Mooney and Evans -- Ch 4 -- Language and the Media

Introduction

Chapter 4 focuses on language used in the mass media.
Mass media is defined as information communicated from one sender to a large audience.
The chapter will cover social media and news media, which have become important sources of information for society.
The study of media provides linguistic data and opportunities for analysis.
It also allows examination of how ideologies are communicated and maintained, linguistic choices, and changes in news reporting.
Media literacy is crucial for understanding information in the media.
Critical reading of media texts and understanding content delivery is a form of new literacy practices, which equates to power.

Mass media

Mass media has a large audience.
Trust in the author is significant for news media (ethos).
Trust allows media entities to influence the interpretation of events.
'Fake news' is a topic of public debate.
Traditionally, there was an asymmetry between producer and consumer before the internet and social media.
Before 2004, news was primarily obtained through newspapers, radio, and television.
The historical asymmetry between producer and consumer is the starting point for considering language and media power.

Manufacture of consent

Ideologies are built up, sustained, and reiterated over time.
News is broadcast 24 hours a day through various media.
The language of news provides insights into the creation and exercise of power.
Power is not just a matter of language but includes physical force.
Fairclough distinguishes between coercion and the manufacture of consent, with ideology being key to the latter.
The 'manufacture of consent' originates from Noam Chomsky's work.
Chomsky and Herman's book, Manufacturing Consent, examines the mass media in economic and ideological terms.
They identify five 'filters' that influence the representation of stories:
- Media ownership.
- Advertising income.
- Source of news stories.
- Responses to stories.
- Avoidance of communism.
These filters alter information, leading to 'manufactured consent' rather than real agreement.
Chomsky and Herman argue that news media functions as propaganda, promoting a particular viewpoint beneficial to those in power.

Filtering the facts

The concept of 'manufacture of consent' is understanding the cumulative effect of the filters.
The filters can be understood as structuring language and content at an ideological level.
Audiences are unaware of these filters when interacting with mass media.
The filters cause events to be presented in particular ways.
Some events may be omitted, while others are given great importance.
The way stories are told is also influenced by these filters.
Exposure to filtered representations normalizes the values of mass media.
These values become part of 'common sense' and dominant ideology.
Chomsky and Herman argue that 'common sense' is constructed by sustained media representations.
Knowing these filters allows for different interpretations of texts.
The example of Edward Snowden's portrayal in the mass media illustrates how filters operate.
Different news outlets presented polarized views of Snowden, with varying ideological positions.
Research shows that even within a single country, different newspapers reported on Snowden differently.
The Guardian focused on 'criticism of surveillance' and 'justification of reporting'.
The Daily Mail focused on 'lifestyle and personalisation' of Snowden.
The Sun focused on 'defence of surveillance rights'.
Reporting strategies are connected to the ideological views of the outlet and its audience.
The mass media exerts ideological power by framing situations and people in a specific way.
Ideologies and representations are potentially connected to media ownership (filter (a)).
Owners' political and social views may influence content and perspective of coverage.
Keeping advertisers (filter (b)) and owners content is common sense.
Ideology acts as a filter, removing contradictory ideas.
This filtering is not necessarily conscious; it appears as common sense.

Lexical Choices

Newspaper accounts of events can vary significantly depending on lexical choices.
Different lexical choices can suggest different things about the same events.
Example: Accounts of student protests in London in 2010 varied widely.
One account described violent behavior and destruction of property.
Another described a peaceful protest hijacked by anarchists.
An eyewitness account presented a relatively peaceful protest with minimal property damage.
News can only ever be a partial representation of what actually happened.
Journalists' stories may not exactly represent their intended narrative.
Manipulation of even one word can change understanding of an issue.
Lexical choices bring with them propositions, arguments, views, and 'facts'.
Example: Some Americans support the 'Affordable Care Act' but oppose 'Obamacare,' even though they refer to the same legislation.
This confusion demonstrates the power of naming choices.
The term 'Obamacare' was created and maintained by the Republican Party to discredit the Affordable Care Act.
The term confused citizens about the policy.
Republicans argued that the term was part of the language and in spell check.
President Obama and Democrats eventually accepted the term.
This is an example of reclaiming, where a negative word is used for positive purposes.
A poll in 2017 showed that many respondents still did not know that Obamacare and the Affordable Care Act referred to the same policy.
This demonstrates the strength of lexical choices.

News values

Allan Bell outlined 'news values' (or 'newsworthiness') explaining what is significant and newsworthy for news producers.
News values complement Chomsky and Herman's filters: (c) where stories come from and (d) how people respond to them.
Bell focuses on news production at the level of journalists' choices.
His lists explain why some stories are covered and some are not.
News organizations still orient to news values in new media contexts like Twitter.

Actors and events

In terms of actors and events, news values explain what stories are considered newsworthy and why.
Bell identifies the following news values:
- NEGATIVITY: negative events are more likely to be newsworthy than positive ones.
- RECENCY: the event should be recent.
- PROXIMITY: the event should be close by.
- CONSONANCE: events should cohere with existing ideas.
- UNAMBIGUITY: events should be clear with resolution.
- UNEXPECTEDNESS: that which is not routine is more newsworthy.
- Superlativeness: the worst or best of something is more likely to be covered.
- RELEVANCE: the audience should see relevance to their own life.
- PERSONALISATION: reporting in a personal way makes a story more newsworthy.
- ELITENESS: stories about powerful people are more newsworthy.
- ATTRIBUTION: Facts/stories attributed to someone important/trustworthy.
- FACTICITY: figures, dates, locations, and statistics are important.
These features help understand why we get the news we do.
There are two distinctions made about news stories:
- Hard or soft news.
- Fast or slow news.
Hard news consists of reports of accidents, conflicts, crimes, announcements, and discoveries.
Hard news might draw on the news values of RECENCY, NEGATIVITY, PROXIMITY, UNEXPECTEDNESS, RELEVANCE, and FACTICITY.
Soft news might draw on the values of PERSONALISATION, ELITENESS, CONSONANCE, SUPERLATIVENESS, and ATTRIBUTION.
Fast news needs to be reported quickly but becomes outdated quickly.
Slow news is not as time-sensitive and develops over a longer period.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Election results are fast news.
The consequences and implications are slow news.
News values depend on various factors.
What counts as 'recent' changes depending on the media outlet.
Stories can be framed to construct a particular news value.
Word choices can construct events in line with relevant news values.
Explicitly stating a person's qualifications can construct FACTICITY or ELITENESS.
Temporal markers can contribute to understanding an event as recent.
Shared behaviour on Facebook can be understood with reference to these news values (Bednarek, 2016a).
'Eliteness, Superlativeness, Unexpectedness, Negativity and Timeliness [recency] seem especially important in shared news' (2016a: 252).
NEGATIVITY seems to be more important than positivity for Facebook users.

Experts and the news

Media plays a role in creating what is true (facticity).
Boyce's (2006) work on the media reporting of the alleged link between the MMR vaccination and autism helps explore media challenges.
AMBIGUOUS, RELEVANT, and PERSONAL information is considered newsworthy.
The MMR debate shows us the changing profile of who is considered an expert.
Children are given vaccinations for their health and public health.
In 1998, a scientific paper argued for a link between autism and a 'rare bowel syndrome' that was then publicized (Boyce, 2006: 892).
The apparent risk to children became a big, NEGATIVE, RECENT, and PERSONAL news story.
Professor Wakefield suggested that separate doses of vaccines would be safer.
This suggestion was not supported by the majority of his co-authors or by scientific evidence.
The media reported the link between MMR and autism as true.
Other scientists disputed Dr. Wakefield's claim.
The empirical facts were unambiguous.
The story had significant effects because it involved children.
News coverage of MMR increased dramatically.
Vaccine uptake fell.
Boyce found that audiences were not presented with scientific experts.
The MMR debate is an example of the changing nature of 'expertise' in the media.
Accurate information is crucial, but there has been a decline in trust of 'experts' (Boyce, 2006: 890).
News producers rely on experts to satisfy ATTRIBUTION and FACTICITY.
In the absence of (or in spite of) compelling scientific evidence, parents and government bodies can become experts.
From a news point of view, which 'experts' are chosen depends on the ideology of the news producer.
Distrust of expertise has a dramatic impact even nearly twenty years later.
Efforts to re-educate the public about the safety of the MMR vaccine have been contested by a range of groups.
The issue is not simply about who is spoken to, interviewed, or reported.
Rather, it is about how they are positioned in respect of one another.
While it is important to hear the views of parents, their expertise is different from that of a scientist.
News consumers were interested in the personal views of scientists.
Experts were asked whether they would have their children vaccinated.
If the experts had no children, their opinion was sometimes represented as less important.
The story was framed as being about children and parents rather than about science.
Moreover, people overestimated both the amount of research on both sides and the number of subjects involved.
This story resulted in people refusing to have their children vaccinated (Boyce, 2006: 892).
'Expertise' is constructed by the very process of news production.
The mass media can make an expert out of someone who wouldn't otherwise be considered to have expertise on a topic.
'Lay' speakers will provide 'a salient comment on some aspect of their own personal status and identity, before going on to state their opinion'.
The decline of trust in experts has a number of consequences.
Important information is harder to convey.
There is a discourse of distrust, especially around health issues.
New stories related to health can be framed as consonant with these discourses of distrust.
Sorting the truth from the fiction has become even harder.
This online environment is challenging for news producers.
They have to produce their content in a new way, in a new context for a new kind of audience.

News online

Examples primarily come from online versions of newspapers.
Most newspapers have webpages.
Some news outlets only have an online presence (e.g., Huffington Post, Slate).
Changes to news production and consumption through the internet have been profound.
A Pew Research poll shows that 38% of Americans often obtain news online and among younger people aged 18-29, 50% often obtain their news online.
TV continues to be the most widely used news platform; '57% of US adults often get TV-based news'.
It is important to understand online news media.
Jucker identifies six ways the internet has changed mass media:
- Hypermedia: integration of different channels of communication.
- Becoming more personal, targeted at particular audiences.
- Levels of interaction have increased dramatically.
- The 'traditional lifespan of information' is changing (Jucker, 2003: 130).
- Change from communication between synchronous (at the same time) and asynchronous.
- The availability of media products is no longer subject to the same physical restrictions, and the products are losing their fixity (Jucker, 2003: 131).
Kautsky and Widholm describe the distinction between printed news and online news as 'mono-linear' versus online news, where versions vary.
News online is now very fast indeed.
How do news producers make stories visible?
Kautsky and Widholm distinguish between print media and online news.
- Printed newspapers are periodic with their content fixed.
- For online news, sites are designed so that they can be constantly updated and changed.
- The text is not stable.
One can discover that there are differences in how a story is told even over a short period of time.
Online news has to balance continuity with novelty.
Online news is updated according to the type of publication.
When looking at the resources used to construct news online, many are those found in the traditional print media.
Bateman, Delin, and Henschel identify five areas to consider when examining online news:
1. Content structure: what information is included and in what order?
2. Rhetorical structure: what is the relationship between the content elements, and what argument does it produce?
3. Layout structure - where are the different parts of the story (the text, the pictures, and so on)?
4. Navigation structure - how should the reader move between parts of the story?
5. Linguistic structure - what is the detail of the language used?
Online journalism is broader than just mainstream online news.
Deuze identified four types of news online:
1. Mainstream news sites (e.g., newspapers and news shows).
2. index and category sites (e.g., search engines and news aggregators).
3. meta- and comments sites (e.g., sites about the media itself).
4. share and discussion sites (e.g., sites where individuals can connect and share information).
Sometimes mainstream media is constrained by ideological filters and political power.
Share and discussion sites become important when mainstream media have been restricted.
These sites can be a powerful tool for exercising agency/ voicing opinion and engaging in political discussion.

Presentation of news on the internet

The story about two supermarkets and their plan to implement a fee for plastic bags illustrates the nuances of online news media.
The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) distributes in print and online via Facebook and Twitter.
Comparing different types of media dissemination helps uncover what may be relevant to our analysis.
Twitter and Facebook serve as navigation tools to the main website.
Both the Twitter feed and the Facebook headline posts provide links directly to the article on the newspaper webpage.
However, a news story like this won't be the only item on a person's Twitter feed or Facebook page.
News stories from mainstream publications will be interspersed with other kinds of news.
News stories are vying for attention with other 'news'.
It makes sense, then, that the tweet and the Facebook post are dominated by an image and a short headline and framing information for the reader. These act as 'hooks'.
Woolworths announced they would no longer give out single-use plastic bags on Friday, July 14, 2017.
SMH subsequently reported this news online and on social media.
Later the same day, Coles announced that they would also be charging for plastic bags.
The SMH print edition came out on Saturday, July 15, and included news about both supermarkets.
All of them have a headline and a leader (the first sentence after the headline), but Twitter and Facebook must present these differently.
On Twitter and Facebook, the headline and a leader are presented inside a frame with a photo above them, which serves as the direct link to the story on the SMH homepage.
The tweet accompanying the link repeats a detail about the story (that another store will ban plastic bags) while the Facebook post provides more text about the same salient detail of the story. The tweet and post also foreground temporality, or 'breaking news’.
The tweet and the Facebook post, which include an image, headline, leader, and comment, work in a similar way to the front page of the printed paper.
The newspaper website was updated to reflect the breaking news about Cole's.
The final print copy differed in small ways from the online version.
The headlines and leaders are similar, and if one takes the headline, leader, and frames altogether, the reader is given a key summary of the story.
Surprisingly, the constraints of Twitter seem to have replicated in the Facebook domain, indicating that newspapers think readers consume news on social media in a similar way to Twitter.

The inverted pyramid

News stories follow a structure known as the 'inverted pyramid'.
Traditionally the inverted pyramid story begins with all the main facts and relegates the less important details to the apex of the pyramid, and can therefore be cut from the bottom.
Online articles are not (in theory) subject to the same kinds of limitations.
Nevertheless, some conventions of the print journalism genre have carried over to the online environment.
The inverted pyramid structure also makes sense in relation to reading habits and how people consume information, that is, we tend to read headlines, then leads first.
The structure of an online story is related to the layout and the navigation tools available to the news producers.
Online newspapers have to deal with a range of layout constraints.
Homepage navigation tools include headings for different sections, search functions, 'most read' boxes, and short snippets of articles.
The homepage 'is a complex sign, consisting of a range of visual and visual-verbal signs which function as coherent structural elements'. (Knox, 2007: 23).
Newspapers online are 'not simply digital versions of newspapers, but a fusion of radio, television and traditional print media' (2008: 84).
Online news analysis has to take account of the multimodal nature of the internet.

Commenting on the news

Changes in technology allow for new modes of communication and new forms of interaction between 'producers' and 'consumers'.
The presence of news media online has expanded the range and speed of such interaction.
The ability to comment on stories online often leads to conversations between readers.
The reader comments are helpful for understanding how the event or issue is understood and provide readers with a variety of opinions on the story that may be different from their own.
Comments on the Woolworths story on the SMH Facebook page were similar in content to those on the website.
Some people were very pleased about the ban; others complained.
The level of interaction between commenters, however, was much greater than on the website.
Some Facebook comments resulted in as many as 29 replies.
The interaction is taking place among readers rather than between the news producers and their audience.
Some news organisations are more proactive in this domain (2017: 706).
A publisher's proactive engagement with the reader comments serves the goals of the publisher in that it keeps readers engaged and enables them to deliver them more content and deliver readers to its advertisers.

Tweeting news

Twitter was founded in 2006 and has been taken up by a range of people and institutions for a variety of reasons.
Twitter is a micro-blogging application, allowing individuals to author and disseminate messages called 'tweets'.
To access Twitter, you need a user name, and this may allow people to tweet directly to you, by including your Twitter handle (which is signified by @).
Hashtags (#) are an important part of Twitter. These work to identify the subjects or orientations of tweets.
It is also possible to include images and links to webpages in tweets.
The Twitter interface allows users to see what subjects are being hashtagged and circulating widely (called 'trending') as well as allowing users to follow a subject regardless of who is tweeting.
The conventions for using Twitter have been generated by its users.
In Section 3.8, we saw how students exercised agency using Twitter to protest university fees.
This is a use of Twitter that is akin to citizen journalism.
Traditional news bodies monitor Twitter because it can provide an important cue to trending topics and current events.
Hermida points out that sourcing news from Twitter makes verification of stories very important for journalists but also very challenging given the fast pace of contemporary news reporting (2012: 661).
'The process of determining the facts' traditionally took place in newsrooms' (2012: 665).
'Arguably, some of the process of journalism is taking place in public on platforms such as Twitter' (Hermida, 2012: 665).
Twitter can be used to bring people together in a digital communicative context.
The circulation of trending topics on Twitter also means that those who do not use Twitter become aware of what Twitter users are discussing.
There is still a 'digital divide'- the fact that not everyone has access to these technologies.
Twitter has become valuable in times of crisis.
In emergency situations, the 'most popular retweets among locals [affected by the emergency] were tweets containing much more locally relevant information' (2010: 7).
Twitter has also been used to track illness and thus plan for demand on local health services.
The Food Standards Agency has used information from Twitter in order to map the spread of the norovirus.

Fake news

News and information can be easily divorced from their point of origin, they are susceptible to misinterpretation.
It's not surprising that sometimes news that isn't true is reported as though it is.
It is important to read and understand this material more critically.
News stories are based on a particular point of view.
Recently the notion of ‘fake news' has become a much more widely discussed topic.
'Fake news' refers to a few slightly different but related concepts (Zimmer et al., 2017):
1. a term used to delegitimise news reports.
2. a term used to refer to fabricated news reports that are:
  - intended to be untrue and whose goal is to misinform, or.
  - intended to be untrue and whose goal is to entertain.
The accessibility of social media and other forms of new digital technology do make it easier to produce, distribute and consume 'fake news'.

Fake news as delegitimising accusation

Labelling news as 'fake' is used to delegitimise it.
Donald Trump has often suggested that the media does not represent him accurately.
In a press conference in 2017, Trump accused an entire news network, CNN, of being 'fake news'.
This seems to be an allegation that news organisations have particular agendas and that these agendas shape (and distort) their coverage of Trump.
By doing this, Trump can call into question the validity of a story about him and exploit distrust of news sources.

Fabricated news reports to misinform

The use of ‘fake news’ involves purposeful misinformation to gain an advantage over a political rival.
For example, one story that circulated widely via the internet involved accusations that Hillary Clinton and her team were running a child traffic ring.
This practice is not limited to the US.
Establishing the veracity of news was traditionally the role of mainstream media organisations.
The increasing occurrence of fake news suggests that before accepting something as true, we should verify stories ourselves.
Research suggests that some high school and college students don't have the skills necessary to evaluate claims made on social media or to distinguish between actual news and content that someone else has paid for.
Social media outlets and internet search engines have also made efforts to try to curb the circulation of fake news on their sites.
False stories 'diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information'.

Fabricated news reports to entertain

There is also fake news that is intended to be untrue and whose goal is to entertain.
The Onion, Faking News and the Betoota Advocate are all examples of platforms that circulate this kind of fake news.
There are cases of spoof fake news being published in mainstream media outlets as factual news.
Wardle (2017) points out that in order to understand fake news, we need to understand (1) ‘the different types of content that are being created and shared’, (2) ‘[t]he motivations of those who create this content’ and (3) ‘the ways this content is being disseminated’ (Wardle, 2017).

Comedy news shows

We should also consider comedy news media that engage with genuine current events for the purpose of informing and entertaining.
These shows have often been referred to as 'fake news' even though the content was real.
The Daily Show and Full Frontal in the US and The Daily Mash and Have I Got News for You in the UK are examples of parody news television programming.
'The starting premise of the [comedy style] fake news routine often begins with real journalism'. (Borden and Tew, 2007: 306).
This genre of programme can even be found in countries where presenting this kind of news programme is risky because of the critiques they present (e.g., Parazit in Iran, Al Bernameg in Egypt, ChistoNEWS in Ukraine).

Summary

This chapter discussed the role that mass media plays in society and the power it exercises.
It describes how the mass media constructs and exercises its power by paying attention to the way information is filtered and represented.
Analysis of lexical and syntactic choices reveals ideology, and news stories are structured to present a particular point of view.
Individual choices (at the level of lexis and syntax) interact with each other and build to a single interpretation of the facts.
Experts are constructed by the media.
The concept of 'news values' explains why news producers consider some events to be newsworthy while others are not.
Mass media has moved from print-based publications to the World Wide Web, which has changed some aspects of news production and consumption.
Even though information is presented through a different technology, the linguistic and ideological choices made are still relevant.
This understanding is necessary to adjust our literacy practices and our understanding of the texts we consume.