This book is the second book-length treatment of ‘news values’ by Bednarek and Caple after their earlier work in
2012.
It is a significant development of their previous work and provides a
more detailed and systematic analysis of newsworthiness in English
language news media. There are two important features in this book which
put Bednarek and Caple into the map of scholars who have contributed
significantly to ‘news values’ and ‘newsworthiness’ research (e.g.
Bell, 1991;
Galtung and Ruge, 1965;
Harcup and Neil, 2001).
One is the close and systematic analysis of images and the other is the
inclusion of corpus methods. The corpus consists of 12 newspapers (a
mix of ‘popular’ and ‘quality’) from Australia, the United Kingdom and
the United States, as well as the Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and
websites of 22 news organizations in major English-speaking nations. A
few news organizations in the Middle East were also included.
The
book comprises 10 chapters and is organized into four main parts.
Chapter 1, Introduction, establishes the importance of studying ‘news
values’ and the necessity of a multimodal (i.e. both verbal and visual)
approach. Part I, titled ‘Theory’, is dedicated to the discussion of
news values both in journalism and linguistics (Chapter 2). The authors
start with the widely cited work of
Galtung and Ruge (1965),
elaborating on each ‘news factor’ or ‘news value’ proposed by Galtung
and Ruge (p. 29) and discuss their lasting influence on the subsequent
‘news value’ studies. As argued by
Bednarek (2016)
elsewhere, ‘examining how events are endowed with newsworthiness by the
news media shows which aspects of the event are emphasised, and reveals
the shape in which events are packed for news consumption by audiences’
(p. 31).
In Chapter 3, Bednarek and Caple
conceptualize and exemplify their list of ‘news values’ (i.e. Aesthetic
appeal, Consonance, Eliteness, Impact, Negativity, Personalization,
Positivity, Proximity, Superlativeness, Timeliness and Unexpectedness)
and, in doing so, consolidate their ‘Discursive News Value Analysis’
(DNVA) framework. The important difference to note between Galtung and
Ruge’s classic categories and those of Bednarek and Caple is the
‘linguistic’ and ‘semiotic’ focus of the latter in contrast to the focus
on ‘content’ of the former (see pp. 28–30). It is worth mentioning that
their DNVA adopts both ‘constructionism’ and ‘realism’ in the sense
that ‘they assume that material events are endowed with newsworthiness
by the media through emphasising or de-emphasising certain news values
in the text’. They also assume that ‘the potential news value of events
depends on a given sociocultural system that assigns them value’ (p.51).
In other words, an event is ‘constructed’ as news and the news value of
the event is not ‘natural’ or ‘inherent’.
In
Part II, Chapters 4 and 5, a frame for analysing verbal and visual
elements is discussed. Chapter 4 focuses on linguistic resources (e.g.
lexical choices such as ‘typical’ for consonance, ‘prestigious’ for
eliteness; see page 79 and 80 for more examples) for establishing each
news value. The book uses the online reporting the same event (i.e. the
killing of five Israelis in Jerusalem in November 2014) by
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia),
The Guardian (UK) and
the Washington Post
(US), as an example to showcase the application of DNVA. The same news
value elements are discussed with regard to the images in Chapter 5. The
only addition to the inventory is ‘aesthetic appeal’ (visual
attractiveness of an item). After providing a typical example for each
of the visual news value element, the chapter finishes with an analysis
of a front-page report of Sydney Lindt Cafe Siege
1 in 2014 in the
The West Australian.
Part
III (Chapters 6, 7 and 8) provides three case studies using DNVA.
Chapter 6 looks at how ‘cycling’ is associated with certain news values.
A corpus, titled Cycling, consisting of 1678 articles and 506,324
tokens was used. The analysis showed that Negativity was the most
typical news value constructed and this was through negative lexis such
as ‘injure’, ‘die’, ‘kill’ and so on (pp. 146–147). There was also
evidence of Personalization and Superlativeness as well as Timeliness
(e.g. ‘is being treated’, ‘today’) and Proximity (e.g. ‘in Oxford’, ‘in
West Oxford’, ‘at the junction of Henry Road and Botley Road’). Chapter 7
focuses on images used in news organizations’ Facebook pages and
Twitter accounts. It was found that Eliteness (e.g. image of famous
people like political figures), Personalization (e.g. image of ordinary
human beings, non-celebrities in human interest stories) and Proximity
were the most commonly constructed news values. While Chapters 6 and 7
focus, respectively, on one semiotic mode, Chapter 8 presents a
multimodal analysis of 99 widely shared news items on Facebook.
Part
IV (Chapters 9 and 10) discusses the possibility of diachronic and
cross-cultural studies of newsworthiness. Chapter 9 is particularly
fascinating as it suggests possibilities for future research. For
instance, the chapter compares reporting on the Sydney Siege from a
number of countries in Europe and America. Apart from providing some
DNVA of the publications of different countries, the main purpose of the
chapter is to encourage researchers to apply DNVA to ‘other’ languages
in cross-cultural research. They also encourage researchers to conduct
‘historical news discourse’ or take a ‘diachronic’ perspective.
In
the book, Bednarek and Caple have focused on the English-language
publications. The most common types of news value(s) reported in their
studies might be different from those construed or constructed by a news
outlet in Africa or the Middle East (
Makki, 2016).
Further research is needed to explore this analytical framework in the
journalism of other countries and cultures, since an event’s potential
news value is ‘socioculturally-assigned’ (p. 51). However, researchers
should not take the list of news values presented in this book as an
exclusive list and try to find only these values, but they should
observe closely as they might come up with new and different categories.
This
book would be of interest to scholars working in journalism,
communication, linguistics and discourse analysis. Bednarek and Caple,
with their knowledge and expertise in discourse analysis and corpus
linguistics and their background in journalism and photography, offer a
theoretically informed and an innovative take on the concept of ‘news
values’.
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