прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - News Analysis

Western press tends to pay attention to international events primarily from its own point of view and in the perspective of its own interests.

Let us examine more closely the regional differentiation for these various background topics. Whereas overall most attention is paid to the political consequences topic (though less in the Third World), South Asia, and Oceania have the election topic as most frequent background information. The negotiation topic occurs most frequently in the American, West European, and Japanese press, but hardly at all in the South Asian Press. Note, however, that the Latin American press also pays much attention to the negotiation topic. This may be explained by the fact that the Latin American press generally pays much attention to U. S.-related topics of any kind, including the U. S. involvement in the Middle East, which also is prominent in the U. S. press and the transnational (and particularly the American) news agencies. Eastern Europe scores low on all topics, especially because its coverage is rather limited in size, which means that an article usually cannot really develop a topic (we used a minimum of three lines as a criterion for topicality of information).

Size

This last point brings us to the size of the topics. After all, a topic may be developed in three unes but also may occupy a whole article or large fragmenta of it. Usually, the central topics are developed within a range of 6 to 20 unes. International reactions often take more space, whereas the topic of the survival rumor usually takes less. Again, there are few interesting differences between First World and Third World topic size, but First World newspapers tend to have somewhat more space for background topics, as may be expected from the higher frequencies of these themes in the First World press. Third World newspapers pay relatively more attention to the death of Gemayel, his burial, and to the international reactions, that is, to the main events themselves as they are provided by the news agencies. In other words, the dependence of the Third World press on the international news agencies can also be seen from the selection, distribution, and size of the topics they include in their coverage.

Relevance Signals

The importance of topics may be indicated by their expression in headlines or lead. As may be expected, the bomb attack, the death of Gemayel, the political consequences, his burial, and the international reactions appear most frequently in the headlines or lead summaries. Political backgrounds and context hardly appear here. Differences between First World and Third World on this relevance structure dimension are again slight, and in line with the observations made aboye: More attention for a topic increases the

groups, institutions, or countries — Table 2.15 enumerates the most frequent thematic actors, with their frequencies of occurrence both in the First World and in the Third World press. As may be expected, Gemayel occurs most often, both in the First World and the Third World dailies. At a distance, we find the other participants involved in this event, such as the Lebanese politicians and groups (Moslems, PLO, other Christian groups), Israel, United States, Reagan, Arafat, etc. As is the case for many of our quantitative data, there is a 10% difference between First World and Third World coverage, due partly to a somewhat lower overall amount of news in the Third World press. This difference is not significant. There are, however, more prominent differences. It was suggested earlier that the Western press tends to pay more attention to the United States and Israel. The United Nations and Third World leaders appear somewhat more often in Third World news. In general, as may be expected from its higher share of background news, First World anides have more background actors, in-

Arafat. On the oth , hand, the Third world press more often mentions Arafat at the prominent headline or lead location. That is, his

TABLE 2.15

Frequencies of Main Actors in First and

Third World Articles

( ) Number of headline occurrences.

prominence is upgraded from a secondary background actor to a major spokesman about this event, (e.g., his declaration during his visit to Rome, where he was visiting the Pope).

Conclusions

The first general conclusion from this section is that there are few significant differences between the First and the Third World press. The First World press has some more and larger background topics, such as the political situation in Lebanon and the Middle East, as well as more background actors. The Third World press gives more attention to the internatonal reactions to the events. Background topics are more scattered than kernel topics, which tend to appear together. There is a tendency in the Western press to pay more attention to Western-related topics or actors, such as the role of the United States and Israel. Cluster and correlation analyses confirm our qualitative analysis of the thematic structures of the story. Few differences between topics or actors in First or Third Worlds, or among other regions, can be fully attributed to political or ideological differences. Leftist and communist newspapers may be expected to portray Gemayel, the Falangists, Israel, and the United States somewhat more negatively. This is the case more for the editorials than for the news itself. mt,• 1,,, , for the conservative or right-wing press, which will exhiba a more favorable point of view of there actors. Mpst differences in thematic selection, size, ordering, or development, can be explained by the type of newspaper rather than by differences between countries, regions or ideologies. Overall, our thematic analysis provides a first confirmation of the hypothesis that news across the world about an event as the assassination of a president tends to be standardized and stereotypical.

SCHEMATIC STRUCTURES

The News Schema of the Assassination Story

Topics are not only organized in a thematic structure that defines their hierarchical ordering or other semantic relations. They may also play conventional roles in a news story, such as giving information about a Main Event, Context, History or Verbal Reactions (van Dijk, 1986, 1987e). The previous section demonstrated that the very semantic categories of the topics in the Gemayel story already suggest such conventional functions that define the overall form or schema of a news story. This section continues the qualitative analysis, by examining the overall organization of news iteras

FIGURE 2.4. Simplified schematic representation of the pyramidal structure of the Main Events category in the news about the assassination of Gemayel. High-low ordering represents macro-micro (theme-detail) ordering, left-right ordering represents temporal/causal relations, and front-back ordering represents foreground and background information at each thematic leve!.

and Granma. This means that the nf the schema in Figure 2.3 follows a complex strategy: top clown, left-right,.and cyclical. Each category alter the Summary (Headline and Lead), presents the highest level information first, and in a subsequent round lower level details are given. In general, Main Event and Context (such as the election of Gemayel) come first, and then History (personal history, civil war, previous attacks), but this is merely a tendency. Conclusions, Verbal Reactions tend to come last.

The thematic analysis has also shown that several newspapers apply transformations to this basic schema. El País, for instance, starts with political consequences; and the Indonesian Times has Verbal Reactions fairly early in the text. That is, relevance criteria may be used to transform the schema in such a way that political, ideological, regional, or other information may be put in a more prominent position. One general role applies to the realization of complex stories. The (important) last event comes first and is also signaled as such in the headlines. Recency is one of the most pervasive criteria in the representation of news events. In general, consequences are mentioned before causes or conditions, as illustrated in Figure 2.3.

The top-down, left-right, and cyclical principies in the realization of the news schema might be complemented with a foreground-background dimension. Figure 2.4 illustrates some of the topics of the assassination story

in a pyramid, which not only has the top-down and left-right dimension but also a third dimension, representing for each level foreground and background topics. Thus, at the same level of semantic generality, the destruction of the building and the death of others is backgrounded relative to the information about Gemayel's death. That is, news relevance takes precedence over semantic hierarchies. This means that backgrounded information tends to be realized láter and less prominently (not in the headline, for instance).

Schemata of Different Newspapers

Table 2.16 lists the respective topics of the item analyzed before from the New York Times and assigned a schematic category to each topic. Indeed, most categories are present in this text, which means that structurally the Times item is rather complete. Note that for some categories the assignment is not without problems. Some historical information, such as the strife between the various Christian factions or the opposition between Falangists and Moslems, is still relevant in the actual situation and, therefore, might also have a context function.

Similarly, we have also analyzed the schematic structures of the other newspapers discussed in the previous main section. Table 2.17 indicates which schematic categories are present. Obviously Summary and Main Event appear to be obligatory. Consequences, Context, History, and Verbal Reactions occur frequently; Expectations and Evaluations occur least often. The Context category, usually contains at least a brief account of the controversial election of Gemayel, such as information about the opposition of Moslem groups. The two Asian newspapers have no evaluation and expectations, which are usually given in background or editorial articles in the other newspapers.

Table 2.18 compares this schematic analyis with schemata in other newspaper stories, again both from First World and Third World dales, using a somewhat different pattem. In general, however, some newspapers appear to have all major schema categories, whereas others only have the Main Event and Consequences categories. These data show that Third World news articles tend to have less background/context topics and also less Evaluation.

To show that differences between newspapers are not necessarily related to First and Third World differences, the schemata of the press in one country, Great Britain were examined, which has both quality newspapers and a large popular press (tabloids). Both the reports of the 15th and the 16th were examined because the British moming papers of the 15th did not yet have the news of the death of Gemayel. Table 2.19 shows that the

TABLE 2.17

Schematic Categories in Eight Newspapers

(A slash indicates that the category is part of a separate article)

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