The Use of Passive Voice in News Reports for Political Purposes

Journalism Practice, 2008

2008

This study explores which sources are ‘‘making’’ local news and whether these sources are simply indicating the type of news that appears, or are shaping newspaper coverage. It provides an empirical record of the extent to which sources are able to dominate news coverage from which future trends in local journalism can be measured. The type and number of sources used in 2979 sampled news stories in four West Yorkshire papers, representing the three main proprietors of local newspapers in the United Kingdom, were recorded for one month and revealed the relatively narrow range of routine sources; 76 per cent of articles cited only a single source. The analysis indicates that journalists are relying less on their readers for news, and that stories of little consequence are being elevated to significant positions, or are filling news pages at the expense of more important stories. Additionally, the reliance on a single source means that alternative views and perspectives relevant to the readership are being overlooked. Journalists are becoming more passive, mere processors of one-sided information or bland copy dictated by sources. These trends indicate poor journalistic standards and may be exacerbating declining local newspaper sales.

This study investigates the way a political issue as well as its main participants and their actions are represented in newspaper headlines. Employing a number of analytical tools from Van Dijk (1998) and Halliday's transitivity model, the study examines the headlines of news stories on Iran's nuclear program published by a number of British newspapers to identify the specific ideology propagated by the newspapers. The findings of the study indicate that the British newspapers' coverage of Iran's nuclear program tends to present a negative image of Iran and its nuclear program in the context of "Us" and "Them". The findings provide evidence to support the claim that news media do not simply reflect the social reality but articulate dominant ideologies in representing political events. The study contributes to the understanding of the ideological role of language within news discourse in constructing representations of a society.

ABSTRACT This study examines difficulty with the forms and functions of English passive voice in news report encountered by L2 learners of English. The participants were 80 trainee teachers in an undergraduate Teaching of English as a Second Language degree program at a Malaysian university. The participants were asked to identify the passive voice constructions in a brief news report, and reformulate the sentence using the active voice.

Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2000

This article describes one way in which news reports, apparently neutral, subtly show the personal preferences of journalists. It shows 1he way different people are reported using different reporting verbs, thus prejudicing readers' opinions in favour of or against them. It matters considerably whether the reporting verb is "professed" or "claimed", which have negative connotations, or "explained", "announced" or "pointed out", which have a more positive sound to them. Depending on the context, others, such as "asserted", "stated", "concluded", "argued", "promised and "maintained", are more neutral. In general, those reported favourably respond to aprofile of Western, offícial, élite, establishment speakers.

Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, 2022

A well-directed article may affect the objectivity of the event itself and the reader's interpretation. Language is powerful because it can appeal to emotions and ideologies, and therefore readers need to establish a more objective judgement in the various news reports from different news media. Based on the purpose of the study, this paper discusses the media bias and language patterns of different news reports on the theme of "COVID-19". By using corpus methods, comparative analysis and discourse analysis, this study analyses 20 articles published by CNN and CBN, two news media with left and right political stances respectively. The results reveal that (1) The two news media have their own preferences in phrase collocation. (2) Exposure to media bias is closely related to the highfrequency word "vaccine".

Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2016

This paper examines the discursive structures employed in legitimizing the event of U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq and identifies them in relation to linguistic features. It attempts to describe the relation between language use and legitimation discursive structures in depicting political events. The paper focuses on the political event of U.S. forces' withdrawal from Iraq in the English newspaper issued in Iraq. The study shows the way in which journalists express their values and attitudes concerning this critical event. Consequently, this requires a critical discourse analysis (henceforth, CDA) to analyse news articles in the Iraqi English newspaper: The Kurdish Globe (henceforth, KG) newspaper. Accordingly, the study presents a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles to identify the legitimation discursive structures and their linguistic features. It is found that the main discursive structures of legitimation employed in the KG newspaper are: authorization, rationalization, and moral evaluation. Besides, there were five verb processes used to represent this legitimation, including material, verbal, relational, mental, and existential.

The Russo-Ukrainian War is considered the biggest attack to Europe and the first full-scale war in Eu- rope since the Second World War. Media and press do not merely serve the purpose of communicating events, but they have been used as the tool to propagate agenda and play a vital role in shaping the perspectives of the audience towards the events. This prompts scholars to investigate language use in news to examine linguistic phenomena underlined by political and ideological currents. This project analyzes subject-verb pairs occurring under passive voice constructions in news corpora. Passive voice constructions play a crucial role in revealing how agency and responsibility are repre- sented, especially in the discourse surrounding war and conflict, and this aspect has been underexplored in previous studies. Datasets used in this study include the Ukraine War corpus (170K), Leipzig news corpora (17M), and English speaking Russian news corpora (210K). Examining passive pairs, proper noun subjects, by-agent phrases, as well as conducting diachronic analysis on active and passive voice, short and long passive, and be- and get-passive, the study aims to answer the following research ques- tions: i) How Russia and Ukraine are represented in the Western news media compared to the Russian news media? ii) How their agency and responsibility are delegated, and iii) How the usage of passive voice changes over time? A combination of theoretical linguistic frameworks on passive voice and semantic roles, corpus lin- guistic methodologies, statistical measures, as well as natural language processing (NLP) methods, are employed. SpaCy parser is used to extract passive subject-verb pairs. Semantic map aids the catego- rization of words. Topic modeling reveals different topics within a corpus, and t-score and p-value are used as the measurements of collocational strengths. The main findings include the representation of Russia as a malevolent actor in Western media both towards its own people and foreign citizens while Ukraine is represented as victims. The use of eu- phemism with Russia signals mechanistic dehumanization. In the Russian news, Russia is found to be associated with neutral and positive verbs. Regarding the assignment of responsibility, weapons are found to be used to perform violent actions while human agents are more often associated with restrictive or non-violent actions. The diachronic analysis indicates an increased usage of short and get passives but a gradual decrease of passive voice in general.

2015

This article represents a CDA account for the different realizations of Speech Reportage instances in written media articles. It is a case study of nine (09) articles selected from The New York Times (Oct, Nov, and Dec 2014). These articles share the same source and topic which is the Syrian political impasse with its details and possible outcomes. The aim has been to unveil the importance of preferences made at the discursive level for the societal role ascribed to written media articles. Media producers tend to manage structural entities in accordance with the preset social objective of the mediated text. The CDA framework has been qualified most adequate for bringing different practices accompanying text production and consumption to the fore (van Dijk 2006). Critical analysis of mediated texts is geared to study the different workings of ideological investment of political discourse in the media.