Why do news values matter? Towards a new methodological framework for analysing news discourse in Critical Discourse Analysis and beyond

Abstract

This article introduces a new framework for the analysis of news discourse to scholars in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and beyond. It emphasises the importance of news values for linguistic analysis and encourages a constructivist approach to their analysis. The new methodological framework is situated within what the authors call a ‘discursive’ approach to news values. From this perspective, news values are seen as values that exist in and are constructed through discourse, and the primary research interest is in how texts construct newsworthiness through multimodal resources. This article first introduces resources that are used to construe news values in English-language news discourse, before illustrating the framework through two case studies of a 70,000-word corpus of British news discourse. The framework itself is intended for both multimodal discourse analysis and corpus linguistic analysis, although this article focuses more on the integration of corpus linguistic techniques. Thus, the discursive approach ties in well with two recent trends in CDA – towards multimodal and towards corpus-assisted discourse analysis. More specifically, the case studies show that corpus linguistic techniques can identify conventionalised discursive devices that are repeatedly used in news discourse to construct and perpetuate an ideology of newsworthiness. They further show that such techniques can provide a useful indication of the discursive construction of newsworthiness around a specific topic, event or news actor. The article concludes with an outline of further applications of the framework for (critical) linguistic analyses of news discourse.

Keywords

Corpus linguistics corpus-assisted discourse analysis (CADS)Critical Discourse Analysis critical linguistics journalism multimodality news discourse news factors news values

A brief introduction

The aim of this article is three-fold: first, to bring news values to the attention of critical linguists; second, to encourage a constructivist approach to news values; and third, to introduce a new framework for the analysis of news values in the hope that critical linguists will both apply it and develop it further. By Critical Linguistics or CDA – we use these terms interchangeably here – we mean any approach that is interested in using discourse analysis (however defined) to uncover the (re)production of ideology. By news values we mean the values of newsworthiness (e.g. Negativity, Proximity, Eliteness).

The new framework for the analysis of such values, which we introduce in this article by means of two case studies, is explicitly aimed at the analysis of text/discourse, by which we mean not just linguistic text, but also other semiotic systems such as images, layout and typography. Due to space restrictions, however, we limit our discussion in this article to the analysis of verbal resources (but see Bednarek and Caple, 2012a, 2012b; Caple, 2013, for a discussion of images). Our approach is thus in line with a recent trend within CDA towards multimodal discourse analysis (e.g. Machin and Mayr, 2012). It is also in line with another 21st-century trend within CDA, towards combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, in particular the use of corpus linguistic techniques (e.g. Baker et al., 2008; Mautner, 2000). Indeed, the latter will be the main focus of our two case studies, although we will also have something to say about multimodal discourse analysis. We will start by introducing news values and their conceptualisation in Journalism/Communication Studies and Critical Linguistics before we continue with the illustration of our own discursive/constructivist approach to newsworthiness.

News values: What are they and why should they matter for critical analyses of news discourse?

News values can be defined in many different ways, but in essence they determine what is news(worthy). In the Journalism/Communication Studies literature, news values are typically defined as properties of events or stories or as criteria/principles that are applied by news workers in order to select events or stories as news or to choose the structure and order of reporting. Such values include Proximity (geographical or cultural ‘nearness’); Negativity (negative aspects, e.g. conflict, death, disaster, accidents, negative consequences); Eliteness (elite status); and Superlativeness (‘the more X, the more newsworthy’), to name but a few.

From a linguistic perspective, language can be seen as expressing, indicating, emphasising or highlighting news values (Bednarek, 2006; Bell, 1991; Conboy, 2006), or news values can be regarded as becoming embedded in language (Cotter, 2010: 67). More radically, news values have also been defined as values that are construed in and through discourse (Bednarek and Caple, 2012a, 2012b). For instance, for a British audience, this lead sentence from the Independent online:

Demolition has begun on the site of Britain’s worst nuclear accident, as scientists are brought in to dismantle the infamous Sellafield chimney.

(http://tinyurl.com/ozlg579, accessed 12/9/2013)

construes the news value of Timeliness through tense and aspect (has begun, are brought in); Proximity through Britain’s and Sellafield; Superlativeness and Negativity through worst nuclear accident and infamous (‘famous for something bad’); and Eliteness through scientists. In this view, news values can be seen as discursively constructed, and newsworthiness becomes a quality of texts. News values are thus defined as the ‘newsworthy’ aspects of actors, happenings and issues as existing in and constructed through discourse. It should be emphasised that the view from Journalism/Media Studies is much more widespread than this more recent discursive approach. In fact, the history of news values in this area goes back to at least 1965, with Galtung and Ruge’s seminal publication in the Journal of Peace Research, although Walter Lippmann (1922) is widely acknowledged as the first person to suggest a range of attributes, or news factors, that lend news value to events.

Regardless of the way news values have been conceptualised, many researchers have pointed to their ideological nature, including linguists. Thus, Fowler (1991) states that news values are culturally and socially constructed rather than ‘natural’ (pp. 13, 15). Bell stresses that ‘these are values. They are not neutral, but reflect ideologies and priorities held in society’ (Bell, 1991: 156, italics in original). Cotter (2010) calls news values important ‘ideological factors’ (pp. 8, 67) and points out that they reinforce or establish ‘an “ideology” about what counts as news’ (p. 67). News values are also ideological in the sense that they can work to reinforce other ideologies (rather than just an ideology of what is newsworthy). Richardson (2007: 93) mentions a study by the Glasgow Media Group which showed that coverage of television news about developing countries focused on negative happenings such as war, terrorism, disaster and conflict. This presents a narrow preconceived view of these countries, particularly if other countries would not show the same foregrounding of the news value of Negativity. To give another example, if it was found that stories about Central Asian republics like Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, etc., consistently foreground the news value of Novelty (unexpected aspects), whereas stories about the USA and the UK foreground the news value of Eliteness, this could be seen as reproducing an ideology of the ‘normal’ and ‘elite’ Us versus the ‘exotic’ Them.

Despite these ideological aspects of news values, they have not yet been the focus of critical linguistic analyses of news discourse. Instead, they are either ignored and only mentioned in passing, or introduced as part of journalistic culture but not much used in the actual analysis. For instance, there is no index entry for ‘news values’ in Fairclough’s Media Discourse, and a search in the databases LLBA and MLA for ‘CDA’ or ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’ together with ‘news values’ comes up with only two results. Among the critical linguists who mention news values in passing, Baker et al.’s (2013) book, Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes, is a recent example that only refers to news values four times in 270 pages (although there are additional mentions of newsworthy/newsworthiness). Concerning those critical books on media or news discourse that introduce news values, two classic examples are Van Dijk (1988b) and Fowler (1991). Van Dijk (1988b) interprets news values as constraints that ‘have a cognitive representation’ (p. 121). These constraints are said to underlie the production of news, including selection and formulation: ‘the interpretation of events as potential news events is determined by the potential news discourse such an interpretation (model) may be used for, and conversely. News production seems circular: Events and text mutually influence each other’ (p. 113). Despite making this connection to discourse/text, news values themselves are of a cognitive nature for Van Dijk (1988b), and thus do not feature much in his analyses of news discourse (e.g. Van Dijk, 1988a, 1988b). Similarly, Fowler (1991) starts off by explaining Galtung and Ruge’s (1965) original news values, but comes up with his own cognitive conceptualisation. In this definition, news values are seen as socially constructed ‘intersubjective mental categories’ (p. 17), although Fowler also argues that they are ‘qualities of (potential) reports’ and ‘features of representation’ (p. 19). Nevertheless, Fowler does not discuss news values much in his book when analysing language, with only a few mentions throughout. To be clear, both Fowler and Van Dijk do see news as having discursive, social and cognitive dimensions and Van Dijk’s general work on values and ideology certainly accounts for their discursive expressions.

A more recent addition to the Critical Discourse Analysis of newspapers is Richardson (2007). News values are seen by him as one of several professional practices ‘that shape journalism as a discourse process and therefore help to account for the products of newspaper discourse’ (p. 182). Richardson explains news values as ‘the criteria employed by journalists to measure and therefore to judge the “newsworthiness” of events’ (p. 91); he talks about events (such as a war involving Britain) satisfying news values (p. 182), but also writes that ‘news values are the (imagined) preferences of the expected audience’ (p. 94, italics in original). The relationship between these different conceptualisations is not discussed at length or in depth, but if we interpret Richardson’s remarks correctly, this means that in his view an event occurs, it satisfies particular news values, journalists measure and judge this newsworthiness based on what they imagine their audiences find newsworthy, and use this judgement to ‘select, order and prioritise the collection and production of news’ (p. 91). Like the books of Fowler and Van Dijk, Richardson’s book itself is not overly concerned with news values or their analysis. To name a second contemporary example, Machin and Mayr (2012) introduce an account of news values as related to crime reporting in their introductory chapter, alongside other concepts such as media panic, but they then only draw on news values a few times in the rest of their book.

These examples are not presented here as criticism of these (and other) linguists; they just demonstrate that critical linguists have so far not found the notion of news values to be very useful. But why is this the case? Why are critical linguists, who focus on uncovering power relations and ideology, not interested in news values even though these values have been called deeply ideological? One obvious reason is that such linguists have focused on answering other valid research questions, such as the representation of agency.

But for us, there are three additional potential reasons for this neglect: first, the disciplinary origin of news values in Journalism/Communication Studies means that some (critical) linguists are simply unfamiliar with the concept. Second, most (critical) linguistic research tends to uncritically adopt the conceptualisation of news values from Journalism/Communication Studies (e.g. as properties of events or selection criteria); there is no real questioning or in-depth engagement with such conceptualisations. From this, it follows that news values are not seen as relevant for linguistic analysis, but appear to be regarded as outside the text. Third, there is no readily available linguistic framework for analysing news values, in contrast to other well-developed linguistic tools such as analyses of transitivity, active/passive voice, nominalisation, predication, argumentation, modality, speech acts, metaphor, lexis, and so on, which are described in general introductions to CDA and books on the critical analysis of news discourse (Fowler, 1991; Richardson, 2007).

The first two points about the disciplinary origins of the concept and how it has been treated outside its own discipline bring home not only the importance of interdisciplinary research, but also its challenging nature. As is well known, critical linguistic approaches (realist or not) take a constructivist approach to social reality. For example, social concepts such as gender are clearly regarded in CDA as being discursively constructed, rather than being properties of individuals. Given this constructivist stance, why do critical linguists not also take such an approach to news values, regarding them as values that are mediated through discourse?¹ The answer may well be that it is more difficult to reconceptualise concepts that originate from outside one’s own discipline and that one will tend to adopt rather than reconfigure them. The final point – the lack of an appropriate systematic analytical framework for the linguistic analysis of news values – is what we want to address in this article. Drawing and building on previous work by Bednarek and Caple (2012a, 2012b), we introduce such a framework below. This is not meant to replace existing CDA tools such as transitivity analysis, but rather to be added to the toolbox.

Linguistic resources for construing news values

Our framework for a linguistic analysis of news discourse is situated within the discursive approach to news values that we briefly introduced earlier. When we analyse news values in a text using this approach, we analyse how an event is ‘sold’ to us as news(worthy) – how newsworthiness is created for the audience through language, image, layout, typography, and so on. To repeat, for us, news values relate to the ‘newsworthy’ aspects of actors, happenings and issues, and we are not concerning ourselves in this article with general factors impacting on the selection of news. We would indeed argue against using the term news values in such an all-encompassing way.

Our approach is constructivist in that we assume that it is difficult to determine an event’s fixed or inherent newsworthiness and that, rather, events are given newsworthiness by the media, via the construction of particular news values. This means that certain news values can be foregrounded or backgrounded in texts. It also means that we need to identify how news values can be construed, constructed or established (we use these verbs interchangeably in this article to refer to the discursive creation of value) through linguistic and other devices such as images. Once we have identified the techniques that can be used to this purpose, we will have an analytical framework that can be applied to any and all news stories.

We should emphasise here that our discursive approach is to be regarded as complementary to practice-based (ethnographic newsroom research) or cognitive approaches (news values as socially-shared cognitive representations), and does not see the discursive as the only perspective on newsworthiness. Thus, our aim is not to reduce values to discourse or to assume that they are only constructed through discourse. But we believe that the study of news values should incorporate a more systematic analysis of how they are established in discourse. Results from such analyses could then be tied to ethnographic and cognitive research, through multidisciplinary collaborations with other researchers.

The appendix presents a list of the resources that we have identified so far (revising and updating Bednarek and Caple, 2012a, 2012b), with a focus on linguistic devices only.² This list is based on a survey of existing literature on news discourse (especially Bednarek, 2006; Bell, 1991), as well as arising inductively from our analysis of a wide range of English-language news stories. We also draw on research on evaluative language (Bednarek, 2010; Martin and White, 2005). There is no claim here that these resources would work across languages – this is clearly an area where we would encourage other researchers to develop their own lists. There is also no claim that these resources are yet exhaustive – as we analyse more data, we will identify further resources; and as we continue to teach students how to analyse news values, we will refine their categorisation and application. We invite anyone working with this framework to do the same. The appendix lists the respective news value along with a brief definition in the left-hand column, together with key linguistic devices in the right-hand column, exemplified by authentic examples from the news.³

It must be stressed that this list of devices should not be taken as an automatic checklist; rather, analyses should proceed in a context-based, interpretive way, using the guiding question: Does this resource have the potential to establish aspects of actors and happenings as newsworthy (e.g. as negative, novel, elite …) for the target audience? Are there any other resources in the text that function in a similar way, even though they are not listed in the appendix? Close attention needs to be paid to the likely potential effect/function of the linguistic resource as it is used in the text. Note also that we are not claiming that such devices only function to construct newsworthiness – for instance, eyewitness accounts and numbers construct truthfulness/credibility (Van Dijk, 1988b: 85, 93), tense/aspect are important devices for constructing temporal relations between happenings, and other devices contribute more generally to establishing aspects of the ‘“five W’s and an H”: who, when, where, what, how, why’ (Bell, 1991: 175). In other words, these devices can be multifunctional, but we focus here on their potential to construct newsworthiness.

Analysing news discourse

(Multimodal) discourse analysis

To be exhaustive, an analysis of how news values are discursively constructed in texts should be both ‘manual’ and ‘multimodal’. Only through close analysis of texts can we find out what values are emphasised (foregrounded), rare or absent (backgrounded). And only through multimodal analysis can we investigate how semiotic systems other than language construct news values and how they interact with linguistic resources: Are the same news values constructed (reinforcing) or different news values (complementary)? Images play a big part here, but Caple (2013) has already elaborated elsewhere on how images can be analysed for the construction of newsworthiness. Neither of us has yet systematically tackled sound, typography, punctuation, layout, and so on, but there is clearly a potential for construing news value: in Figure 1, for example, the use of capital letters and the large size of wild, together with the exclamation mark and underlining, seem to intensify the storm itself as a happening, hence contributing to the construction of Superlativeness. Similarly, in Figure 2 on page 8, the black background and framing of the headline, image and story text reinforce the negative construction of the person depicted in the image.

Figure 1.

Multimodal resources for the construction of Superlativeness (New York Post, 17 September 2010, p. 1).

Figure 2.

Multimodal resources for the construction of Negativity (Metro, UK, 27 September 2013, p. 1).

Given that CDA has a history of in-depth, qualitative analysis, we assume familiarity with this as a general approach and point the reader to Bednarek and Caple (2012b) for an example analysis of news values and their foregrounding/backgrounding in a single text. What we have not yet discussed in depth is how corpus linguistic techniques can help with news value analysis.

Corpus linguistics and the analysis of news values

The same techniques can be used for news values analysis that are traditionally used in corpus linguistics in general: analysis of frequency (word forms, lemmas, clusters), analysis of keywords/clusters or grammatical/semantic tags,⁴ dispersion analysis, concordancing, etc. Table 1 on page 8 (inspired by Baker et al., 2008: 295) shows the potential stages of analysis, which do not necessarily need to be undertaken in this order.

Table 1.

Possible stages in the corpus linguistic analysis of news values.

1	Analysis of frequent word forms, lemmas, clusters, including dispersion analysis and qualitative analysis using concordancing/text view
2	Analysis of parts of speech using a tagged corpus: analysing those associated with constructing a particular news value (e.g. personal pronouns → Personalisation; Proximity; comparative/superlative, number, degree adverb → Superlativeness; proper nouns → Personalisation; Eliteness; tense and aspect markers; adverbs of time → Timeliness, etc.), including dispersion analysis and qualitative analysis using concordancing/text view
3	Analysis of word senses using a semantically tagged corpus: analysing categories associated with constructing a particular news value (e.g. from the USAS semantic tagger: Damaging and Destroying → Negativity; Affect → Impact; Comparing → Novelty; Consonance, etc.), including dispersion analysis and qualitative analysis using concordancing/text view
4	Analysis of keyness concerning 1–3, with the help of an appropriate reference corpus and/or comparison using ranked frequency lists (searching for big rank differences)
5	Analysis of collocates and phrases around significant words (e.g. words associated with the topic)
6	Manual analysis of a subset of the corpus to identify additional resources for constructing news values
7	Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a whole corpus for additional resources

It is beyond the scope of this article to demonstrate all seven steps, and we will thus only focus on illustrating steps 1 and 4 with the help of two case studies. For both case studies, we are using a corpus of 100 news stories (about 70,000 words) from 2003, covering 10 topics in 10 different national newspapers in the UK (from both the ‘popular’ and ‘quality’ press). The corpus was originally compiled for what might best be described as corpus-assisted or corpus-informed discourse analysis (Bednarek, 2006). While the data are now 10 years old, the corpus, which we will call News2003, serves to illustrate the approach, and we are more interested in investigating how corpus linguistic techniques can help with news value analysis than in saying something about the corpus data per se.

Case study 1

A first step in much corpus linguistic analysis is to examine word frequency (of word forms, lemmas, clusters). As far as news values are concerned, this can give us insight into how happenings are ‘sold’ to us as newsworthy through conventionalised ways of saying that are repeated frequently. We will focus here on the top 100 most frequent words and two-word clusters (bigrams⁵) in News2003, without distinguishing if any instances are attributed to sources or not, since both attributed and non-attributed text contributes to the construction of newsworthiness. We will not provide a complete and exhaustive analysis here, but just point to some of the key results and identify avenues for follow-up analysis. Among the top 100, we can indeed identify many words and phrases that could potentially be used in the text to construct news values.

Eliteness

First, there are the names of people and institutions that would have been considered prominent in 2003 for many members of the British public, and which hence construe Eliteness: Mr Blair/Blair (then prime minister); Duncan/Duncan Smith/Mr Duncan (then leader of the opposition); Ferdinand (Manchester United footballer Rio Ferdinand); Manchester United; the FA/the FA’s (the Football Association, the governing body of English football). Borderline examples are Burrell (the former butler of Princess Diana) and Mr Barrett (then chief executive of Barclays) – these might only be known/considered prominent by some readers, although we would expect there to be an introduction with an explicit role label in the text at first mention. Concordancing shows that this is indeed the case. Here, for example, are the immediate co-textual environments for the first mention of Barrett’s name in the 10 newspapers:

1 The boss of Barclays Bank admitted yesterday that […]. The astonishing confession came as Matthew Barrett […]

2 Matt Barrett, the man ultimately responsible for Barclaycard, Britain’s biggest credit card business

3 […] the boss of Britain’s biggest credit card company yesterday stunned his customers with […]. Matt Barrett, the £1.7m-a-year chief executive of Barclays, […]

4 […] Matt Barrett, the chief executive of Barclays […]

5 Chief executive Matthew Barrett […]

6 THE boss of Barclays Bank gaffed yesterday by admitting […]. Matthew Barrett – Britain’s highest paid banker admitted that […]

7 Barclaycard boss Matt Barrett admitted yesterday that […]

8 THE boss of Barclays made an amazing gaffe yesterday […] Millionaire Matt Barrett revealed […]

9 Matt Barrett, the Barclays chief executive […]

10 […] the head of Barclays admitted that […] Matthew Barrett, whose company runs Britain’s biggest credit card, […]

As can easily be seen, various role labels and descriptions (underlined) are used in all 10 newspapers to construct Barrett as an ‘elite’ news actor from the start.⁶ It is not surprising that we can also find other role labels and titles in the top 100 from News2003: chief/chief executive, prime minister, the princess, party (in all but seven of 81 instances used in the sense of ‘political party’). Further concordancing of the lemma CHIEF uncovers other titles such as: chief whip, police chief, chief executive(s), chief constable(s), chief of the Paris vice squad, chief of staff, jewellery chief, Barclays chief, HBOS chief, police chief(s), Manchester United chiefs, banking chiefs, party chiefs, or just chiefs (e.g. appalled chiefs). With respect to dispersion/distribution, CHIEF occurs across eight of the 10 topics and is used by all 10 newspapers. It may thus belong to a conventionalised repertoire of rhetoric of newsworthiness in the British news.

Superlativeness

Second, the symbol # (standing for a number) and various bigrams including it, along with the word forms and bigrams per cent, two, more/more than/than, the most, all and only have the clear potential to construe Superlativeness. This would depend on how high the numbers are (with numbers and per cent) and looking at the co-text. Even a low number such as two can be used in expressions that construe Superlativeness, e.g. less than two months earlier, having waited almost two months since, in the past two months alone, fallen by more than two -thirds. Conversely, not every instance of than or only would construct Superlativeness. For instance, concordancing of than reveals that some of its usages are likely to construct Superlativeness (e.g. more than, larger/bigger/cheaper than, no fewer than, less than TIME PERIOD), while others are not (e.g. rather than).

Proximity

Third, the top 100 include the names of locations that would be considered geographically or culturally near by a British audience: England, Manchester, Greater Manchester. The first-person plural pronoun we is also frequent, but we would need to undertake concordancing to identify whether any instances are examples of an inclusive usage that addresses a community that also includes the reader. Some grammatical words in the top 100 can partake in location references, e.g. prepositions such as at/in, and would also deserve a closer look.

Negativity

Further, the negative word form attack and the names of groups that are likely to be negatively evaluated by the audience (Islamic Jihad, the IRA) also turn up among the top 100 in News2003. There are also examples of words that might be associated with negativity in other ways: police/the police (in terms of dealing with crime), credit/credit card/credit cards (could potentially be associated with debt), the Israeli (we might hear about conflict). These word forms are not negative per se, but it would be worth identifying the co-textual environments of these words/bigrams to see if any negativity is indeed set up.

Timeliness

The top 100 also include potential temporal references, namely yesterday, last/last night/night. Yesterday and last night clearly construct Timeliness by locating the reported event as recent. Concordancing illustrates that last in general often constructs Timeliness in News2003, occurring in phrases such as last week/last week’s, last weekend, last Saturday. But in other phrases it is used for temporal positioning with respect to events that are less ‘recent’: last month, last year/last year’s, last October, last November, last autumn, and last is also used for other purposes (e.g. England’s last clean sheet). This reinforces the importance of concordancing rather than a pure reliance on frequency results.

While the top 100 also include several instances of high frequency verbs, which are marked for tense and aspect (e.g. has been, had been, is, are, being), an analysis of part-of-speech tags would be necessary for a more accurate approach to Timeliness. Prepositions such as at/in can also be part of temporal expressions and the top 100 modal verbs will/would/could and associated bigrams can refer to the future (and might also construct Impact). Further concordancing would be necessary to investigate these grammatical devices in more detail.

As far as the foregrounding or backgrounding of news values is concerned, it must be kept in mind that tense is a grammatical category in English and must hence always be specified. What a systematic analysis can tell us, however, is first, whether or not there are any time references that explicitly establish the event as recent/immediate or about to happen soon (e.g. last night, today, this weekend) and second, how far the respective happening is constructed as past, present, future and as impacting on the present (e.g. via aspect). While news values such as Superlativeness or Novelty lend themselves to repetition (i.e. they can be emphasised in different ways throughout a story), it is not conventional to keep repeating an explicit time reference throughout a story, once that time has been specified. Thus, repetition cannot be used as an indication of foregrounding in general.

Personalisation

Potential pointers to Personalisation are hard to identify, but we could look at those personal pronouns in the top 100 in News2003 that are only used to refer to human referents (I, we, he, she, plus associated bigrams). Examining their co-text would tell us which news actors they refer to. Other top 100 words such as people and Mr may also be useful to look at because they might construct ordinary people as news actors.

Lower frequency items, such as the names of ordinary individuals (rather than politicians, stars, etc.), can also point to Personalisation – for instance, the female name Deborah can be found at rank 247 in the corpus. The proper noun DEBORAH occurs 39 times in eight of the 10 newspapers, all concerning the same story (the sentencing of Mohammed Dica, who was found guilty of infecting two women with the HIV virus). Deborah is variously described as victim, naïve and unsuspecting – a mother of two children, who ‘fought back tears’, ‘sobbed’ and ‘wept with relief’. In such instances, the story is clearly given a ‘human’, ‘personalised’ face through references to an ordinary individual and her experience. In total, the tabloids use the proper noun DEBORAH 35 times (~10.7 per 10.000 words) and the broadsheets six times (~1.6 per 10.000 words), the difference being statistically significant (LL = 26.69). This may suggest that the tabloids emphasise the news value of Personalisation in the construction of this happening more than the broadsheets, although it does not capture anaphoric reference via the pronoun she, and other ways of referring to the women (e.g. as his first victim), etc. There are also individual differences between newspapers’ use of DEBORAH: Daily Mirror (12.32 hits per 1000 words) > Sun (12.20) > Daily Star > (7.08) > The Guardian (5.23) > Financial Times (4.20) > Daily Telegraph (4.06) > Daily Express (3.96) > Daily Mail (3.34). There are no occurrences in The Times and The Independent. This could indicate that the newsworthiness of the same happening is constructed differently depending on the newspaper and its imagined audience.

Novelty

Among the top 100 bigrams only one is clearly used to construe Novelty: the first. Of 41 occurrences, 23 construe Novelty (Figure 3). Although they relate to only two of the 10 topics, they occur across all 10 newspapers in the corpus.

Figure 3.

The construction of Novelty through the first.

Interestingly, usages such as the ones exemplified in Figure 3 (e.g. the first + historical comparison) appear to belong to a common repertoire in news discourse (c.f. Bednarek and Caple, 2012a: 241–242). To identify whether there are any other resources in the corpus that construe Novelty, we would need to either consider lower frequency items or work with semantic tags (e.g. the UCREL Semantic Analysis System (USAS) category Comparing: usual/unusual). In fact, from the manual analysis of evaluation in this corpus (Bednarek, 2006), we know that the corpus includes expressions such as amazing, astonishing(ly), bizarrely, curious, dramatic(ally), extraordinary, fully, sensational(ly), spectacular(ly), strikingly, stunning, unexpected(ly), unprecedented, unusually, which function to express evaluations of unexpectedness.

Other top 100 word forms/bigrams and their potential contribution to the construction of newsworthiness

As to be expected, the top 100 of News2003 also include a large amount of function words and associated bigrams that we have not yet discussed. It is not straightforward to associate such grammatical words with a particular news value, but they should not be ignored either. For instance, the conjunction but and markers of negation (not, no, only) are associated with counter-expectation and could in certain contexts be used to construct Novelty. Similarly, to can occur in LEAD to (potentially constructing Impact) and, together with up and numbers, can certainly construct Superlativeness (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

The construction of Superlativeness through up to.

Other words/bigrams from the top 100 that would be worth investigating further include Mr, said, told, plus various bigrams with said and one with added, all of which do not construe newsworthiness per se, but could nevertheless yield interesting insights into news values: Mr would be followed by the name of the respective news actor and the reporting verbs would be associated with particular speakers. We could then analyse these news actors/sources further for Eliteness or Personalisation. We could go even further and identify all reporting expressions (nouns, verbs, etc.) in the frequency list and examine their associated sources.

Even seemingly innocuous words can be interesting to explore. Content words that are frequent in a corpus indicate an important topic – analysing such words in their co-text can then show us what news values are associated with them. Candidates in the top 100 in News2003 include letter, hotel, test, car. Looking at the dispersion of car, for example, shows that it occurs in 24 texts (five out of 10 topics), although most occurrences are in two stories – one about a suicide bomber and one about Princess Diana. Concordancing shows us how car is being talked about in these stories:

accident/crash: car accident, car crash, car smash, car blast, and references to plot an accident and a death in a car; drive car into hotel, suddenly turned into the hotel, smashed into, careered into

speeding: was driving at 100 kilometres an hour, suddenly […] coming towards me, sped up the wrong side of the street

conflict and destruction: fired on, firing on, open fire on, shooting at, hurled backwards, destroying

bombing: car bomb/bombs/bomber/bombing/bombing

explosion and fire: drove up and exploded, exploded, blew up his car, flames engulf, burns, blazes, blazing.

Here, we can easily see the construction of the news values of Negativity (negative lexis, e.g. accident, fired, car bomb) and Superlativeness (intensified lexis, e.g. smash, blast, hurl, engulf, blaze).⁷ Thus, it may be useful to produce concordances for the most frequent content words in the text/corpus, as this will offer valuable insights into how a particular happening or news actor is constructed as newsworthy. The value of this approach depends on the corpus construction – for instance, the words car, letter, hotel, test are in the top 100 of News2003 because the same 10 topics are repeated across the corpus. If each of the 100 texts covered a different topic, these words would not necessarily be among the top 100, as they might be pushed down the frequency list by words that are repeated across topics (the same goes for some of the other devices identified as frequent above, e.g. police, Manchester). But this approach should work for corpus-linguistic CDA studies, since these often concern one particular topic (e.g. Europe, in Mautner, 2000, refugees/asylum seekers, in Baker et al., 2008; Islam/Muslims, in Baker et al., 2013), and topic-specific corpora are likely to contain frequent topic-specific content words. In addition to concordancing such words, automatic collocation and cluster analysis can also be undertaken (cf. Table 1).

To sum up this section, we have illustrated how a researcher might proceed with corpus linguistic techniques and have discussed how such techniques could help with news value analysis. Since we used a non-topic-specific corpus here, we gained first insights into a conventionalised repertoire of rhetoric of newsworthiness in the British news rather than into how a particular happening’s newsworthiness was constructed. A much larger, more representative corpus would be necessary to confirm the conventionalised nature of the identified resources and to add others.⁸ What is missing from the above frequency analysis of News2003 is a comparative element. It is generally useful to compare frequencies between news texts or corpora. For instance, in a previous investigation (Bednarek and Caple, 2012b) we compared the top 20 frequent word forms in one particular news story (about the 2011 Queensland floods) with the top 20 frequent word forms in the one-million-word news subset of the BNC Baby (four million words of British English, extracted from the British National Corpus). Exploring the co-text of those words that occurred much more frequently in the flood story (in terms of rank) proved highly productive for news value analysis. Another way in which a comparative element can come in is through automatic keywords analysis. This corpus linguistic technique provides the researcher with a list of key words or clusters in a text or corpus – those words/clusters that are, statistically speaking, unusually frequent (or infrequent) in relation to a comparison corpus. We undertook such a keywords analysis for our second case study.

Case study 2

While the first case study used a corpus that is perhaps slightly atypical of CDA because it covers several different topics, the second case study on keywords will briefly consider stories about a particular happening. For this keywords analysis case study, we compared 10 stories about a suicide bombing in Iraq in News2003 with another 90 stories about nine other topics. Without going into detail or offering up an exhaustive analysis, the keywords that the software identified are indeed highly informative as far as newsworthiness is concerned. They point to Negativity (blast, explosion, exploded, bomb, attacks, killed, soldiers, wounded, injured, suicide, bomber, attack…) and Eliteness (US, CIA, Bremer, Krivo, American, Americans, officials, governing, administrator, agents …). Names such as Bremer and Krivo, which are likely to be unfamiliar to many in the audience, are accompanied by titles emphasising their eliteness (similar to the Matt Barrett example earlier) (Figures 5 and 6).

Figure 5.

The construction of Eliteness for Paul Bremer.

Figure 6.

The construction of Eliteness for George Krivo.

Interestingly, the word form ‘al’ is also a keyword. Concordances show that this is used to refer to people or organisations (e.g. A member of the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, Mouwafak al -Rabiyeh; Al -Qaeda), to localise the event (e.g. crashing down into al -Sadoun Street; Some of the wounded, […] were taken to nearby al -Kindi hospital), and also occurs in the co-text of eyewitness accounts (e.g. Ghaith al -Qassi, who was sitting at a tea shop 100 yards away, said: […]). A close reading of the 10 stories reveals that all newspapers except the Financial Times cite at least one eyewitness. In summary, the keywords analysis appears to suggest that overall this particular event was constructed as negative and as involving elite news actors and that Personalisation (the human face of the event, through eyewitness accounts from ‘ordinary’ people) also plays a role. That is, the British media sold the event to its readers by emphasising these particular news values, rather than others, although there appear to be differences between the popular/quality press and individual newspapers. A dispersion/distribution analysis and in-depth manual analysis would be necessary to identify such differences in detail.

To sum up this section, a keywords analysis where a topic-specific corpus is compared to a reference corpus of some kind seems to be a particularly useful strategy to identify what kinds of news values are constructed around one happening (topic, news actor…) as compared to general news reporting. We only investigated those word forms and clusters that are unusually frequent, rather than exploring those that are unusually infrequent. The latter could be one technique for investigating backgrounded or absent news values (cf. Taylor, 2013 on ‘absence’ in news discourse).

Concluding remarks

We hope that this article has achieved our three aims: to raise awareness of news values in CDA; to promote a constructivist approach to such values; and to introduce a new analytical framework that can be used in their analysis. Because of their ideological nature, we believe that a systematic analysis of news values should belong to the standard procedure of critical linguistic analyses of the news.

Our first case study demonstrated that a systematic linguistic analysis can tell us what kind of discursive devices are repeatedly used in, say, the British press, to construct different news values and to perpetuate the ideology of newsworthiness in itself – namely, that negativity is interesting, that elite people are worth listening to, that what is near to us is more important than what is far from us, and so on. It could be interesting to undertake a diachronic analysis of news discourse over time to investigate any changes in this general ideology and in its conventionalised rhetoric.

As our second case study indicated, we can use a linguistic analysis of news values for a specific topic, event or news actor to establish how they are constructed as newsworthy. This may also work to perpetuate existing ideologies, as when there is a particularly high amount of conflict stories about Islam/Muslims, as found by Baker et al. (2013: 258):

[…] bad news stories tended to be viewed as having a higher news value than good news stories. This is one argument that editors could make: that it is not that newspapers are Islamophobic, [it’s] just that the media’s role is to report on bad news. However, to counter this, we would point out that, when we compared our corpus of stories about Islam with other corpora of more general news in Chapter 2, we found that there were more references to conflict in the Islam corpus – a difference that was statistically significant. Even taking into account the general press tendency to focus on bad news, the amount of conflict stories regarding Islam and Muslims looked suspiciously high.

It is clear that Baker et al. (2008) are not taking a discursive approach to news values here, but, interpreting their result from our perspective, we could say that the news value of Negativity appears to be discursively foregrounded in such stories, more so than in other news. (Our news value of Negativity includes what others have called the news value of Conflict; see Cotter, 2010: 69.) But a systematic analysis of all news values, including comparison with general news, would be necessary to find out how else the construction of newsworthiness regarding Islam/Muslims differs from or is similar to other subject matter. Indeed, some of the most frequent words in Baker et al.’s (2008) corpus (see pp. 53–54) may point to the construal of particular news values. Thus, one application of this framework lies in investigating whether a given topic is repeatedly associated with particular news values and, if so, what the effect of this might be.

What are other potential uses of this framework for CDA? It would be interesting to analyse how news cycles impact on the construction of newsworthiness and whether or not different news values are emphasised, depending on whether we are dealing with breaking news or follow-up reporting and analysis. With a longer timescale, we could analyse the news values that are constructed across decades with respect to particular issues, happenings or news actors, for instance gay marriage or the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community in general. Cross-cultural comparisons are also possible, which would uncover whether news outlets from different countries construct the newsworthiness of one event using the same news values.

If the researcher’s analytical stance is of a realist persuasion, they might be interested in exploring the extent to which an event is made more newsworthy than it ‘deserves’, which ties in with research on sensationalism/media panics (Fowler, 1991; Molek-Kozakowska, 2013). Other researchers might be interested in investigating a particular news outlet or output, such as the Sun newspaper, Fox News, BBC News, and so on. How does this particular paper, organisation or programme sell the world to us as newsworthy, and what ideologies are perpetuated? We could also undertake a systematic comparison of ‘popular’ versus ‘quality’ news (see Conboy, 2006: 15–16, on tabloid news values).⁹

It is also possible to use news values analysis to gain insights into audience positioning: any story would be written in such a way as to sell the happening as newsworthy to the target audience, imagining that they are interested in the particular construction of newsworthiness that is applied. This also ties in with research into different news outlets and outputs, as they each have their own imagined target audience.

To conclude, we hope that our two case studies have demonstrated that corpus linguistic analyses of frequency (of word forms, clusters, lemmas) can provide a useful indication of the discursive construction of newsworthiness in a given text or corpus, without being complete or exhaustive. This analysis should be complemented both by other corpus analyses (POS tags, semantic tags) and in-depth discourse analysis, not just of language but also of other semiotic systems. Ideally, an analysis of news values would incorporate several strands:

a large-scale analysis of relevant semiotic systems using a corpus/database (making use of corpus linguistic techniques for language analysis and other techniques for other semiotic systems); and

a detailed, close-reading analysis of selected texts (subsets from the corpus/database) and the contribution of relevant semiotic systems to newsworthiness, including the relations between them.

Building on our existing work on language and images, we are currently working on creating such an integrative approach, which we tentatively label corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (CAMDA).

Footnotes

Appendix

APPENDIX.

News values – key linguistic devices.

News value	Key devices (language only)
Negativity (the negative aspects of an event)	Negative evaluative language (language expressing the speaker’s/writer’s negative opinion/disapproval: ‘this is bad’), e.g. terrible news; a tragedy; gaffe; wannabe …
	Reference to negative emotions (emotions that are generally considered as negative experiences), e.g. distraught; worried; breaking our hearts; shock; disappointment …
	Negative lexis (lexis describing actors/happenings that would be considered negative by the social mainstream), including ‘disaster vocabulary’ (Ungerer, 1997: 315), e.g. damaged; killed; deaths; bodies; crime; the IRA; destruction; confusion; offence; road closures …

Timeliness (the relevance of an event in terms of time: recent, ongoing, about to happen, impacting on the present, or seasonal)	Explicit reference to the present, the recent past, the near future or the season, e.g. Labour will today offer[…]; yesterday’s flash flooding; currently; this week …
	Verb tense and aspect, e.g. rescuers have been trying to pluck survivors; it’s a tragedy; it is testing our emergency resources; residents have described the horrific moments

Proximity (the geographical or cultural nearness of an event)	Reference to place (mentions of locations or communities, often local/national, that would be considered ‘near’ or ‘familiar’ to the audience, including via names and deictics), e.g. Canberra; Queensland’s residents; Wellington researchers; a Baltimore county democrat; at Arlington National Cemetery; here; in parts of the country …
	Reference to the nation/community of the audience, e.g. it will test us as a community; the Prime Minister warned the nation it must brace itself for more deaths; local veterans tell us their story…
	Inclusive first-person plural pronouns (‘inclusive’ meaning ‘we’ = the audience’s community, e.g. nation, state, region), e.g. Ms Bligh said it was clear Queensland was now mired in a very different sort of disaster: ‘It might be breaking our hearts at the moment, but it will not break our will’

Superlativeness (the maximised or intensified aspects of an event)	Quantifiers (various parts of speech with quantifying function, emphasising the amount, scale, size, etc.), e.g. thousands of Queensland residents; a tenfold increase in reports to its hotline; a tragedy of epic proportions; there is great disappointment and anger at all levels; it may also have irreparably shaken many Iraqis’ faith in America’s promise of a prosperous; progressive new Iraq …
	Intensifiers (maximisers, amplifiers, emphasisers, etc., whose function is to scale upwards, amplifying or focusing on high degree, force, etc.): e.g. houses that are completely collapsed; the princess’s bodyguard, who was severely injured in the crash; countries suffering badly from austerity; deeply concerned; in the past two months alone; just/only hours after; the water was just roaring…*
	Intensified lexis (non-core vocabulary items that include intensification as part of their meaning; see Martin and White, 2005: 143), e.g. they were petrified; wrecking families and their fortunes; note that will stun the world; [cars] were smashed together …
	Repetition, e.g. they were petrified, absolutely petrified; building after building…
	Comparative and superlative adjectives, comparative clauses (when upscaling), the comparative item more, comparison to other events, usually in the past (establishing the current happening as ‘superior’ or ‘more intense’ in some way), e.g. Foxtons’ stock price was rising faster than the cost of a Mayfair penthouse (comp. adj); the worst of the worst (superl. adj); water was so strong that cars were stacked on top of each other (comparative clause); around 5,000 more suicides in Europe and North America (comparative item); this one has just maxed out every other flood (comparison to past event)…
	Metaphors and similes that intensify or quantify, e.g. an army of volunteers; a flood of complaints; a brown wall of water; our Queens Park was like a raging river; it was like a World War II battle; thunderstorms that looked like the apocalypse…

Eliteness (the high status of individuals, organisations or nations involved in an event)	Labels and assessments that someone/something is significant/important, e.g. pop star; celebrity bad boy; top US officials; the most senior black officer; a key figure; long-term industry observers
	High-status role labels and institutional names (describing professions, titles, roles, affiliations, institutions that are generally regarded as having a ‘high status’ in society), e.g. the Prime Minister; Queensland Premier Anna Bligh; Professor Roger Stone; Commonwealth Bank CEO Ralph Norris; the BBC investigation; murdered Oxford University professor; the Sydney University boycott; sanctions and divestment row …
	Description of status, e.g. two people who were selling millions of records a year…

Impact (the significance of an event in terms of its effects/consequences)	Evaluative language relating to the impact of an event (language assessing the significance of the happening), e.g. a potentially momentous day; in a historic legal case; a crucial annual conference…
	Descriptions of significant/relevant consequences (references, hypotheses, speculations or predictions concerning past/present/future effects, including mental or abstract consequences, with implied or explicit cause-effect relations), e.g. triathletes reduce city traffic to an Australian crawl;
	flash flood deluged the town […]; leaving scenes of destruction and people dead in their cars; passengers face sticker shock as airfares soar; note that will stun the world […]; as rebels and loyalists geared up for a febrile weekend of politicking that could determine his fate; By failing to disclose what could amount to vital evidence until now, Burrell could have hampered the Paris detectives who spent three years investigating the crash […]; ‘It could lead to actions against employees who deliberately infect others […]’; its publication will encourage those who have long considered Diana’s death to have been suspicious; leaving some long-term industry observers deeply concerned that Australia could be left with no policy to reduce its greenhouse emissions

Novelty (the new and/or unexpected aspects of an event)	Indications of ‘newness’, e.g. in a fresh attempt to tackle what it says is a steep rise in reports of extreme images online; Helius Energy unveils new plans for biomass plant in Southampton; the document […] gives the first conclusive evidence that…**
	Evaluative language indicating unexpectedness (language expressing an assessment that aspects of the event are unexpected, unusual, different), e.g. a very different sort of disaster; astonishing; extraordinarily…
	Comparison with other events, usually in the past (establishing the current happening as novel in some way or not having happened in a long time), e.g. I’ve lived in Toowoomba for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like that; the first time since 1958…
	Reference to surprise/expectations, e.g. shocked residents; no one was expecting it; people just really can’t believe it …
	Reference to happenings that would be considered unusual (outside an established societal norm or expectation), e.g. a homeless man who returned a diamond engagement ring to a woman after it fell into his cup; British man survives 15-storey plummet; woman secretly filmed dancing at bus stop wins theatre role …

Personalisation (the personal or ‘human’ face of an event, including eyewitness reports)	Reference to emotion (language that explicitly labels/names an emotion such as joy/fear, an emotional process such as frustrate/annoy, an emotional state such as fearful/happy, or an emotional reaction such as cry/scream), e.g. ‘It was pretty bloody scary’; but one of his victims […] sobbed…
	Quotes from ‘ordinary’ people, e.g. ‘Myself, I was almost pulled in by the torrent’; Deborah […] said afterwards: ‘My sentence has only just begun…’
	Reference to ‘ordinary’ individuals, e.g. panel-beater Colin McNamara; Charissa Benjamin and her Serbian husband…

Consonance (the stereotypical aspects of an event; adherence to expectations)	Evaluative language indicating expectedness (language expressing an assessment that aspects of the event are in line with expectations), e.g. legendary; notorious…
	Comparison with other events, usually in the past (establishing the current happening as similar), e.g. as the US came to terms with yet another mass shooting…
	Conventionalised metaphors (metaphors that are used again and again by the news media to refer to events), e.g. a flood of immigrants; the war on drugs … (Baker et al., 2008: 287 and Fairclough, 1995: 71 identify water/war metaphors as common in the news media in reporting on refugees/asylum seekers and drug trafficking respectively)
	Associations that play on stereotypes, e.g. Australia – sharks; Britain – the weather; Germany – sausages and beer…
	Story structure (the roles that news actors are construed to play and the events that are said to have happened fit in with archetypes of stories), e.g. ‘hero’, ‘villain’, ‘rescue’

Just can express a range of meanings such as ‘only’ or ‘exactly’, and not all of its usages are used to intensify (cf. the invented example: he’s just a student). Time relations of frequency/duration can also work to intensify or quantify.

Newness also has temporal aspects and could be grouped with Timeliness; the word novelty itself is ambiguous, indicating ‘newness’ or ‘unusuality’.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks go to Teun van Dijk for useful input on an earlier version of this article. This article was produced while we were both on a Visiting Fellowship at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (The University of Oxford) and we are grateful to the institute for this opportunity.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Author biographies

Monika Bednarek is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Sydney, with a research interest in the linguistic analysis of media discourse. Her most recent books are: News Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2012, with Helen Caple), Telecinematic Discourse (John Benjamins, 2011, co-edited with Roberta Piazza and Fabio Rossi) and The Language of Fictional Television (Continuum, 2010).

Helen Caple is Senior Lecturer in Media, Communication and Journalism in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Her primary research interests centre on press photography and text–image relations. She is the author of Photojournalism: A Social Semiotic Approach (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and co-author of News Discourse (Bloomsbury, 2012, with Monika Bednarek). She has also worked as a press photographer in the UK.

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