
прагматика и медиа дискурс / Teun A van Dijk - News Analysis
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in more abstract terms and attribute Gemayel's death to the violence, of which Gemayel himself was part.
As for the evaluation of Gemayel, most newspapers have mixed feelings. They often mention his controversia) role in the civil war and report that Moslem and leftist groups are violently opposed to him. On the other hand, they recognize that in the actual situation a strong man may be the only hope for peace in Lebanon. This mixed opinion can be found both iii Third World and in First World newspapers. Some more conservative newspapers, such as France Soir, tend to mitigate Gemayel's role in the civil war and use the rhetorical device of a pleonasm when it describes him as "not exactly an angel." Le Réveil provides a straightforward eulogy of its leader and is by far the most positive in its evaluation of both Gemayel and the Falange. El Mercurio finds the Falangist party the "most moderate" group in Lebanon, whereas Nicaraguan simply calls it "fascist", and Israel "zionist."
The invasion of West Beirut by the Israeli army is generally condemned, both in the First World and in the Third World press ; but the First Woiid conservative press hardly formulates explicit negative evaluations about Israel. Rather, they present the invasion as a direct consequence of the assassination and seem to adopt the Israeli point of view that the invasion was necessary to maintain order in Beirut. As has been argued earlier, the lack of an evaluation, in this case about Israel, implies an evaluation within the framework of political altitudes.
The analysis of the situation in Lebanon is stereotypical. Emphasis is placed on the gruesome civil war, on the violence and the conflicts between the various groups involved. Standard expressions, such as `Tachona' strife", "conflict ridden country'', or "Lebanese drama" are used to characterize this conflict. Expectations and predictions are generally rather vague, and few specifics are given about who could or should be the new president, who is generally portrayed as facing an impossible task. Only a conservative newspaper like the Daily Telegraph explicitly states that the Russians, via the Syrians, will profit from the situation and recommends that the Western troops should stay in Lebanon. Most newspapers confirm that the PLO is one of the central issues in the problem of peace in Lebanon and the Middle East, and most agree that all foreign troops should leave Lebanon. The Western newspapers generally welcome Reagan's Mid East plan, including the which gives the standard opinion that Israel and the PLO should recognize each other and live in peace together. Overall, however, the expectations are rather pessimistic and morally substantiated by general proverbs such as "violence will spawn violence", or "who lives by the sword will perish by the sword."
From this brief analysis of the opinions formulated in the editorials, we

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may conclude that the homogeneity found in the news reports is not reproduced in the editorials. There is considerable variation here, both between and within the First and Third World. The opinions are generally in line with the political and ideological attitudes of the newspapers and their regional or national background. The opinions of the conservative Western or pro-Western press and of the communist press are most direct and explicit, but the majority of the liberal press in both the West and the Third World is more mixed. The Arab press is violently anti-Israel, moderately anti-United States but moderately pro-Gemayel. The analysis of the situation in Lebanon is on the whole rather stereotypical and tends to be pessimistic. The violence should end, and this is only possible when foreign troops leave the country and the PLO is recognized as a core issue in the Middle East.
Opinions in News Articles
Although the editorials are the preferred formulation place for explicit opinions, the news and background articles themselves may have at least implicit opinions or points of view. Therefore, each article was subjectively scored on the implied position towards the major participants in the Lebanese events. Sometimes, one article has several opinions about several people, groups, or countries.
The quantitative results show that 49 of the 80 editorials formulate explicit opinions about the participants, which means that a substantial number of editorials are vague in their evaluations. This vagueness is due to the controversia! role of Gemayel and the generally complex situation in Lebanon, which cannot be captured simply in proor anti-Western, proor anti-communist, or proor anti-Third World.
The reverse is true for the proportion of news articles that has an opinion or explicit point of view: 60% of them are unclear or neutral. This also means that a considerable share of the news has some form of opinion or point of view. Of the editorials, 21.2% are pro-Israel, 30% are anti-Israel, 15% pro-Falange, 10% anti-Falange, 11.2% pro-United States, and 8.8% anti-United States. These data are consistent with our qualitative analysis of the editorials given earlier. The Third World press tends to be anti-Israel, except for the South and East Asian press, which also explains the substantial amount of pro-Israel positions it shares with the Western press. The evaluation about the Falange and the United States are more mixed, but the pro-voices dominate.
These distributions of opinions also hold for the news and the background articles, except for the opinion about the Falange, which tends to be

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more negative in the background articles. When we examine the correlations between opinions and specific thematic clusters, the negative opinions about Israel are often associated with the invasion topics, but they also appear in the background analyses of the situation, in which the occupation of South Lebanon by the Israeli army plays an important role.
Although these quantitative measures are even more superficial than the qualitative analysis, they confirm the general pattern. There are few very clear tendencies of opinion. They may differ among newspapers, countries, or regions; and no consistent First World or Third World opinions seem to be derivable from the data. Only clear political and ideological points of view can be related with a position against Israel or Syria, but even for the role of the United States this is not easy. Most strilcing are the mixed feelings evaluations of Gemayel, which tend to be slightly positive for most of the press. His expected political role in this case is taken to be a more important criterion for evaluation than his past actions and the role of the Maronites in Lebanon.
CONCLUSIONS
It is not easy to draw straightforward conclusions from a complex analysis that involves both qualitative and quantitative results and deals with more than 700 articles from 138 newspapers from 99 countries. Structurally, the news articles about the assassination of Gemayel are not fundamentally different in the Third World and First World press, although there is much variation among newspapers and regions. Generally, differences are more marked between reports of the elite press and those of the popular or tabloid press. Thematic structures, relevance structures, the use of schematic categories, local coherence phenomena, style, and rhetoric appear to be very similar in this elite press. Also quantitatively, the differences are far from substantial. First World coverage tends to be somewhat more extensive as a whole; and background articles and themes especially occur more frequently in the Western press, but the Third World has somewhat higher coverage per newspaper, which might be even higher if we knew the proportion of the coverage about the assassination as part of the total editorial
space.
Yet, this general conclusion needs some qualification. First, although we have studied many newspapers and articles, we cannot simply conclude that we have a representative sample of the global press. Second, both the qualitative and the quantitative approaches need further work to subtantiate some of the more detailed analyses. Third, there are large differences within and between various regions of the world. Thus, the Eastern European,

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African, and South-Asian coverage is rather modest, whereas Western Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas give much attention to the assassination and its backgrounds.
This overall result stronglv suggests an implicit system of rules and values in the news accounts of an international event such as the assassination of Gemayel. This globally shared code of journalistic practices leads to a standardized description of the events. This rule system selects the assassination of a head of state of a politically important country as a major news event, which receives global attention, front page treatment, and detailed description in large main and background articles. The same rule system provides a stereotvpicai news schema, featuring categories such as Main Event, Context, Historical background, International Reactions, and similar categories, which are filled with the dominant topics as supplied by correspondents or news agencies. It also specifies in what order the dominant topics are treated and in which installments the)/ are delivered through the news text. Finallv, it provides the standard formal style for the selection of words and the structure of sentences, as well as possible rhetorical devices that make news discourse credible (quotes, numbers, eyewitness description). This formal journalistic consensus seems to be largely context-free. It is the implicit definition of what a well-formed news article should look like, whether in central Africa, the Caribbean or in Scandinavia. Even such ideologically diverse newspapers as the New York Times and Granma follow this rule system.
In terms of a shared global concept of foreign news, however, this analysis only provides one side of the explanation. It should of course be asked next where this shared rule system comes from. Given the historical development of the press in the world, we assume that this implicit code has been established and diffused by the Western press and news agencies. This explains, superficially, not only its use in the Western world, but also its widespread acceptance in the press of many of the countries that were colonies of these Western countries and who adopted the news format of the metropolitan press. Both the leading newspapers of the Western world and the news agencies are regularly used as sources by Third World newspapers, and this is a strong inducement to adopt similar news formats. We found, indeed, that most of the Third World press uses materials from the international news agencies, and it was also shown that often agency text is faithfully copied by the press. Deadlines; professional training (sometimes in the West); examples of influential Western newspapers; and the general lack of alternative sources, formats, and experiences force the Third World journalist to follow the general, Western-oriented framework of reporting foreign news.
It may be concluded, therefore, that two related factors explain the standardization of international news in the press, namely the globally dif-

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fused implicit journalistic code for the production and structures of news discourse, on the one hand, and the pervasive role of the Western news media as sources and examples that helped diffuse this code in the first place, on the other hand.
Theoretically, alternative codes for news production and structures may exist, but in the present political and social context, these would at most have local or regional relevance. Stories produced according to fullv different rule systems would simply not be recognized globally as interesting news and would, therefore, have no access to the international news media and distribution channels of the agencies. This mav be seen most clearly by the somewhat different rule system adopted in some Eastern European and some Third World countries. Their definition of the news is not only rejected as being too directly partisan, if not party-controlled, but the very attention for tedious administrative issues such as the routine activities of the head of state or government agencies, or the reports about economic results, is considered to be too uninteresting for primary journalistic attention. Conversely, the Western preoccupation with negative news about accidents, catastrophes, deviance, crime, violence, etc. is similarly rejected as information that should be publicly diffused by the press in several of the Eastern European countries. For the Third World press, there is in addition the generally felt need for development news as a counter-strategy against the Western dominated spot news that focuses on isolated interesting events instead of on more structural issues behind those events.
Yet, at a deeper level, the similarities between the Western and, say, the Eastern (communist) press are perhaps larger than the differences. Except for the differences in factual control of the press, the news in both camps is predominantly about politics and economic affairs. Actions of politicians are the main topic of news anywhere. Second, only with slight variations, the press in any country mirrors the basic interests and goals of the political, economic, and cultural elite. True counterjournalism is marginal, oppressed or simply nonexistent anywhere in the world, whether by force or by economic and more subtly ideological reasons. Communist newspapers, if any, are usually small in most Western countries, and the same holds for leftist media in general. Third, most of the world's press tends to be nationalistic if not ethnocentric. There are few important issues in which the dominant press does not as a rule support . international actions of the government, at least in the•first stage. Examples also abound for the critical Western press (Vietnam, Grenada, or the Falklands/Malvinas) (Glasgow University Media Group, 1985). Opposition from the press exists only as soon as sufficient members of the elite have become opposed. There are, of course, exceptions, but these tend to be marginal and rather confirm the general rule. In other words, not only the international news format tends to be rather generally adopted by journalists, but also the very position and altitudes of

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CONCLUSIONS |
journalists are not fundamentally different. This does not mean that, on the surface, different political, economic, and ideological contexts do not produce rather different press systems and even variation in news conceptions. Our data suggest that the differences in news discourse that result from such variation are slight for similar newspaper types: Rather, they predict differences in the content of editorials and the opinions of background articles than in the selection of topics or the standard treatment of given topics. This is especially true for foreign news coverage.
The implications of there general conclusions and their interpretation for the current discussion about the new world information order, and the organization of global news flow, are similarly complex. It has been shown, again, that Third World news media are practically wholly dependent for their international news from the international, Western based and controlled, news agencies. Only the rich Western press has a substantial number of reports by own correspondents. It has been argued, too, that the implic- a news code of journalists in the Third World is largely due to the example, if not the pervasive and exclusive role, of the Western news media. This means that in addition to their regional, political, and ideological frameworks that define their social position in their own countries, Third World journalists must operate within a news code that may at several points conflict with their own personal and social frameworlcs. Yet, due to the prevailing economic and social situation and the nature of international news distribution and control, there is no immediate solution for this conflict. The result is what in the West is usually called "rhetoric", that is, persuasively argued normative statements that claim that the actual news situation is imbalanced in many respects. Our study has shown that both as to factual distribution and dependence, and as to contents and forms of the news, this imbalance does indeed exist. The result is the pervasive standardization of the Western news product and its usage also in the Third World.
At the same time, our conclusions suggest that redressing the imbalance, by creating Third World based and controlled international news agencies or pools, or even sending more of its own correspondents, may be a necessary but not yet a sufficient condition for the change of the deeply entrenched news values and news codes. The social definition of newspapers and news discourse appeared to be very general, and despite important variations, shared by many journalists all over the world. After all, writing primarily for the elite which is often. Western-oriented in life style if not in political ideology, also Third World journalists are seldom in a position to develop a systematic alternative to Western news formats. This would mean that they would either not be able to publish routine foreign news items from agencies or that they would be obliged to rewrite each item, which is of course not feasible.
In other words, there is a complex structural frámework of financial,

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economic, sociá, cultural, and historical constraints that have led to the development of the currently dominant global ideology of news; and it is the same framework that keeps it in place. Changes, unfortunately, will only come slowly, as is usual in fundamental ideological transformation. Yet, under the continuous impact of a well-argued normative critique and various forms of resistance by Third World journalists (and a few critical Western ones), it is likely that also the dominant Western news framework can be changed. More and more Western journalists, at least individually, would agree that more structural background and development news would be an important aim to pursue. Unfortunately, economic constraints of the privately owned Western press may frustrate these aims when it continues to take into account too much the types of news values that sell well. In other words, the public should learn to read different types of stories but this again requires different and better sociopolitical education, which is tied to fundamental class differences. Hence, what appears as a rather superficial property of international news, or as an ideological and economic dominance of the international agencies, may be tied to a deeper and much more complex global network of cultural and socioeconomic relationships. It is this structural foundation that obstructs fundamental changes in the framework of international news.
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tures. After the frequency of complex sentences for each newspaper, the mean degree of complexity of the first five sentences, measured by the number of embedded clauses per sentence, is indicated. Complexity too appears to be more or less the same in the various newspapers, and the same holds for sentence length, which is slightly higher in the Third World press. From these figures we provisionally conclude that sentence syntax in news discourse is, fairly complex and that length and structure are not significantly - different in First World and Third World newspapers.
Credibility and The Rhetoric of Numbers
The persuasive nature of news is not primarily geared towards the change of opinions and attitudes, even when these may eventually change on the basis of information given or suggested by news discourse. Rather, news has an assertion-type speech act function, and its major aim is to achieve credibility with the reader. Hence, rhetorical strategies are used to stress the preciseness and the truthfulness of the text. Rhetorical devices that may be used include direct observations, interviews with eyewitnesses, quotations from participants, scene descriptions, and especially numbers.
Although in the news about the death of Gemayel, many direct or indirect quotations are present, we focus on the use of numbers. Many of the items, provide such numerical information:
1.Practically all newspapers mention the precise weight of the bomb: 200 kilos (440 pounds). El País even puts this in the headline. The exact weight is not, of course, very important. However, the use of such a number suggests precision of information and at the same time adds to the seriousness of the event. No important information would have been lost if the newspapers had simply said "heavy bomlf; the ubiquitous and mostly prominent use of the precise weight, therefore, should be considered a typical rhetorical strategy of establishing credibility.
2.That the numbers do not matter much may be easily discovered when comparing the numbers of the dead and wounded that resulted from the bomb explosion. Of course, the various sources may give different numbers about the casualties, but even from one source and even within the same article, the numbers may vary. Moreover, subsequent information containing new numbers is seldom printed to correct old numbers. The New York Time,9 and Excelsior report 8 deaths and 50 wounded; Granma, 19 deaths and 60 wounded; Jornal do Brasil, 8 deaths and about 50 or 60 wounded; the Daily Telegraph even speaks about 60 deaths, and the Guardian about 50.
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3.The same holds for the estimates of the victims of Gemayel during the civil war. It is reported that Gemayel was involved in the killing of Tony Franjieh and 29 (32, ?) of his followers, and of 400 (or 500?) of Chamoun's militiamen. La Prensa of Argentina mentions 1200 killed at Quarantaine, but El País speaks of 500.
4.Dates are also important. Most reports mention the date of the elec-
tion and the day (a month Gemayel was expected to take office. Also the dates of the two previous attacks on his life are often given, even if such information does not have a direct function for the actual news report. An indication such as "two years before" would have been sufficient.
5.Finally, the use of time was analyzed. Most reports specify the exact time of the explosion, 16 h. 10, local time (a Lebanese paper is even more exact: 16:08): And the same holds for the indication of the delay (6 or 7 hours) after which Gemayel's body was found in the rubble. This latter indication is journalistically more relevant because it makes the presence of the survival rumor more plausible and at the same time explains why the news of Gemayel's death came so late.
The news about Gemayel's assassination has the usual features of a rhetoric of numbers. It gives many indications of weight, time, date, or periods, even when diese are not directly relevant. Sometimes, indications of time may be used routinely to detail the actuality of the report or to explain delays in the news.
PHOTOGRAPHS
Having studied both the macrostructured and the microstructural properties of news discourse, we turn now to the photographs that accompany the news of Gemayel's assassination. Except for an occasional map of Lebanon, such as the one in the New York Times that marks the location of the home bases of the various groups or factions, the most important visual dimension of the news is the photographs.
There are two major classes of photographs, pictures of Gemayel and pictures of the explosion scene. Borsje (1983) studied 181 different photos, which were used 441 times. Most appear in Lebanese Le Réveil, which has a vast photographic reportage after the death of its leader. Without this newspaper, there are 32 photos used 289 times. About a quarter of all pictures used are portraits. Both the pictures of Gemayel and those of the explosion scene come predominantly from AP and UPI. The AP picture of the devastated party building is especially used, and the confusion as portrayed on the street aptly symbolizes the confusion after the death of Gemayel.