Political Bias on BBC, CNN, and Fox News - Doria

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(Fowler 1991: 13, also van Dijk 1988: 2 and 119). That is to say, in addition to the commercial interests of news organizations, societies and communities themselves are what define the types of news their members watch and read. For example, when comparing a local newspaper and a larger circulation, national one, there will be a difference in their contents: the local paper will report about locally important or newsworthy issues, whereas the national paper will report about issues that its wider range, less localized readership is interested in. Therefore, newsworthiness is socially constructed because it can vary by culture as well as within one culture. The concept of socially constructed news values can be approached through the widely acknowledged assumption that all texts have an ideal reader (e.g. Markley 1979 and DeMaria 1978) for whom the text is tailored. This concept, also known as implied reader, is utilized by the journalist so that they are able to write the text to fit "assumptions about the social world which they expect the readers to share" (Allan 2010: 103, also Bell 1991: 88-89 and Fowler 1991: 4). It is easy to see that since society can affect news values, it can also affect the product that the framework of news values helps create (i.e. news). To put it a different way, the author (or speaker) of a text is necessarily concerned with the function of the text (see Halliday 1985: xiii-xxxv for a discussion of language and function 2 ) - after all, writing a letter, a poem, and a news article all require significantly different approaches because their functions are different. Therefore, the manner in which one writes a news article is influenced by the fact that what one is writing is a news article in a particular society. The reason why the writer must conform to the features of the specific genre (i.e. news) is because there exist various social rules and restrictions which dictate how language is used (Fairclough 1989: 29-30, also Fowler 1991: 46). It is because language is socially restrained and structured (Fairclough 1989: 29-30) that the form (notably the inverted pyramid structure, see Deuze 2003: 209 and Jarman and McClune 2007: 44) and, to a lesser extent, content (theoretically factual information) of a news article are to a considerable extent predetermined. From this perspective it 2 Two editions of Halliday's book are used because the 1985 edition includes irreplaceable descriptions of the main concepts (e.g. language and function) in the introduction which is not found in the later version. All references outside the introduction will be made to the 2004 edition. 6
ecomes clearer how newsworthiness (as well as language in general) is influenced by the readership (or society) and, conversely, how the readership (or society) is influenced by the news (or language) 3 . In other words, all texts affect their interpreters who then not only expect a certain kind of text to conform to certain rules but also go on to reproduce the text type - if not through writing the news stories themselves then through the expectations about the features of news stories that the journalist then has to follow. This reciprocity is crucial in reinforcing unequal power structures imposed upon society by those in power (e.g. commercial entities). In this and the preceding section I have argued that the news is a product of different profit-seeking news broadcasting entities and that this, in addition to the socially constructed restraints on news production and topics, affects the news as a product. News broadcasting that aims to make maximum profit changes news to what is easy to sell, but which is not necessarily the product of "'serious' journalism" (Allan 2005: 93), and affects the choice of what becomes news (ibid., also Fowler 1991: 121). Additionally, the aforementioned social restraints, through a different process, produce a similar result by providing news readers with what they expect (Fowler 1991: 13). What is more, news articles do not simply contain remnants of the ideologies held by the journalist: several editors typically modify articles before publishing (Bell 1991: 42-43), and news agencies typically have style guides that "deal with controversial, evaluative and loaded discourse which clearly exhibits both discursive and social traits these organizations prefer" (Barkho 2008: 135). That is to say, the organizations themselves, guided by their commercial and political interests, determine to a large extent how journalists write and what language is used. These issues continue to present themselves as essential as this thesis progresses. 2.3 Journalism and ethics Based on the previous sections, it may seem as if news production is purely money- driven. There are, however, aspects to journalism which, at least in theory, act as a balancing force to the issues caused by the commercial nature of news production, 3 For more on this type of reciprocity, see, for example, Fairclough (1989: 29-30 and 57-58 as well as [1995] 2003: 54-55). 7
Page 1 and 2: "It's Barack Obama Who's Soft" <str
Page 3 and 4: Table of Contents 1 Introduction...
Page 5 and 6: 1 Introduction In the past two deca
Page 7 and 8: 2 The news media The news is often
Page 9: 2.2 An outline of media discourse a
Page 13 and 14: 3 Critical Discourse Analysis In th
Page 15 and 16: (Wodak 2001: 4). The key linguists
Page 17 and 18: grammatical and lexical analysis of
Page 19 and 20: 3.3 Critical Discourse Analysis and
Page 21 and 22: In addition to the distorted view t
Page 23 and 24: it can be argued that her own inter
Page 25 and 26: One type of conservatism, classical
Page 27 and 28: In their study, Covert and Wasburn
Page 29 and 30: percent respectively; Morris and Fr
Page 31 and 32: transitivity and Theme are not defi
Page 33 and 34: BBC is part of the establishment, a
Page 35 and 36: the United Nations in 1997; ibid.).
Page 37 and 38: initial methodology, an appropriate
Page 39 and 40: in the headline analysis when the s
Page 41 and 42: The popularity of Hallidayan SFG pa
Page 43 and 44: Lexis in general as well as colloca
Page 45 and 46: 8.1.1 Theme in the headlines The ge
Page 47 and 48: As the above examples demonstrate,
Page 49 and 50: Verbal processes result in two Them
Page 51 and 52: CNN, and 8.8 on Fox News (numbers w
Page 53 and 54: all four CNN headlines refer to the
Page 55 and 56: The topic of illegal immigrants 12
Page 57 and 58: highlight the connection between th
Page 59 and 60: The fact that the headline includes
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The lack of such explicit presence
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Instead, when the police are identi
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Finally, to provide a comprehensive
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Another aspect of Theme to discuss
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Starting with the Theme structure a
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When considering the way the law is
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trillion in savings over the course
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ing in more revenue by spurring eco
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mentions taxes 11 times, which cons
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While the BBC article does not cont
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easy access to all types of birth c
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does not refer to the drug in this
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Beyond the instances of supporters
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at all. It could be argued that if
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was not expected to be present at a
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hidden agendas varied considerably,
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irreplaceable, the additional suppo
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maintain, however, that the methods
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Primary sources BBC Online. 116 art
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Chilton Paul and Wodak Ruth (eds) 2
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Harris Paul 2006. OJ 'confession':
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Schoetz David 2010. David Frum on G
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Appendices Appendix 1. Table detail
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Cedillo called Saturday's signing "
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Appendix 3. Finnish summary - suome
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ideologian käsitteisiin (Blommaert
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(Democrats 2008: i). Konservatismii
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kaikenkattavimpia, puolueettomimpia
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(Halliday ja Matthiessen 2004: 64-6
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Obamasta enemmän kuin Fox News (16
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keskuudessa. Yleisesti ottaen demok
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mahdollista tämän tutkielman puit
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Political Bias on BBC, CNN, and Fox News - Doria

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