Evaluation devices in newspaper reports

Journal

of Pragmatics

469

19 (1993) 469-486

North-Holland

Evaluation devices in newspaper reports Helmut

Gruber*

Received July 1991; revised version August 1992

In this paper I am concerned with different evaluation strategies in newspaper reports on political events. After a short review of the literature on political language and on discourse representation in the mass media, I present my analysis of newspaper reports on the 1986 presidential election campaign in Austria in two newspapers (Die Presse and Neue Kronenzeitung). I distinguish between two main types of evaluative utterances, namely ‘direct’ and ‘reported evaluative utterances’. The latter are split into three further subtypes, referring to their structural, textual and pragmatic properties. I argue that the evaluative effect of these utterances is a combination of the expressed evaluation as well as of the reader’s knowledge and beliefs. In concluding, I present a scale on which each of the utterance types is ranked according to structural and pragmatic properties along two dimensions, namely ‘directness of evaluation’ and ‘responsibility of author for evaluation’. It is shown that the responsibility for the evaluation shifts from author to reader depending on the directness of the utterance. The presented scale may serve as a first approach to substantiate the notion of ‘biased’ news reporting.

1. Introduction Political newsreporting is a business which takes place in a continuous double bind situation. While the basic ideology of journalism is that of ‘objectivity’ and ‘reporting mere facts’, most investigators of media discourse and journalist language stress the impossibility of these claims and describe the ways in which underlying ideologies bias news reports (Van Dijk 1987, McQuail 1988, Hall 1989, Fowler et al. 1979).’ In the following paper I deal with negative evaluations in newspaper reports by investigating evaluative utterances which Correspondence to: H. Gruber, Department of Linguistics, University of Vienna, Berggasse 11, A-1090 Vienna, Austria. * I wish to thank Jose Sanders, Michael Agar, Jyrki Kalliokoski and two anonymous referees for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. I am especially thankful to Michael Agar for some stylistic corrections of the English version of the text. 1 There is only disagreement over the question of whether this ideological bias determines the views and positions of the public, or if the press only tells us how society perceives itself (cf. Nir and Roeh 1990). Although this question is not in the focus of this paper, I want to stress that I hold the second view.

0378-2166/93/$06.00

0

1993 -

Elsevier Science Publishers

B.V. All rights reserved

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H. Gruber / Evaluation devices in newspaper

reports

are part of newspaper discourse (i.e. discourse which is clearly attributable to the authorship of a journalist) as well as evaluations which are part of political discourse and which are only reported in the media. I will argue that evaluative utterances as well as different modes of discourse representation in the media can be used for characterizing and evaluating certain speakers in the eyes of the general public. Thus, I want to show that even in the case of mere reporting utterances of third persons, a clear relationship exists between types of evaluative utterances, kinds of quotations, and their evaluative function in newspaper discourse. In order to establish a theoretical framework, I will use theories of political language use as well as approaches directed at the language of the mass media.* In the course of my analysis, evaluative utterances are analyzed on the structural, textual, and pragmatic levels. I will present an integrative model which explains the relationship between these different aspects of an utterance and its respective evaluative ‘power’. The investigation is based on a text sample of newspaper reports from the 1986 presidential election campaign in Austria. The sample consists of all issues of two newspapers during the period from March 3rd 1986 to June 31st 1986 and covers the so-called ‘Waldheim affair’. The two investigated newspapers were Die Presse, a liberal-bourgeois quality paper, and Die Neue Kronenzeitung (NKZ), Austria’s most read tabloid.

2. Politics and mass media Speaking of political language in the modern western societies is impossible without taking into account the close interrelation between the sphere of political action and the representation of these actions in the media (cf. Wodak et al. 1985, Gruber 1987). Certain political events (like press conferences and interviews) are performed for the sole purpose of being reported. But apart from these transparent examples, all instances of overt political action are possible news events. Certain properties of political language account especially for this possible newsworthiness and will be examined more closely in the following.

* Whereas the methodological basis of my linguistic analyses is strongly influenced by pragmatic language theories like Halliday’s functional approach (Halliday 1978) or speech act theory, I should make it clear that I do not explicitly subscribe to any one of them; rather, such theories have provided the ‘cognitive background’ of my whole thinking about, and working with, language and communication. Thus, if I use specific terms such as the ‘performative component of an utterance’, etc., I do not have in mind the ‘narrow’ (speech-act theoretical), but a somewhat ‘looser’ sense of these expressions, as referring to general aspects of linguistic action which are dealt with in the above theories.

H. Gruber / Evaluation devices in newspaper reports

2.l.Some

properties

of political

471

language

Political language can be divided into several domains like communication between different administrative boards, language of bureaucracy, ceremonial language, etc. (cf. StrauB 1986). But the main area of the ‘language of politics’ is public speech of politicians, i.e. political debates, interviews, etc. It is this domain of political language use where politicians often try to convince (or persuade) the citizenry that their view of the world (‘Weltanschauung’) is the right one and that their ways of problem solving are more appropriate than those of their competitors. In doing so, political actors tend to reduce complex and interrelated political problems to simple causal theories of society and politics. This involves the creation of ‘myths’ (i.e. explanations of certain events and justification of certain actions; cf. Geis 1987 for a detailed account of ‘mythic themes’ in American politics; Edelman 1977 for a detailed explanation of the concept), as well as different rhetorical moves and argumentation strategies which are also typical for prejudiced communication (cf. Wodak et al. 1990, Van Dijk 1987, Gruber 1991). Thus, political language has a strong performative component, which may be overt (like appeals or commands) or covert (like descriptive or declarative statements which aim to convince people of a certain point of view; cf. Dieckmann 1969). Additionally, this performative component implies that political statements are evaluative in most cases because political actors do not only want to convince people of their point of view, but also want them to believe that their opinion is of a higher moral or ethical standing than that of their competitors. This involves evaluations of two different kinds: positive self-evaluations as well as the negative evaluation of others. Whereas the former is not opposed to any social shared values in western societies, the latter may conflict with the overall doctrine (or myth) of rational and fair political confrontation (especially when the negative evaluated subjects are part of a minority, cf. Van Dijk 1987). Thus, negative evaluation processes are hidden in many cases by the use of different linguistic strategies. These properties of political language have implications for the processing of political information: the construction of meaning in the course of information processing depends to a higher degree on implied propositions, mutual knowledge of politicians and citizenry and contextual information about the setting of the speech event, historical and social background, etc., than it does in other types of communication (Dascal and Weizman 1987, Weizman and Dascal 1991, Geis 1987). As the media are the main communication channel of political discourse, they play a crucial role in this process. 2.2. News reporting and discourse representation The question

of discourse

representation

in newspaper

reporting

has received

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H. Gruber / Evaluation devices in newspaper reports

some attention in studies of media discourse. The reason for this might be the fact that the type of news-item which involves most cases of discourse representation (the ‘quote-story’, cf. Warren 1934) seems to be the most ‘objective’ type, because in this case the journalist does not seem to ‘create’ the text (in the sense that he couches ‘events’ in ‘his’ words), but to transmit statements of third persons (cf. Gruber 1991). However, studies of newspaper reports on political discourse events have revealed several linguistic means which may be used to convey evaluations. In her study of the use of quotation marks in journalist language, Weizman (1984a,b) found that quotation marks do not only function as formal devices which mark portions of reported speech, but that they also convey the attitude of the journalist towards the quote. This attitude function of quotation marks depends on language-specific reporting styles as well as on the portion of reported discourse, i.e. the smaller the reported discourse unit is, the more the function of the quotation marks shifts from the ‘reliability function’ to the ‘attitude function’ (Weizman 1984a). Geis (1987) draws special attention to the speech-act describing verbs journalists use to introduce quotes. His experimental study yields two dimensions which can describe these verbs, namely expression of positive/negative affect and high/low volatility.3 These two dimensions are connected, since low volatility verbs tend to express neutral (or slightly) positive affect whereas high volatility verbs express more often negative affect. Geis argues that this connection is due to the fact that most high volatility verbs are not primarily speech-act describing but action describing (e.g. ‘shoot back, trumpet, attack’) and therefore often used in indirect quotes, whereas the low volatility verbs are the ‘true’ speech-act describing verbs (e.g. ‘say, report, answer’, etc.) which are used in direct quotes. Thus, the use of indirect speech offers more possibilities of negative evaluation than direct speech does. In his comparison of some news magazines, Geis finds systematic differences in the characterization of the same speakers by the use of different speech-act describing verbs. In his study of the press coverage of a single news event over a period of some months, Verschueren (1985) obtains similar results concerning speaker evaluation by means of (what he calls) ‘metapragmatic metaphors’. In an approach to media discourse which Fairclough (1988, 1989) bases on the work of Voloshinov (1975 [1929]), he distinguishes (amongst others) two main properties of discourse representation, namely mode and situationality and two domains of newspaper discourse (primary vs. secondary discourse). Mode relates to the type of representation, i.e. direct discourse representation, roughly characterized as ‘direct speech’ and indirect discourse, i.e. instances of 3 By ‘high volatility’, Geis means that there was a class of verbs in his sample showing wide variation when they were judged as either expressing positive or negative affect: while for some of his raters, they expressed an extreme positive, for others an extreme negative affect, they were neutral for none.

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discourse representation ranging from indirect speech to narrative report of a speech act. Situationality represents the non-ideational (situational, interpersonal, or textual; cf. Halliday 1978) dimension of discourse-meaning. The term ‘primary discourse’ signifies discourse between journalist and public, ‘secondary discourse’ denotes political discourse which is reported by the media.

3. Press policy Austria

and political

situation

of the 1986 presidential

campaign

in

I will describe the ‘Waldheim affair’ only as far as is necessary for the understanding of my linguistic examples (for a detailed account of the political situation and prejudiced communication during and following this period in Austria, cf. Wodak et al. 1990, Mitten 1989, Gruber 1991). The two most important candidates for the Presidency in 1986 were Kurt Steyrer of the SPij (‘Austrian Social Democratic Party’) and Kurt Waldheim of the OVP (‘Austrian People’s Party’: a Christian Conservative party). There were two other candidates, who were nominated by small parties and who had no real chances in the election. On March 3rd 1986 documents were published in the Austrian news magazine projil which revealed that Waldheim had been a member of National Socialist organizations (the NSDStB4 and an equestrian unit of the SA). These documents were also published in the New York Times of March 4th. From this date on, the World Jewish Congress (WJC), which joined the campaign of projil and the New York Times, published one document after another which showed that Waldheim must at least have known about antipartisan activities in Yugoslavia and deportations of Jews from Salonika. This was a key issue in the reproaches against Waldheim ~ namely that he had been a member of Nazi organizations and had either been personally involved in atrocities or war crimes or had at least known about them. The repudiation of these accusations was the principal objective of the majority of the Austrian mass media and of the (conservative and nationalist) politicians who supported Waldheim. At the beginning of the affair, even former (SPij-) chancellor Bruno Kreisky and Simon Wiesenthal (himself a Nazi victim, founder and head of the ‘Documentation Center of Nazi Victims’ in Vienna and well known for the uncovering of many prominent Nazi criminals who went into hiding after the war) defended Waldheim against the reproaches of the WJC, but soon altered their position when more or less overt antisemitic stereotypes and argumentations occurred in the statements of other Waldheim supporters. 4

‘Nationalsozialistischer

Deutscher

Studentenbund’:

a National-Socialist

student

organisation.

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H. Gruber / Evaluation devices in newspaper reporls

There were, nevertheless, two other criticisms, which never became the focus of public interest in Austria. The first concerned Waldheim’s previous account of this past. Until this time he had always maintained that he had been regarded as ‘politically unreliable’ during the Nazi era (as he had rejected the Nazi regime because of his Christian Conservative attitude); in addition, he had never mentioned his war years in the Balkans (cf. Waldheim 1985): in other words, he had given an incomplete (and partly) misleading account of his activities in World War II. The second criticism concerned Waldheim’s current behavior, as more and more new charges were made against him. At first he rejected all and any accusations and only admitted to details when documentary proof was provided. In addition, he did not indicate any change in attitude towards his role in World War II. His answer to a question posed by a journalist has become notorious. When asked what he had done during World War II, he replied, “I only did my duty”.5 These latter two issues were mainly raised outside Austria and were interpreted as affronts against the whole country by the Waldheim supporters. Their argumentation relied on the public repression of Austria’s Nazi past, which is fostered by Austria’s officially being the ‘first victim’ of the German ‘Wehrmacht’ and the aggressive Nazi policy in Europe of 1938, even though millions of Austrians served in the same ‘Wehrmacht’ and participated in the Holocaust in leading positions after 1938. Thus, the Waldheim supporters created the image of a world-wide (Jewish) conspiracy (‘Weltverschwiirung’) against Austria as the affair went on, especially because more and more foreign (and particularly Israeli) politicians reproached Waldheim for his behavior. Newspapers played a crucial role in the whole affair. Except for the weekly magazine projil (which started the whole matter) and the SPij party-paper Arbeiterzeitung (‘Workers’ Paper’), all the papers supported Waldheim more or less overtly. The two papers under consideration here (Die Presse and NKZ) were selected for several reasons. Firstly, both of them eagerly supported Walheim (but for somewhat different reasons, cf. Gruber 1991) and frequently used antisemitic and prejudiced language. Secondly, they address complementary readerships: Die Presse, as a liberal bourgeois quality paper, is mostly read by ChristianConservative, well-educated readers (which are, however, only a minority of Austrian newspaper readers: only 2.8% of potential readers (i.e. Austrians older than 14 years) in Austria actually read Die Presse according to an Austrian media analysis which was reported in pro31 (12/1992: 32)). In contrast, the NKZ is a tabloid which is read by 42.2% of the potential

5 ‘Pressestunde’, ORF (Austria’s State Broadcasting Company), March 9th. 1986. The ORFPressestunde is a weekly talk-show which is broadcast every Sunday morning. In this broadcast. two newspaper journalists ask a politician their questions, while an ORF-journalist is in the chair.

H. Gruber / Evaluation devices in newspaper reports

415

Austrian readers (projil, 1992), most of them only having an average school education. In accordance with the educational level of their respective readerships the two papers use markedly different language styles. Thus, one could expect that the two papers would also use different strategies for achieving the same underlying communicative goals. In the context of the present article, this would mean that Die Presse and the NKZ, taken together, should provide the full range of evaluative utterances characterizing the Waldheim adversaries (especially the Jewish ones) to be found in Austrian newspaper discourse.

4. Evaluative utterances and discourse representation As I am concerned with two types of basically different (in terms of authorship I will begin with an investigation of the evaluating utterances.6 First, I will deal part of primary discourse. Figure 1 gives this type. 4.1. Direct evaluative

utterances

media utterances which seem to be and function in newspaper reports), structure and different functions of with evaluative utterances which are a schematic sketch of an utterance of

(DEUs)

X is y

IL target of evaluation Fig.

1. Structure

evaluation proper

of direct evaluative

utterance

(DEU)

In this structure ‘X’ represents the concept of a person or an entity of the world which may be labeled in several ways and thus may be evaluated by means of lexical or register choice. As this is an evaluation device of its own (cf. Gruber 1991) I will restrict the present investigations to examples where ‘X’ is represented by the name of a person. ‘X’ will be called the ‘target of evaluation’ as he or she is the person who is evaluated by means of the utterance. ‘y’ may be represented linguistically as an adjective or a predicative NP and is called the ‘evaluation proper’ in the following in order to distinguish it from portions of speech which are only functionally evaluative (cf. below). An example of an utterance of this kind is:

4 I shall not go into a discussion about differences between sentence meaning, meaning, and speaker’s meaning here, but refer to Grice (1971) and Dascal (1983).

utterance

476

“Deputy

H. Gruber 1 Evaluation devices in newspaper reports

X is a silly man.“7

As the example shows, DEUs may occur either as parts of political discourse proper or in the course of newspaper reporting (i.e. as parts of the primary discourse). In the following, I will be concerned with DEUs as parts of primary discourse only; the next section (4.2) analyzes the function of DEUs in secondary discourse. Obviously, the use of this type of evaluative utterance violates the ‘objectivity claim’ of newspaper reporting to a great extent because it expresses an overt evaluation of a person by a journalist in the course of news reporting. Nevertheless, utterances of this kind occurred in the text-sample from the NKZ: 8 (1) “It now appears as if the Israeli Foreign Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, going mad: yesterday in Jerusalem he appealed to the world leaders (NKZ, May 28, 1986) join in the fight against Waldheim.”

is to

In the context of newspaper reporting, utterances of this kind are not only evaluative with respect to their structural properties but also insofar as they have certain textual and pragmatic functions. On the textual level, DEU-utterances occurred only in text-initial position, i.e. as the first sentences of the lead of a newspaper report. Additionally, these utterances were combined with reported evaluative utterances (called REU in the following, see below) which constituted the main body of the text. These portions of reported speech served to ‘legitimize’ the evaluation expressed in the DEU-sequence of the news-reports, i.e. they quoted ‘honorable’ persons in Austrian public life (e.g. former chancellor Bruno Kreisky or Simon Wiesenthal) supporting the evaluation expressed in the lead. Thus, in the whole news story an implicit argumentation was conducted (cf. Gruber 1991) and the introductory sentences served to give the whole text an evaluative perspective. On the pragmatic level, these introductory evaluations may be viewed as a kind of pre-sequences similar to those found in investigations of oral storytelling (cf. Levinson 1984). These pre-sequences served as attention-getters aiming to raise the interest of the hearer as they convey an evaluation of the whole story the teller wants to tell. In the course of newspaper reporting, utterances of this kind violate the expectations of the reader concerning structural properties as well as the communicative intentions of the text and thus reveal the pragmatic function which they have in this type of news-story: namely that of arousing the interest of the reader. ’ This is a paraphrase of an actual statement of former chancellor Bruno Kreisky made during a press conference when he was asked about his opinion about MP X. This example is given to illustrate the culture of political discourse in Austria and will (hopefully) make the following examples from Austrian newspapers less strange for foreign readers. * Translation of all German examples: Ardith Maier and John Rennison in cooperation with the author.

H. Gruber / Evaluation devices in newspaper reports

411

Another factor which affects the pragmatic function of DEU-sequences is the responsibility for the evaluation expressed by the utterance. In DEUs, the responsibility for the evaluation is clearly attributable to the journalist who is the author of the story.g This may influence the reader’s perception in two directions (according to his/her own view of things and his/her appreciation of the author): he/she may either support or reject the author’s evaluation. In either case, this effect adds (either in a ‘positive’ or in a ‘negative’ direction) to the evaluation proper expressed in the DEU. Therefore, every evaluating utterance in newspaper reports has an evaluative effect resulting not only from the evaluation proper, but also from an evaluative force which combines the evaluation proper and the pragmatic effects of the utterance in the reader. The direction of these pragmatic effects is partly dependent on the reader’s opinions, and partly on the textual and pragmatic properties of the evaluative utterance. So far, we have not been concerned with the representation of a DEUutterance in another text (and context). This is discussed in the next section. 4.2. Reported

evaluating

source

utterances

(REUs)

of evaluation

Fig. 2. Structure

of reported

structural marker evaluating

utterance

(REU).

Figure 2 adds two components to figure 1, namely ‘Z’ and ‘(SAID)‘. ‘Z’ is the speaker of the utterance; the same restrictions on the choice of examples as made in the case of ‘X’s, above, apply here. The crucial point in the schema is the ‘(SAID)’ - component. It stands for a whole range of speech-act and action-describing verbs in the language; the use of brackets shows that this component may or may not be present. In this case, the sentence type (i.e. ‘reporting sentence’) may be expressed by the use of the colon and quotation marks, or by quotation marks alone. The term ‘structural marker’ is chosen to denote the conventional function of this part of the utterance. As we saw above, when we reviewed the literature on the topic (and as we shall see again when we turn to the linguistic examples), the actual choice of a verb may 9 Thus, the textual embedding of view, cf. above) and some linguistic modal expressions (‘it appears to’ Gruber 1991) are used to diminish

these utterances (quoting opinions supporting the journalist’s devices of downgrading the evaluation proper (like the use of in the above example, the use of hedges in other cases, cf. this feature of the utterance.

478

H. Gruber 1 Evaluation

devices in newspaper reporrs

influence the function of this part of the utterance. The schema also shows that the quote itself may be represented in two different ways: namely, either as a direct quote, or as paraphrase of what Z actually said. In the latter case discourse representation takes the form of a subordinate clause. The two main possibilities of discourse representation (which will be further differentiated below) also represent the two main evaluative devices. The first one is evaluation of third persons by the use of direct quotes. 4.2.1.

Subtype

1: Third person-evaluating

REUs

(2) “Former Chancellor, Dr. Bruno Kreisky, explained to the KronerO yesterday: ‘Yitzhak Shamir is the last person who has a right to make appeals to the rest of the world. He is one of the world’s most evil figures . . . He was a terrorist leader. He was involved in the murder of Count Bernadotte, who had been dispatched to the Near East as a UN-mediator.“’ (NKZ, May 28, 1986) Utterances of this type appeared frequently in my text-sample and shared certain characteristics of structure and textual/pragmatic function. In most cases, the full name and title of the speaker was given as well as some description which underlined his ‘prominence’. The speech-act describing verbs which were used were of the class described by Geis (1987) as having ‘positive affect’ and ‘low volatility’ like ‘say, report, explain’, etc. The quoted portions of speech themselves consisted of direct evaluative utterances like the ones described in figure 1. The target of evaluation was some person who was the reason for the news story, but not one of its actors. The textual function of this subtype was partly described above when discussing the occurrence of DEUs in newspaper reports. As mentioned, direct quotes serve to support the evaluation expressed in a DEU. Thus, they constitute (together with indirect quotes, cf. below) the text type ‘quote-story’. However, whereas direct quotes occurred in all types of news stories, not all direct quotes were quotes of evaluative uterances. Thus news stories containing REUs constitute a subset of quote-stories which convey evaluations to the reader without overt responsibility of the author of the story. The structural aspects of direct quotes relate to their pragmatic function. As mentioned above, the speakers were given with full names, titles and some ‘epitheta ornantia’. This may give the quotes more ‘gravity’, because in many cases the evaluation proper expressed in this subtype was unusually direct and offensive for political discourse. Additionally, the mentioning of the ‘promi-

unit (replaced by lo In Austria, the word ‘Krone’ (lit. ‘crown’, the name of the old monetary Shilling) from which the newspaper has its name) is a common abbreviation for the rather bulky name Neue Kronenzeifung. As the example shows, it is even used by the newspaper itself.

H. Gruber 1 Evaluation devices in newspaper reports

419

nence’ of the source of evaluation adds force to the evaluation expressed. Thus the evaluative force of this kind of REU is a combination of the evaluation proper and the ‘distinction’ of the source of evaluation. Another aspect of the pragmatic function which affects all types of REUs concerns the responsibility of the author of the news story for the evaluation proper. Other than in DEUs, the author cannot be blamed for the expressed evaluations: after all he only reported ‘facts’. Only a detailed long-term study of newspaper reporting of a particular event (like the Austrian 1986 presidential election campaign) can reveal the systematic choice of evaluating utterances to describe and evaluate one particular issue of the campaign (in this special case, Jews). 4.2.2. Subtype 2: Explicitly speaker evaluating REVS The second subtype of REUs consists of cases where all variants of indirect speech occurred as described by Leech and Short (1981). l1 Within this subtype two further subsets may be distinguished. The first one represents only a variant of the REU described above, insofar as the direct quote is transformed into an embedded clause, as the following example shows: (3) “The ‘exaggerated

attacks’ of the World Jewish congress worried him, declared Graff, because they could unleash emotions in Austria which no one wants.” (Die Presse, March 25, 1986)

The function of the quotation marks in REUs of this kind is similar to that described by Weizman (1984a,b), namely of showing a certain distance of the journalist to the drastic description of the quoted source of the evaluation. l2 Apart from the structural difference, this subtype is similar in all other respects to the first subtype and, thus, constitutes a ‘transitional category’ between subtype 1 and subtype 2 REUs. The most frequent type used in evaluative utterances which reveal direct evaluations by the author of the news story were Narrative Reports of Actions (NRAs) and Narrative Reports of Speech Acts (NRSAs) (cf. Leech and Short 1981 and footnote 11) like the following examples show: ii These are the following: - Narrative Report of an Action (NRA) where linguistic and nonlinguistic actions may be reported; - Narrative Report of a Speech Act (NRSA) where “the narrator does not have to commit himself entirely to giving the sense of what was said” (Leech and Short 1981: 323); - Indirect speech (IS); - Free indirect speech (FIS) which is (among others) characterized by the omission of the introductory reporting clause. i* In this paper, I shall not be concerned with the fact that this indirect quote expresses an implicit antisemitic argumentation from which the author of the news story does not dissociate himself (cf. for this aspect, Gruber and de Cillia 1989, Gruber 1991, Wodak et al. 1990).

480

H. Gruber / Evaluation devices in newspaper reports

(4) “This is a crazy world: in Israel they pounce upon the prominent Jewish Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal now, because he doesn’t join the campaign of the World Jewish Congress against Waldheim. Heavy attacks are carried out (of course) against Kreisky.” (NKZ, March 29, 1986) (5) “[nobody will ever forget, H.G.] . . how the head of the World Congress, Israel Singer, overwhelmed with emotions and his voice trembling with anger, threw the accusations of ‘Nazi’ and ‘liar’ through the TV-cameras at Waldheim.” (NKZ, March 28, 1986) In example (4) an action-describing verb with negative connotations (‘to pounce upon’) is used to describe the linguistic actions (of Israeli newspapers and politicians) carried out against Simon Wiesenthal. The content of the reproaches is not represented in any detail, but only in the form of a rough paraphrase. In example (5) the action-describing verb (‘to throw at’) is complemented by a description of Singer’s emotional state and the content of the reproaches is reduced to the two catch-words ‘Nazi’ and ‘liar’. What differentiates this subset of indirect REUs from the first one is the splitting of the target of evaluation. While the paraphrased content of the represented portion of speech is aimed at evaluating a third person, the speech-act describing verb evaluates the source of the evaluation. This is highlighted by the structural properties of the portion of speech represented in this type, namely the rough paraphrase or fragmentary representation of utterances. Thus, the pragmatic function of this type is different from the REUs described so far. In all examples of this type, speech-act or action-describing words were used which expressed negative affect and/or high volatility, in Geis’s (1987) terminology. Thus, the authors of the news stories express implicitly negative evaluations of the speakers (= the sources of evaluation) mostly by reporting about the situationality aspect (i.e. the interpersonal or social dimension) of the discourse reported on. This is aggravated by the fact that the paraphrases of the reported discourse portions (which were evaluative as well) are very rough and inaccurate in most cases. Therefore the readers do not know what the speakers actually had said, but only how they said it. By using this device of discourse representation, journalists introduce a level of discursive reality where the implicit (and explicit) evaluations are not verifiable for the reader on the ground of reported ‘facts’, but only by reported ‘atmosphere’. In addition, in this special case the content of these (reported) evaluative utterances violated the basic concepts of Austrian public selfesteem (cf. Wodak et al. 1990, Gruber 1991) and thus the speakers may have been evaluated negatively in the eyes of the general public by the representation of their statements alone. The evaluative force of this type of REU results from the evaluation expressed by the speech-act describing verb and concerns the source of evaluation (i.e. the speaker whose utterances are reported). As a secondary

H. Gruber 1 Evaluarion devices in newspaper reports

481

component, the content of the discourse reported on may be used by the author of the news story to perform an additional implicit evaluation of the cited speaker in the eyes of the readers (i.e. properties of secondary discourse are used to evaluate the speaker (= overt source and covert target of evaluation) in terms of his own utterances. While evaluation proper and evaluative force have distinct overt targets, their covert target is the same. The additional evaluation depends partly on the political beliefs of the readers; it is triggered by the fragmentary reporting of the content of the reported utterances, which tends to legitimize the evaluation conveyed by the speech act describing verb. 4.2.3. Subtype 3: Implicitly Speaker-Evaluating REUs The remarks on evaluations of the speaker evoked by the content of their reported utterances lead to a last evaluative device in newspaper reporting. In this type, the whole evaluative force is established by the content of the reported utterance. Thus, the journalist uses the utterances he reports as implicit evidence for a negative evaluation of the speaker of the reported utterance :

(6) “‘concealed

liar, willful deceit, moral blindness, selective amnesia’, - for two hours these and similar reproaches hailed down on Kurt Waldheim and his son Gerhard on Tuesday.” (Die Presse, April 24, 1986) (7) “‘Those rowdies who claim that the disclosure of the truth will cause [anti-Semitism, H.G.], must be called to account’, said Singer . . . ‘Whoever says that it would have been nicer if I had waited with the truth until Waldheim was elected, is wrong. I would have revealed it anyway, even if it had been an affront to the president’ . . . ‘this guy [Kreisky, H.G.] interfered in almost every state’s internal affairs on the international level”’ (Die Presse, March 29/30/31, 1986)

Structurally, this type of REU is suggestive of the first subtype analyzed above. Example (6) is a combination of a first and third subtype of REU insofar as it combines the use of an evaluating (metaphorical) speech-act describing verb (‘to hail’) with the fragmentary direct representation of the content of the reported utterances. Example (7) shows the ‘pure use’ of a subtype 3 evaluation. In this subtype, speaker’s own evaluative utterances are used to characterize him or her negatively in the eyes of the readers. Thus the target of evaluation is split into an overt and a covert target of evaluation. The overt target of evaluation is expressed in the reported utterance, l3 whereas the covert target is the speaker himself. Now what leads me to this interpretation of utterances like 6 and 7? I3

Kurt Waldheim

in example

6 and Austrian

politicians

or Bruno

Kreisky

in example

7 above.

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devices in newspaper

reports

To arrive at my interpretation, we have to account for the pragmatic function of utterances of this subtype and to relate it to their structure and textual functions. Subtype 3 REUs did not occur very frequently in my material. And unlike in the subtype 2 examples, which were analyzed as having a selfevaluating component, direct discourse representation was used in all cases. Sometimes the quotes were rather fragmentary, representing only value-laden catch-words or slogans; sometimes full sentences were given. The cue for my classification of these utterances is given by the unusual form of discourse representation which was chosen here to represent utterances of Waldheim adversaries (cf. Weizman and Dascal 1991 and Dascal and Weizman 1987). In general, the main evaluating device was the use of speech-act describing verbs together with the fragmentary indirect representation of discourse (i.e. subtype 2 REUs), whereas the evaluating utterances of Waldheim supporters were represented as subtype 1 REUs. Direct representation of utterances of Waldheim adversaries was thus very unusual; if we look at the content of such representations, we find a coherent pattern: only those catch-words, phrases, or evaluating utterances were represented which violated official Austrian norms and values and which were formulated in a very impolite and offensive way. these utterances can be characterized as Regarding their textual function, ‘illustrations’. They were embedded in quote-stories in which most of the argumentation of the respective speakers was given in indirect or free indirect speech, sometimes only as rough paraphrases. In this context, the portions of direct speech allow for a glimpse on how the speaker argued. Thus, the use of this type of quotes here is similar to the ‘dramatizing function’ of direct speech found in studies of spoken discourse (cf. Redeker 1986, Labov 1972). Just as ‘dramatizing quotes’ highlight the dramatic peak of a story, subtype 3 quotes indicate the highmark of offensive behavior of a certain speaker. On a more general level, we may give the following criteria for the classification of an REU as belonging to subtype 3: Structural properties of the utterance are markedly dzfirent from the usual way in which statements of members of a certain group are represented in the media. This affects mainly the choice of direct vs. indirect speech in discourse representation. Furthermore these properties have to ensure that the responsibility for form and content of the represented utterance is clearly attributable to the speaker. The content of the represented utterances has to violate the norms of at least one significant subgroup of the readers of the newspaper where the REUs occur. In this subtype, the evaluative force of the utterance is established solely by the belief and value system of the reader. l4 Nevertheless the direct representaI4 That is to say, readers who are aware of the intention of the journalist or who support the opinion of the source of evaluation may react in a different way, compared to those readers for whom none of these prerequisites hold. But this is a question which is open to empirical investigation.

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483

tion of the utterances may reinforce the evaluation of the speaker insofar as the use of very drastic language will characterize him/her as rude and impolite.

5. Conclusions By way of conclusion, I will now try to develop a scale of directness of evaluation in newspaper reporting. The two dimensions which I am going to use in order to establish this scale are directness of evaluation and responsibility for evaluation. These two dimensions are chosen because of their relationship to the ‘claim of objectiveness’ cited above: i.e. an utterance which is directly evaluative and which reveals direct responsibility of the journalist may be seen as violating this principle most obviously. Both dimensions are related of evaluation’ refers to the to the levels of the above analysis. ‘Directness structural properties of the different types and subtypes discussed above; ‘responsibility for evaluation’ to the pragmatic function. The term ‘responsibility’ is used here to refer to the overt responsibility for the evaluative process which is triggered by the different kinds of evaluative utterances. However, it should be clear that the journalist who writes a news story bears the basic responsibility for the formulations and structural devices he/she uses. l5 It should be mentioned, too, that the points on my scale (i.e. the different types and subtypes) do not represent really distinct classes of utterances, but rather ideal types (‘Idealtypen’) in a Weberian sense, which are located at a continuum. Furthermore I should stress that the ‘responsibility’ dimension of my scale does not touch upon the overall responsibility that journalists have for reporting certain utterances and neglecting others, and which is an evaluating device of its own (for selectional choices by different media during the Waldheim affair, cf. Wodak et al. 1990). Table 1 shows the way the evaluative utterances can be scaled along the two dimensions. The description of the different points of the scale shows that the overt responsibility for the evaluative force shifts from the journalist to the reader, as the extent of ‘directness of evaluation’ decreases. The directness of evaluation depends on two factors: the linguistic and the pragmatic meaning of the evaluative utterance. The more the evaluation is expressed by linguistic means, the more direct it is. In cases where the evaluation depends mainly on lS Here, I have to add a further note: I am not stating that every formulation in a news text (or in any other text) is the result of rational and conscious decision-making of the author (social, psychological, and psychopathological facts may influence this process, cf. Wodak 1986, Gruber 1988). Nevertheless, the author of a text has to be aware that by using certain formulations (and not others), he/she may mediate certain indirect meanings, especially in public communication, as in the case of journalists,

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H. Gruber / Evaluation

Table 1 Ranking of evaluative

utterances

according

to directness

Dimension

Linguistic

properties

of utterance

Degree ness

1

of direct-

devices in newspaper reports

Type of utterance

Expression ation

Most direct evaluation

Direct evaluative utterance (DEU)

Slightly indirect evaluation

Indirect

evaluation

Most indirect evaluation

and responsibility

of evalu-

of evaluation Dimension

2

Subject of evaluation

Overt responsibility for evaluation

Evaluation expressed directly (by means of adjectives, predicative NPs)

Target of evaluation

Responsibility with journalist

Reported evaluative utterance (Third person evaluating REUs, in direct or indirect speech)

Evaluation expressed directly (cf. above)

Target of evaluation

Responsibility with source of evaluation

Reported evaluative utterance as NRA or NRSA (Explicitly speaker evaluating REUs)

Evaluation expressed by choice of speechact describing verb

Shifting from target to source of evaluation

Responsibility attributable partly to journalist and partly to reader

Reported selfevaluating utterante (Implicitly Speaker evaluating REUs)

Evaluation inferable from textual and contextual embedding of the utterance

Source of evaluation

Responsibility with reader

pragmatic factors, it may be detected by applying the reader’s extralinguistic knowledge. This is expressed by the shifting of the ‘responsibility factor’ of the scale from author to reader. The reader’s knowledge may contain two different components, namely: - general knowledge about cultural and social shared values, norms and stereotypes (‘ideological knowledge’); - knowledge of institutional communicative practices (‘meta-communicative knowledge’). As a rule these knowledge types and their application in the course of meaning construction remain below the level of consciousness just as does the application of linguistic knowledge in processing linguistic units. Speech-act and action-describing verbs play a central role in this process. They are the guidelines which the author places at the reader’s disposal for the task of situating a speaker’s utterance into the cognitive framework of the reader’s representation of the world. Thus, the evaluation expressed by speech-act verbs is similar to the classification process Garfinkel and Sacks

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(1970) and Labov (1990) call ‘formulation’, namely the evaluation of a speechact with reference to the ideology of a certain group. The results obtained in my study serve to show once more the impossibility of the objectivity claim in news reporting, as well as the overall responsibility of journalists for the possible effects of their work. As a further result, one could point to the relationship between types of evaluative utterances, kinds of quotation, and their pragmatic function. Inasmuch as it is based on material from only one news event (although this event was pursued over four months), the scale presented here is liable to changes when tested against evidence from other news media and events; still, it may serve as a first approach to render the notion of ‘biased’ news reporting more objective.

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