Telling media tales : the news story as rhetoric

Abstract

The thesis explores the rhetorical properties of the modem news report. In order to account for the distinctive style of news reporting it extends Systemic Functional Linguistic theories of the interpersonal to develop new analyses of the semantics of attitude, evaluation and inter-subjective positioning. It applies these analyses to identify three distinct interpersonal modes of news reporting style which will be termed journalistic 'voices'. These analyses are used to explicate the rhetorical properties of the voice most typically associated with 'hard news' reporting, to be termed 'reporter voice'. The thesis also examines the textual structure and genre status of two sub-types of news report, those items grounded in material activity sequences and those in communicative events such as speeches and interviews. Several chapters explore the functional connections between these two media text types and traditional narrative and argument genres. The chapters present the argument that linear, syntagmatic models of text structure of the type developed previously for analysis of, for example, the narrative are unable to account for the functionality of these news reports. An alternative 'orbital' model of textuality is presented by which relationships of specification are seen to operate between a central textual nucleus and dependent satellites. These various textual features are located in a diachronic context by means of a brief examination of the historical evolution of news reporting. The thesis then concludes by exploring how these various features of voice and text structure combine to produce a text type with a distinct rhetorical potential. It is argued that the modern news report has distinctive textual characteristics which equip it to naturalise ideologically informed judgements about social significance and the moral order.