps more usual sense, is concerned with the way in which language can be used to argue and, if the arguing goes well, to persuade. My use of the term includes this sense, but my definition is broader - I include uses of language which are not explicitly argumentative but which, nonetheless, have the potential to influence or change the way in which people view the world around them. Arguably, there are few instances of language which are not rhetorical to some degree, given this definition of the word. Most (possibly all) utterances, then, have a rhetorical aspect.
