The Language of Media

LITHUANIAN UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES FACULTY OF EDUCATION IN HUMANITIES DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH PHILOLOGY AND DIDACTICS

JANINA BUITKIENĖ JŪRATĖ MARCHERTAITĖ DAIVA VERIKAITĖ-GAIGALIENĖ THE LANGUAGE OF MEDIA

TEACHING AID

Vilnius, 2018 J. Buitkienės, J. Marchertaitės ir D. Verikaitės-Gaigalienės mokomoji knyga „The Language of Media“ apsvarstyta Lietuvos edukologijos universiteto Humanitarinio ugdymo fakulteto Anglų filologijos ir didaktikos katedros posėdyje 2018 m. gegužės 28 d. (protokolo Nr. 12), Lietuvos edukologijos universiteto Humanitarinio ugdymo fakulteto tarybos posėdyje 2018 m. birželio 1 d. (protokolo Nr. 89) ir rekomenduota spausdinti.

Recenzentės:

Doc. dr. Jurga Cibulskienė (Lietuvos edukologijos universitetas) Doc. dr. Eglė Petronienė (Lietuvos edukologijos universitetas)

ISBN 978-609-471-130-5 (internetinis)

Leidinio bibliografinė informacija pateikiama Lietuvos nacionalinės Martyno Mažvydo bibliotekos Nacionalinės bibliografijos duomenų banke (NBDB).

PREFACE 4 INTRODUCTION 5 1 ASPECTS OF THE QUALITY NEWSPAPERS AND TABLOIDS 7 2 THE INVERTED PYRAMID AND FIVE WS 11 3 NEWSPAPER ARTICLE GENRES 17 3.1 News Articles 18 3.1.1 Hard News 18 3.1.2 Soft News 20 3.2 Opinion Articles 26 3.2.1 Editorials 26 3.2.2 Columns 30 3.3 Feature Articles 39 3.3.1 Eye-witness News Feature 39 3.3.2 Participatory Feature 49 3.3.3 Profile 58 3.3.4 Preview/Curtain-raiser and Retrospective 75 3.3.5 Life-style Feature 78 3.3.6 Timeless Feature 85 3.3.7 Reviews 90 4 PECULIARITIES OF NEWSPAPER LANGUAGE 100 4.1 Text Cohesion 100 4.1.1 Reference 101 4.1.2 Lexical Cohesion 104 4.2 Syntax 109 4. 3 Vocabulary 111 5 HEADLINES 121 5.1 Headline Functions 121 5.2 Headline Language 124 6 GUIDELINES FOR A NEWSPAPER ARTICLE ANALYSIS 130 REFERENCES 131 GLOSSARY 132 PREFACE

Traditionally mass media are perceived as newspapers, television and radio. These days, however, it has expanded to include social networks and computer- aided communication. No matter what channels of communication they choose to use, media remain one of the most important social institutions reflecting the political, cultural and social life of a society and having a significant impact on society’s views and values. As with any communication, communication through media requires the use of language. Media language has specific linguistic characteristics that are predetermined by many factors such as a medium, target audience, genre and intention. Since mass media are famous for being capable of manipulating addressees in a way they do not even notice it, surprisingly small changes in wording can make a big difference to addressees’ perception and interpretation of the message. Hence, media not only shape the attitudes of an audience but also affect the language use of it. Therefore, for adequate interpretation of information presented in mass media, it is essential to develop the skill of critical thinking which could be acquired by learning about the communication strategies used as well as language employed to achieve specific communication aims. The general intention of this book is to provide study material for media language analysis with the focus on language of newspapers. The book provides a short overview of newspaper genres, discusses features of quality press versus tabloids, introduces the major principle of information presentation in newspapers, and gives numerous examples of newspaper articles representing different genres. The second part of the book focuses on media text characteristics including text cohesion and its linguistic means of realization such as reference and lexical cohesive devices as well as syntax and vocabulary. Due to the fact that headlines of media text play a crucial role in attracting addressees’ attention, they are also given due attention by discussing their functions and linguistic features. This book is primarily intended to assist the BA students majoring in English who study the language of media. However, it could also be of some use to all of those who have a general interest in media and language.

4 INTRODUCTION

Language used in media, or the language of media, has attracted increasing interest of scholars in many fields of research. It has been investigated in linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, semiotics, communication studies, sociology, and social psychology. The interest of so many fields points to its importance: media language mirrors the language used in society and at the same time affects the language used by the society. It embodies social interaction between people and at the same time it helps to construct the social reality. To become media and information literate, it is important to know how information is communicated through various types of media. Media languages use a particular type of vocabulary characteristic of a particular medium and it is usually referred to as verbal language. Verbal language is enhanced by visual language, i.e. some visual images are used to reinforce ideas expressed with the help of words. Each medium has its own conventions of information presentation as well as its own language that help to transfer the meaning in the most effective way. The newspaper has been one of the most popular communication forms of mass media. Traditionally newspapers were published in print; however, today most of newspapers have changed their mode and are published on websites as online newspapers which makes them more easily accessible for a wider audience. No matter what their publication mode is, a newspaper is a periodical that contains written information about current events and issues. Newspapers can cover a wide variety of topics ranging from politics and economics to art and entertainment. They display articles of different genres such as news articles, opinion articles or feature articles. They can also include weather forecasts, reviews of local services, advice columns, birth notices, obituaries, comic strips, editorial cartoons or crosswords. Newspapers usually meet the criteria of public accessibility, periodicity, currency and universality. Recently, newspapers have put much effort into enhancing public accessibility by making their publications available online. As for periodicity, newspapers are published at regular intervals, i.e. daily or weekly. Periodicity ensures the timely provision of information about newly- emerging events thus making the information current and up-to-date. The currency of a print newspaper is usually limited by the time needed for printing; however, online newspapers can be updated as many times a day

5 as needed. As far as universality is concerned, newspapers cover a variety of topics from business to art and entertainment. Most newspapers are addressed to general audience, however some focus on readers with a more defined interests such as business or sports. With regard to their geographical scope and distribution, newspapers can be divided into local or regional, national and international. A local newspaper dominates in a particular area such as a small town, a district of a city or a city. There are some newspapers in a country that circulate throughout the whole country and they are considered as national. However, there are some newspapers that can be treated as international due to the fact they cross the borders of one nation and are popular world-wide. Most of modern newspapers are published in one of three sizes: broadsheets (600 mm × 750 mm), tabloids (280 mm × 430 mm) and Berliner or Midi (470 mm × 315 mm). They not only differ in size but in their content, too. Broadsheets are considered to be more intellectual, tabloids are perceived as sensationalist and Berliners or midi are used by European papers such as Le Monde in France. Newspapers of the modern world are coping with the challenges that new technologies pose. By the late 1990s newspapers circulation started to decline due to availability of 24-hour news on TV. On 10 April 1995 the first daily Internet-based newspaper The American Reporter was launched. In the 2000s many newspapers around the world launched their online editions. In the 2010s most of traditional newspapers started to offer digital editions that are accessible through desk top computers, laptops or mobile devices. As of 2017, an increasing number of people get their news from social media websites such as Facebook, therefore causing a decline of interest in newspapers. In spite of the questions whether new technologies will make the print newspaper obsolete and what role newspapers will adopt in the future, newspapers still remain a powerful and influential medium of communication.

6 ASPECTS OF THE QUALITY 1 NEWSPAPERS AND TABLOIDS The British newspapers are often divided into broadsheets and tabloids. Technically the terms refer to the size of a newspaper. A broadsheet newspaper is about 75 centimeters by 60 centimeters, while a tabloid is about 43 centimeters by 28 centimeters. For today almost all the newspapers changed from the broadsheet size to a smaller size for the purpose of convenience, economics and competitiveness. Some broadsheet newspapers, e.g. The Times, changed to the tabloid size and some, e.g. The Guardian, to the intermediary size called Berliner which is about 47 centimeters by 32 centimeters. Though the format of the broadsheet newspapers has been downsized in last years to a compact version, they are still often referred to as broadsheets. For example, to say that The Times is a tabloid would be a great mistake and can cause a major misunderstanding, though its size is identical to that of The Sun which is the biggest tabloid in the United Kingdom. The reason for this possible confusion is that historically the term broadsheet has come to indicate not only size but also quality of a newspaper. Therefore, the term broadsheets allude to “quality press”, while tabloids mean “popular press”. Today such newspapers as The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph and The Independent are considered to be quality newspapers; in comparison, the tabloids with red mastheads like The Sun, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Star are good examples of popular press. They are also called “red-tops” and are more sensationalist than regular tabloids such as the Daily Mail and Daily Express. The quality newspapers, though hardly unbiased, publish news on local and international politics, important public affairs, finance, business and law. The tabloids, on the other hand, “are very selective in their inclusion of political or wider public information and include it only when it fits in with the wider patterns of their coverage or when it concerns major issues which can be covered in sensational fashion” (Conboy, 2006, 10). They thrive on sensationalism, gossip, royal news and celebrities. Also, if the same news is covered by both, broadsheets and tabloids, the language of headlines as well as articles is quite different. Tabloid headlines will be louder and punchier, while the language less formal, usually more idiomatic and colorful. The tabloid newspapers have a much higher readership figures than quality newspapers in the United Kingdom as reported by PressGazette in 2013 (see Table 1).

7 Table 1. Newspaper readership in the United Kingdom in 2013. Website Print Combined Title only (000s) (000s) (000s) The Sun/The Sun (Sunday) 12,400 1,076 13,476 Daily Mail/The Mail on Sunday 9,521 2,449 11,970 Daily Mirror/Sunday Mirror/The People 6,762 1,123 7,885 The Guardian/The Observer 2,781 2,475 5,257 The Daily Telegraph/The Sunday Telegraph 3,051 1,848 4,899 The Times/The Sunday Times 4,347 178 4,525 The Independent/The Independent on Sunday 2,607 1,056 3,662

Task 1. Read Article A and Article B and decide which of them was published by a tabloid and which one by a quality newspaper. Provide reasons for your decision. Task 2. Discuss headlines of both articles. Task 3. Compare and contrast the language of both articles.

Article A 13 September 2015 Jeremy Corbyn wins Labour leadership with a landslide The veteran left-winger convincingly defeated Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall in the first round of voting Jeremy Corbyn was crowned Labour leader today after the most extraordinary leadership race of modern times. The veteran socialist crushed his rivals in a landslide victory that sees Labour shift sharply and decisively to the Left. In a passionate victory speech Mr Corbyn thanked the thousands of people who joined the party just to vote for him. “People are fed up with the inequality, the injustice, the unnecessary poverty,” he raged. “All of those things have brought people in.” “I say to all those new members – welcome to our party.” “And to those who were in our party before, but felt disillusioned and went away – welcome back! The fightback of our party now gathers pace.”

8 Mr Corbyn secured a staggering 59.5% in the first round of voting, meaning second-preference choices were never required. The Islington North MP had been hotly-tipped to win but the scale of his victory shocked even his closest aides. In the end his rivals Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper and Liz Kendall were simply blown away by the unprecedented Corbyn surge.

Article B 12 September 2015 Jeremy Corbyn wins overwhelming victory and declares ‘new movement’ in Britain The hard-left MP wins the leadership of the Labour Party with 60 per cent of the vote and says he will force “radical change” across Britain Jeremy Corbyn has overwhelmingly won the Labour leadership contest and declared the creation of a “new movement” in British politics. The hard-left candidate won the election with 60 per cent of the vote. The scale of his victory shocked many in the Labour Party and triggered the immediate resignation of Jamie Reed, a shadow minister. Mr Corbyn won the leadership in large part thanks to votes from people who paid £3 to become Labour Party ‘members’. He received 251,417 of the 422,664 votes cast in the election. He took 88,449 of the 105,598 votes from people who paid £3 to become registered members of the party. However, he also won 121,751 of the 245,520 votes cast by full Labour members. In his first address following his victory, he said: “We go forward now as a movement and a party bigger than we have ever been in a very, very long time, stronger than we have been for a very long time, more determined than we have been for a very long time, to show to everyone that the objectives of our party are intact, our passion is intact, our demand for humanity is intact.” He said the party is going to become more “inclusive, more involved, more democratic” and will “shape the future of everyone in this country”. He also made clear his firm opposition to military interventions abroad, in a sign he will attempt to block David Cameron’s plans for airstrikes in Syria.

9 Questions for discussion 1. Do we have quality newspapers and tabloids in Lithuania? If so, can you give examples of both? 2. Why the readership of tabloids is higher than the readership of quality newspapers? 3. Will printed newspapers survive? Give reasons.

10 THE INVERTED PYRAMID 2 AND FIVE WS For more than a hundred years news stories have been following the structure that is known as the Inverted Pyramid. Pursuing this structure, essential information is presented at the very beginning of a news article and in journalism is referred to as Five Ws. The first paragraph of an article written in this style will give an answer to five fundamental questions: Who?, What?, When?, Where?, and Why? Sometimes the questions When? and/or Where? might be omitted because of obvious or irrelevant answers and the question Why? might not always have the answer yet. The inverted pyramid structure is particularly characteristic to hard news articles. The articles of other genres will have a more flexible structure. The Five Ws principle is very useful for busy news readers who rarely read news articles till the end but still get the most important information. For more information on The Inverted Pyramid, see Figure 1.

HEAD The most important information: WHO? WHAT? WHEN? WHERE? WHY?

BODY Important information: issue, argument, controversy, evidence and quotes revealed in order of importance

TAIL Unnecessary details targeted for those who are really interested

Figure 1. The Inverted Pyramid.

11 Task 4. Read Article C and its analysis done following the Inverted Pyramid principle (presented in bold).

Article C The Times 1 October 2015

Putin defies West with strikes on Syrian rebels 1 Russian jets bombed western-backed rebels in Syria yesterday after ordering American military planes out of the country’s airspace.

HEAD Paragraph 1 is short, it consists of only 18 words, however, it provides the most important information by answering four “W” questions out of five.

Who?– Russian jets What? – bombed western-backed rebels Where? – in Syria When? – yesterday after ordering American military planes out of the country’s airspace.

2 In a move that signals a dangerous phase in the conflict at the heart of the Middle East, Russia began airstrikes on rebel positions across northern Syria.

3 The bombing raids raised the stakes in the powerplay between President Putin and the West, confirming fears that Moscow’s primary motive is to preserve the Assad regime and secure its own presence in the region.

BODY Paragraphs 2 and 3 create a dramatic effect by elaborating further on “What?” and introducing a possible answer to “Why?”

4 The strikes, carried out by Su-25 Frogfoot and Su-24 Fencer jets, surprised the

12 Pentagon. Less than 48 hours earlier, Mr Putin had met President Obama in a tense encounter at the United Nations in New York to discuss Russia’s military build-up in Syria.

Paragraph 4 gives more detailed information on “Who?” and “What?” by creating the sense of unexpectedness and unpredictability.

5 The Kremlin insisted that its intervention was an opening salvo in a war against the “terrorists” of Islamic State. However, Ash Carter, the US defence secretary, said that the areas bombed by the Russians were not Isis locations and condemned the Kremlin for pouring “gasoline on the fire”. John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, had earlier told the UN Security Council that Washington would have “grave concerns” should the targets prove to be western-backed rebels.

Paragraph 5 presents the controversy of the situation by quoting opposite sides involved in the story.

6 European officials and sources on the ground in Syria said that the strikes had exclusively targeted the mainstream anti-Assad opposition, which is made up of non-Isis rebel groups.

Paragraph 6 hints to the evidence that support the answer to the question “Why?” from the Western point of view.

7 The bombing began hours after Mr Putin drove a motion through the upper house of parliament authorising the use of the Russian military abroad. Sergei Ivanov, President Putin’s chief of staff, said that the deployment would be confined to “air support for the Syrian forces in their struggle with Isis”.

8 Official Twitter accounts of President Assad, whose family have ruled Syria for almost 45 years, said that the Russian intervention came at the request of Damascus.

13 Paragraphs 7 and 8 strengthen the controversial character of the events by giving a different view on “Why?” with a quote of a Russian politician and a reference to the official Twitter accounts of Syrian President.

9 Mr Obama was willing to work with Russia in the battle against Isis, he said at the UN meeting, but the two leaders clashed publicly over the future of President Assad.

10 A Russian general notified the defence attaché at the US embassy in Baghdad of the strikes. He is understood to have demanded that aircraft from the US-led coalition make way for Russian aircraft. The Pentagon said coalition missions in Syria would continue. An hour later, Russian jets began bombing the provinces of Homs, Hama and Latakia. There were reports of at least 40 civilians dead.

11 Among those hit was an US-backed rebel group called Tajammu al-Izza. Major Jamil al-Saleh, its commander, said that the strikes on their positions in Latamina in Hama province came after reconnaissance by unfamiliar aircraft.

12 Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, said Moscow’s choice of targets would clarify its purpose. “If it’s in an area where there is no [Isis], that will send a very clear message that it’s an intervention to defend Assad.”

TAIL Paragraphs 9, 10, 11 and 12 give more detailed background information, accounts of the events and confirmation of possible causes. They do not intend to add any significant information. The account of 40 civilian casualties given only in the last sentence of paragraph 10 may be a good example of devaluation of human life in the circumstances.

Task 5. Do an analysis of the article below following the sample presented in Task 4. Identify 5 Ws and allocate each paragraph to the appropriate part of the pyramid (head, body and tail).

14 The Telegraph 14 October 2015 Cyber criminals drain £20m from UK bank accounts using ‘particularly virulent’ virus Virus is believed to have been developed by a technically-skilled gang in Eastern Europe to steal money from individuals and businesses Millions of pounds have been drained from British bank accounts after cyber criminals unleashed a “particularly virulent” virus, it was revealed today. Officers from the National Crime Agency warned thousands of computers have been infected by the Dridex malware which harvests online banking details. The virus, also known as Bugat and Cridex, is believed to have been developed by a technically-skilled gang in Eastern Europe to steal money from individuals and businesses around the world. UK cyber crime experts are now working alongside the Federal Bureau of Investigations, Europol, GCHQ, Moldovan authorities and the BKA in Germany to track them down. One “significant” arrest has been made and more are expected. NCA officers said global financial institutions and a variety of different payment systems have been particularly targeted, with UK losses estimated at £20 million. Some members of the public may also have unwittingly become victims of the Dridex malware. National Crime Agency is urging all internet users to ensure they have up to date operating systems and anti-virus software installed on their machines. Computers become infected with Dridex malware when users receive and open documents in seemingly legitimate emails. The majority of PCs infected are Windows users, the NCA said. Mike Hulett, head of operations at the National Crime Agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) said: “This is a particularly virulent form of malware and we have been working with our international law enforcement partners, as well as key partners from industry, to mitigate the damage it causes. Our investigation is ongoing and we expect further arrests to be made.” The FBI’s executive assistant director Robert Anderson said: “Those who commit cyber crime are very often highly-skilled and can be operating from different countries and continents. They can and will deploy new malware

15 and we, along with our partners, are alive to this threat and are constantly devising new approaches to tackle cyber crime. We urge all Internet users to take action and update your operating system. Ensure you have up to date security software and think twice before clicking on links or attachments in unsolicited emails. Cyber criminals often reach across international borders, but this operation demonstrates our determination to shut them down no matter where they are. The criminal charges announced today would not have been possible without the cooperation of our partners in international law enforcement and private sector. We continue to strengthen those relationships and find innovative ways to counter cyber criminals.”

16 NEWSPAPER 3 ARTICLE GENRES Newspaper readers are usually very focused readers. They know whether they are looking for current news, information, opinion or advertisement; also, time spent on finding it plays an important role in the process. The knowledge of newspaper article genres helps them to navigate in the maze of news faster and to find what they are looking for more effectively. Newspaper discourse has a variety of genres. Quality newspapers as well as tabloid newspapers not only report news or inform, they also provide readers with entertainment. Newspaper articles can be roughly subdivided into three major groups: news articles, opinion articles and feature articles. News articles inform the readers about things that are happening in the world or locally. They are usually placed at the front of a newspaper. Opinion articles are usually pieces written by “personality” writers, i.e. someone who is an expert and whose opinion is valued. Opinion articles usually include editorials and columns. Editorials’ function is to inform the readers about the opinion of the newspaper on some urgent issues by providing an opinion of an editor or a journalist specializing in editorial writing. Columns’ function is either to inform or entertain depending on the writer and her / his intention. If the writer is asked to write about some issues because of her/his expertise in some field, the writer’s opinion might be considered as a trustworthy and reliable source, however, if the writer is asked to write because she/he has a comic or interesting way of describing events or everyday life the intention of such column article would be rather to entertain. The major distinction between editorials and columns lies in that editorials present the opinion of the newspaper whereas columns express the opinion of the writer. Feature articles usually explore news stories in depth. They can be based on some stories that have been in the news for some time. Feature articles’ function is to explore and analyse reasons of some events or facts rather than to inform about them. Each of the above mentioned groups has a number of genres that bear their own specific style and/or purpose. The following listing is an attempt to provide a general overview of different genres of newspaper articles by describing them and illustrating.

17 3.1 News Articles

In media industry news articles are usually subdivided into two major types: hard news and soft news. However, there is an ongoing debate what really “hard” and “soft” news is and how it should be measured or defined. For the purpose of simplicity we suggest to split both types of articles on the basis of three dimensions – topicality, timeliness and style. It is not assumed here that “soft” news is in any way indicating a lower quality journalism.

3.1.1 Hard News

Hard news is a term most often used by journalists to denote fast-paced news that usually appear on the front page of newspapers. It is covering breaking events and therefore is reported as soon as possible because otherwise they would become obsolete. The news edge in hard news is critical, which means it is really NEW and important to the readers to comprehend and acknowledge the possible changes in the surrounding world. The subject matter of the hard news usually includes politics, economics, war or crime. News and events that require instant reporting are considered hard. The hard news articles will cover the key facts in the first paragraph and will continue with supportive information that will be declining in importance but will deliver additional details. Hard news usually presents facts and explains what happened, who was involved, where and when everything happened and why. In other words, it gives an answer to Five Ws (see Inverted Pyramid Structure in Chapter 2).

The Telegraph 13 December 2017 Gas shortage to push up bills Households warned that ‘perfect storm’ of energy problems could make fuel more expensive for rest of the winter HOUSEHOLDS and motorists were last night warned to expect sharp rises in gas bills and petrol prices after a “perfect storm” of supply problems as the winter freeze begins. The shutdown of the North Sea’s most important oil and gas pipeline system on Monday was compounded by an explosion at a major processing facility in

18 Austria, which is the main point of entry for Russian gas into Europe. After the incidents, wholesale gas prices hit their highest level for six years, rising by more than 50 per cent in the space of 24 hours, raising fears that the increase will be passed on to customers. Oil prices have climbed so steeply that motoring organisations are warning of a 3p per litre increase at the pumps by Christmas. MPs have told energy companies that any rise in bills for consumers would be a “disgrace” because wholesale prices are agreed well in advance. Ian Liddell-Grainger, the Conservative MP and member of the parliamentary business and energy select committee, said: “Passing on price rises to the consumer would be totally unfair because it’s not their fault and this is nothing to do with them.” “The big energy companies buy their gas and oil about six months in advance, so there should be no need to increase bills.” “They should continue to honour their commitments to consumers. If they pass this on to their customers, it would be a disgrace.” As well as problems affecting the Forties pipeline in Aberdeenshire and the Baumgarten facility in Austria, a series of smaller setbacks also added to the sense of crisis. One of the largest North Sea sites is struggling to produce gas at its normal rate. The ageing Morecambe field is supplying at only around two million cubic metres (mcm) per day, less than half its usual rate of 5 mcm. Yesterday, BBL, the Dutch company that operates the gas pipeline between the Netherlands and the UK, had to restrict supply temporarily across the Channel because of problems with a compression station. Meanwhile, Norway’s giant energy company Statoil said that it reduced output from its platform in Troll, Europe’s biggest offshore gas field, because of a power outage. Norway is one of the main suppliers of gas to the UK. The current cold snap has driven gas demand in homes and businesses to their highest forecast levels since early 2013. Overnight on Monday and early yesterday, temperatures dropped to as low as 8.6F (-13C) near Shrewsbury, in Shropshire. Demand for gas has also been driven steadily higher in recent years by the shutdown of coal plants. The events have pushed gas prices to their highest level for six years, from just 57p a unit before the shutdown of the Forties pipeline on Monday to more than 90p yesterday.

19 Oliver Sanderson, a Thomson Reuters analyst, warned that the “spectacular” confluence of problems could result in high prices for the rest of the winter. “This isn’t just about where we’ll find the gas we need for today – it’s about where to find the gas we’ll need in January,” Mr Sanderson toldThe Daily Telegraph. “If small suppliers haven’t bought energy in advance, and that is possible due to the sudden start of cold weather in the last few weeks, they could be in trouble,” he warned. “The European gas market seems to be going through a perfect storm,” said Massimo Di-Odoardo, an industry analyst at Wood Mackenzie. The wholesale gas price for January has already climbed by almost a third, sparking concern that energy suppliers will pass increased costs on to their customers by raising tariffs. A winter of surging gas prices could even cause smaller suppliers to go bust if they burn through their cash while trying to buy enough gas to heat customers’ homes. This week’s “perfect storm” of problems will raise questions about the UK’s energy security, said Malcolm Graham-Wood, a veteran energy industry adviser. He said the gas crunch is an “entirely predictable” result of the UK’s creaking infrastructure and Government’s bungling energy policy. Mr Graham-Wood blamed the Government for its “short-sighted and ridiculous” decision not to invest in new gas storage facilities. The 32-year-old Rough storage facility off the coast of Yorkshire was forced to shut earlier this year.

3.1.2 Soft News

Soft news articles can be presented in different ways but they usually try to entertain or advise the reader. Therefore subject matter of soft news is usually the arts, entertainment or lifestyle stories. Under the heading of soft news fall listicles such as top 10 ways to do something or more in-depth entertainment features about the lives and scandals of famous politicians. Soft news usually has lead-ins that tell a story instead of stating important facts. The reporting time of soft news is not that important. Though the news angle in soft news remains prominent, this type of news is not based on time-bound or scheduled

20 events and therefore there is no real pressure for publishing it at a certain time and/or date. The soft news is presented in less formal and institutional manner, therefore it will be lighter in style, less informative and possibly directed to a narrower group of audience than hard news articles.

The Telegraph 16 December 2017 EU set to ban Cambridge University’s 300-year-old ‘name and shame’ class lists The European Union is set to defeat Cambridge’s 300-year-old “class list” tradition as incoming regulation has forced the climbdown that “snowflake” students could not The lists – where students’ names are displayed alongside their degree grade on a board outside the university’s main building Senate House – now face abolition due to new data protection laws which will come into force next year. The issue has led to bitter divisions among the student body, but class lists survived votes of confidence from both students and academic staff last year. The referendums came amid pressure from campaigners who argued that class lists were “damaging” to welfare, triggered depression and “promoting a culture of shaming”. Now the tradition is under fresh threat from new EU laws which place greater emphasis on “active consent” of subjects, rather than presumed consent. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), due to come into effect in May 2018, the university may be legally required to ask for students’ consent over whether they want their grades to be published. Cambridge University’s council, which is chaired by vice-chancellor Stephen Toope, has backed a proposal to allow students to have their names easily removed from result lists through a simple tick-box option. The final stage is for the proposal to be approved by Regent House, but Graham Virgo, pro-vice-chancellor for education, has told the student newspaper Varsity that it is “anticipated” that the new opt-out system will be in place by May, when the next examination period begins. Currently students can only opt out if they provide a valid medical reason for it and the university has to authorise it. In a student referendum last November, 55 per cent said they wanted the student union to campaign to keep the tradition alive, and the following month academic staff followed suit in their own vote.

21 Pressure to get rid of the tradition began in 2015 when a campaign called ‘Our Grade, Our Choice’ called for students to have the choice to opt out of the lists without having to provide a reason. They argued that the lists were “damaging” to the welfare of students, triggering depression and “promoting a culture of shaming”. But the prospect of their abolition deeply divided students, with an opposing campaign, titled Save the Class List, arguing that it is a “fantastic tradition”, part and parcel of attending an ancient university. Cambridge is one of the very last universities in the country to hold such a tradition, with Oxford getting rid of its public exam results tables in 2009. The Information Commissioner’s Office said that the UK’s decision to leave the EU will not affect the commencement of the GDPR. Universities UK met with the Information Commissioner’s Office this week to discuss the GDPR. A spokesman said that Universities UK will be working with the ICO over the coming months to make sure universities understand and comply with these new rules. A spokesman for Cambridge University said: “A proposal has been put forward for any student to be able to opt out from having their name published in a class list outside the Senate House and in the Reporter, without needing to disclose reasons for the opt out. “If approved by the Regent House, the proposal will be available for the main examination period (commencing 21 May 2018), once systems have been updated.” The spokesman said the move was “in the light of the General Data Protection Regulation coming into effect in May 2018”, and following a consultation with students.

Questions for discussion 1. Does the age of the internet leave any chance to printed newspapers to report “hard news”? 2. Draw a portrait of a fan of “hard” news and that of “soft” news in terms of their age, sex, education background, occupation, social status, etc. 3. Read Articles A and B and decide which type of news they report – hard or soft? Give reasons for your decision.

22 Article A The Guardian 6 March 2018 By Richard Adams Oxford University blocks staff attempts to challenge pension cuts Arcane procedures used to halt move to debate proposals that sparked universities strike The University of Oxford has blocked attempts by staff to debate pension proposals that have sparked industrial action on campuses across the UK, to cries of “Shame!” from academics. As the strike by members of the University and College Union (UCU) entered its eighth day, Oxford’s arcane procedures were used to halts efforts to force a resolution on the proposals to downgrade staff pensions that have provoked action at more than 60 campuses. Staff backing the strikes wanted to suspend standing orders at Oxford’s congregation – a university-wide meeting of staff – held on Tuesday afternoon, and debate the university’s response to a changes proposed to the universities superannuation scheme (USS). But their efforts were thwarted when more than 20 members objected, to a chorus of boos from the hundreds in the Sheldonian theatre who wanted to proceed. In an email to staff, Louise Richardson, Oxford’s vice chancellor, said she endorsed the tactics that effectively killed off a wider debate at the meeting. “I fully understand the depth of feeling on this issue but I have to say that I have been disheartened these past few days by the tenor of some of the debate,” she said. “As a university we take pride in our defence of freedom of speech, in reasoned argument, and evidence based decisions. “If we are to impart these qualities to our students, we should, at a minimum, practise them among ourselves.” The academics rejected an offer from Richardson for a non-binding “town hall” discussion instead – amid signs that the employers’ unity is crumbling as vice-chancellors at Sheffield and Loughborough universities visited picket lines at their campuses. The strikes over controversial changes to the pension scheme for librarians, technicians and researchers have spread across three weeks, with UCU and

23 the employers group Universities UK holding a second day of talks at the industrial conciliation service Acas. The UUK had said it was not prepared for further talks until later in the week but after a change of heart on Monday evening notified the union via Twitter. The UCU will continue with strike action later in the year, which increases the chances of interfering with undergraduates’ final-year results and possibly delaying their graduation. At Sheffield, its vice-chancellor, Sir Keith Burnett, met with staff on a UCU picket line, while his counterpart at Loughborough, Prof Robert Allison, did the same. Burnett also issued a statement calling on the UUK to hold “genuine negotiations” with the UCU. “I am not the only vice-chancellor who is urging action to this end, and I will continue to press for this to happen both in public and in private,” he said. Imperial College London has also broken with the UUK by writing directly to the Pensions Regulator, asking for time to allow an expert group to examine the state of the pension scheme. “We appreciate this is an extraordinary request and we are prepared to carry our share of the risk in staying part of the scheme on the current terms, until the work is complete,” Alice Gast, Imperial’s president, wrote. At City University’s Cass business school, the Liberal Democrat leader, Vince Cable, was asked by striking staff not to cross the picket line. Cable later cancelled an appearance at a conference the school was holding. The strike was provoked by the desire of the UUK to shift staff pensions from offering fixed benefits after retirement to defined contributions, after the Pensions Regulator said the USS was more risky than previously estimated. The role of Oxford and Cambridge colleges has been particularly controversial, after it was revealed they made up a high proportion of institutions backing a lower risk of pensions losses. But even within Oxbridge, support has weakened for the low-risk position that provoked the strikes. King’s College, Cambridge, said in a statement that its submission to the UUK’s survey of members “was not, and should not have been taken as, considered view of the college”. St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, also voided its survey response, saying that it had “no institutional view”.

24 Article B The Telegraph 9 March 2018 By Julian Ryall Japan fears being left out in cold as US-North Korea ties thaw Despite progress on the diplomatic front that has culminated in an agreement for the leaders of North Korea and the United States to hold face-to-face talks, Japan remains convinced that Pyongyang is successfully pulling the wool over the eyes of its allies and fears that its own concerns are being sidelined. Shinzo Abe, the Japanese prime minister, on Thursday emphasised the need for the international community to keep sanctions in place despite Pyongyang and Seoul announcing plans for the first inter-Korean summit since 2007. “Sanctions should not be eased just because the country came forward for dialogue”, Mr Abe said in the Diet. “Concrete actions towards denuclearisation are necessary. We will raise the pressure to the maximum”. Mr Abe on Friday morning applauded the “change” in North Korea after it was announced that Mr Trump has accepted an offer for direct talks from Mr Kim – although the Japanese government will retain its concerns. That much was indicated when it was announced that Mr Abe will travel to the US before Mr Trump meets with the North Korean dictator in order to spell out Japan’s disquiet. Stephen Nagy, a senior associate professor of international relations at Tokyo’s International Christian University, said Japan has a long and prickly history with North Korea that the administration in Washington may have overlooked. “The issue of Japan’s security is obviously the big one as there are several US military facilities across the country and that puts Japan in the front line in many ways of any conflict involving North Korea”, he told The Telegraph. “There is also concern here about an accident at the North’s nuclear facilities, which are poorly maintained and any problems would inevitably impact Japan. “But Japan also sees North Korea through the lens of the abduction of a number of Japanese citizens, which is something that Tokyo consistently demands progress on but which the US does not take into account”. For domestic political reasons, Japan will not be able to let the issue of the abductees slide, which will inevitably complicate any multi-national discussions on future international relations in the region.

25 There is also a sense that North Korea has already been at least partially successful in driving a wedge between Seoul and Washington and that it has ambitions of also peeling Japan away from what has previously been a solid three-nation bloc that it confronted. “North Korea is going to continue to try to maximise the fractures that exist between all and any countries that it faces and any wedge that it can force between South Korea and Japan will increase their leverage”, said Mr Nagy. North Korean state media has this week criticised Japan as “reactionaries” for accusing North Korea of being behind a series of recent hacking attacks on virtual currency exchanges in Tokyo, describing the claims as an “unpardonable provocation and a wicked and mean smear campaign”. The Korea Central News Agency has also taken issue with Japan’s launch of an advanced intelligence-gathering satellite that is dedicated to monitoring North Korea.

3.2 Opinion Articles

Opinion articles voice views and opinions on topics of local or international happenings and are usually written in a vivid, distinctive or even argumentative tone. The Opinion Piece genre can be split into the sub-genres of Editorial and Column.

3.2.1 Editorials

Editorials reflect the opinion of the newspaper and have no bylines. They might be written by the editor or by journalists specializing in editorial writing. Editorials are published on a dedicated page for them and focus on the current international or local events. Ian Reeves (2015) notes that “its tone and content say more about the political, cultural and social positioning of a newspaper than any other piece of journalism within it”. Some newspapers not only position editorials in the dedicated section but also explicitly tell by their headlines that this is the newspaper’s opinion/view on a certain topic, e.g. The Observer view on the cost of university education. In Britain editorials might also be referred to as leading articles; while in the US a leading article is the most important story in the newspaper. Some of the British newspapers call their most important news story that is published on the front page the lead story.

26 Article A The Times 5 August 2016 Game on The human spirit will be celebrated at Rio but the Olympics must return to its original code of modesty and fairness. Drug cheats are not heroes The Olympic Games are a celebration of the extraordinary capacity of the human body to push itself to its limits. Undoubtedly the spectacle that begins tonight in Rio will provide inspiration, exuberance and pride. The Olympic movement is about the sense of community that this sporting competition engenders. It seeks, according to its charter, “to create a way of life based on the joy of effort, the educational value of good example, social responsibility and respect for universal fundamental ethical principles”. The custodian of the charter is the International Olympic Committee, which in turning a blind eye to systemic drug abuse has let down athletes across the globe. By failing to impose a blanket ban on the Russian delegation despite clear proof of a state-run doping regime it has deserted its primary responsibility. There is no educational value in a gold medallist who takes performance- enhancing drugs; no moral high ground. Cheats cannot be heroes. These Games thus present a paradox, the tension between sport and its overlords. Rio, which has struggled in the face of political and economic collapse to meet IOC standards, looks set to be a good host. It has been fumigating Olympic sites to deter mosquitos bearing the zika virus. Almost all of the required building work has been completed; 85,000 police are on alert to protect athletes and spectators. Brazil is the first emerging-market democracy to stage the Games — the autocracies of China and Russia were each able to mobilise massive state resources at the flick of a pen — and has had to deal with diminishing resources and loud public criticism. The verdict is still out on Rio — those policeman could yet be turned on the restless poor in the favelas — but the initial view of the teams, including that sent by Britain, is that Brazil will meet its obligations. If there is a cloud over the Games it is created by the fumbling politics of the IOC. Investigations into doping in Russia between 2011 and 2015 showed that hundreds of positive drug-test results had been concealed. The Russian ministry of sport, its anti-doping agency, the national anti-doping laboratory and the secret service were working together to engineer their country’s

27 sporting success. Those athletes considered good enough to win a medal were protected from close drugs inspection; those unlikely to make the grade were offered up. The IOC came under pressure from 14 national anti-doping agencies, including those of Britain and the United States, to extend the ban on Russian track-and-field competitors to all participants sent by Moscow. That might have been unjust to clean athletes but it would have sent a crushing signal of intent, a commitment to clean up sport around the world. It would have restored confidence in sporting achievement. Instead the IOC ducked the challenge and handed responsibility to individual international sporting federations. “We missed a moment,” said a Canadian Olympian, “to honour the world’s clean athletes and send a bold message to the world that corruption, cheating and manipulating sport will not be tolerated.” The IOC compounded this blunder by banning the participation as a stateless competitor of Yuliya Stepanova, the Russian 800 metre runner who had blown the whistle on her country’s doping practices. The IOC’s failures do not end there. Its demands on aspiring host cities are often unrealistic; it is all but impossible for poor nations to stage the Games. Rio struggles because hosting has become the preserve of wealthy economies. For the Olympics to regain their full glory, countries have to be cajoled into making their training programmes completely transparent. The spectacle has to be more modestly organised. A clean Olympics, not extravagant stadia, has to be the central aim of the IOC.

Article B The Observer 14 August 2016 The Observer view on the cost of university education Universities are raking in far too much thanks to a policy blunder As the annual clearing process for university places gets under way, universities are investing in ever-more innovative ways of marketing to students, reflecting an increasingly competitive market now government has lifted caps on student numbers, allowing universities to recruit as many students as they like. But given that the headline price of degrees has tripled in recent years, there is inevitably more scrutiny of their value. Some might argue we should leave this judgment to the market; the fact that growing numbers of students feel it is an investment worth making tells

28 us all we need to know. It’s also a difficult judgment to make in a nuanced way; it would be ridiculous to imply a degree’s only value lies in its earnings- boosting potential. But it’s becoming increasingly important to ask hard questions about value for money. Universities enjoyed a significant 28% increase in average per-undergraduate funding as a result of the increase in the tuition fee cap to £9,000 and they have successfully lobbied for the cap to rise even further. University funding has grown healthily just as funding for further education colleges has been slashed, per-pupil school funding is falling and the NHS is struggling to find efficiency savings. Universities may not be public institutions in the same ways as schools and hospitals, but they receive a significant chunk of public funding and should be asked to account for what they deliver from a value-for-money perspective. Moreover, in recent months, stark variations in the graduate premium – the amount graduates earn compared to non-graduates – have become more evident. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has found that graduates of some subjects, such as the creative arts, do not appear to earn any more on average than non-graduates. Average earnings for male graduates of 23 universities were actually lower than for non-graduates. It is too simplistic to look at headline earnings in isolation, but this is surely information young people taking on significant amounts of debt have a right to access when they’re making decisions. This is particularly when six in 10 graduates find themselves in jobs that don’t require a degree and fewer than four in 10 students think their degrees represent good value for money. There are two potential responses. The first is to argue we have too many young people going to university. This is crazy when Britain must create more high-skills jobs to compete and a reduction in undergraduate numbers would almost certainly come at the expense of poorer students, particularly with the abolition of maintenance grants. The right response is surely to ask how we can better improve the match between the skills young people develop through their degrees and those needed by the labour market, and whether degrees can be delivered more efficiently. This is particularly important given that the big funding increase awarded to universities was a policy mishap. The government misjudged the impact of its fee reforms; it thought the average fee would be about £6,000 a year rather the £8,600 it jumped to. Higher-than-expected fees mean the government has to fund bigger subsidised loans to cover those fees (although this funding does

29 not count towards the deficit in the government’s accounting rules). So the reforms ended up saving barely anything for taxpayers, but costing students much more, leaving universities the beneficiaries. The government has not asked universities to do anything significant in exchange for this windfall in perpetuity. Not in terms of improving transparency about what money gets spent on or what is included in the teaching offer. Universities have resisted attempts to improve transparency, even lobbying for exclusions from FOI legislation. Nor are they open to being held to account for the quality of the academic experience or their efforts to widen participation and improve retention. The university sector is not thirsty for cash in the same ways as schools or the NHS; as highlighted by Policy Exchange, the sector has discretionary reserves equal to 48% of its annual operating income. University vice- chancellors enjoy very healthy levels of take-home pay. So it was a mistake for the government to give way so easily on increases to the fee cap. It should be allowing inflation to reduce the real value of the fee cap over time to the level it originally predicted fees would settle on. University funding should not be allowed to rise while the rest of the education budget is being squeezed. It’s a wrong-headed and regressive way to allocate education spending.

3.2.2 Columns

Columns are written by a regular or guest columnist. Such articles are usually heavily opinionated and might or might not present factual information. They are written in a distinctive style that is considered to be a signature of a particular journalist and therefore easily recognizable. The opinion expressed in columns is that of the author and not of the newspaper as in the case of an editorial. Mathew Parris, Charles Moore, Janet Daley, and Jane Shilling are well known British columnists who have their articles regularly published in The Times, The Telegraph and The Independent.

30 Article A The Daily Telegraph 13 August 2016 By Charles Moore A duke’s wealth is the natural result of a free society – and should be celebrated If Mrs May worries more about inequality than creating opportunity, she will fall into a familiar trap What does Theresa May think of the Duke of Westminster, who died this week? I ask because she says she wishes to lead a country that works “not for a privileged few but for every one of us”. So is she someone who feels it monstrously unfair that Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor should have ended up “worth” more than £9 billion, essentially because of the accident of birth, or does she think such accidents are symptoms of a free and stable country? Mrs May is by no means the first Tory prime minister to say such things against privilege. Margaret Thatcher (teasing Tony Benn in 1987) spoke of an “irreversible shift… of power… in favour of working people and their families”. John Major said he wanted to create a “classless society”. David Cameron promised at the 2015 general election that he would reward “ordinary people who play by the rules”. He was trying, before a certain other matter deposed him in June, to concentrate on what he called “a life chances agenda” to achieve this. No Conservative is going to come into office saying he or she wishes to entrench privilege and increase inequality. They will all speak of the needs of the many. But one needs to ask them what they mean by what they say. If they are not careful, they will find they are advocating socialism. To a true socialist, any substantial difference in wealth is always a bad thing. It is evidence of selfishness, because wealth is to be held in common and distributed only according to need by an all-wise state which can mysteriously judge that need aright. The most obvious Conservative answer to this is: “No, because people must be free to get rich by their merit, and there won’t be any wealth if they aren’t.” This is true so far as it goes, but is merit much easier to adjudicate than need? Besides, it does not reflect the full reality. The truth is that some people are richer and more successful than others for a wide variety of reasons – luck, ability, upbringing, health, inheritance, education, marriage, even looks (as in “Her face is her fortune”). None of these is strictly a matter of merit, yet few

31 would tolerate a Conservative government which tried to punish everybody who is rich for these reasons. That being so, surely non-socialists should not fret unduly about differences of wealth. They should even give thanks for some of the results. Most Oxford and Cambridge colleges give dinners called Commemoration of Benefactors, where they rightly pay tribute to rich people who gave generously for the high purpose of education, often many centuries ago. The late Duke of Westminster gave £50 million for the new Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre for injured servicemen now being built near Loughborough. People with a conservative cast of mind (and one hopes this applies to Conservatives with a big C, though quite often it patently doesn’t) also have a sense of history. Continuity in a nation is generally a benefit. It is encouraging that a man whose family first got rich because his ancestor was the fat huntsman (grosveneur) of William the Conqueror has £9 billion today, 950 years later. It shows that our culture respects private property over government interference. It gives hope to us all. None of this means that a Conservative government should be any less committed than a socialist one to social reform and economic advancement. In a democracy, the condition of most people is what matters. But “opportunity” and “security” are much better words to express this than “equality”. In this respect, Mrs May is quite right to fasten on the lot of what she calls the “ordinary, working-class family”. She says it is “much harder than many people in politics realise”. By identifying the “just about managing” classes as the most important, she is taking the best measure of which way the economy and the country are going. Problems like the housing shortage, or energy bills inflated by green levies, or the attack on savings made by persistently low interest rates, then come into proper focus. This is much nearer the mark than the liberal agenda, sometimes known as “Sohomodernisation”, which dominated the Cameron- Osborne era. It appreciates the importance of what Mrs Thatcher used to call “our people”. It will all go wrong, however, if it fails to appreciate the importance of wealth creation, of which Mrs May has hardly spoken, and the low taxes and sparing regulation this requires. Few things in British history have done less for well-distributed prosperity than “industrial strategy”, yet Mrs May says she wants one. Most wealth creation works to the general good, but one of its

32 inevitable consequences is that some people do a lot better than others. This helps provide an index of what works and what doesn’t. She is right that too many CEOs are better at taking large sums out of their companies than in improving their long-term profitability, but if she tries to lay down exactly how companies should be run, she will only ensure a flight of talent, and mediocrity for all. One trouble about the obsession with equality is that it creates a chippy, negative disposition about almost everything. It is so much easier to find someone who is rich, and start complaining about him, than it is to help people who aren’t. There is a similar problem in the field of education. For years now, politicians, including Tories who should have known better, have made widening access their priority in universities. Because it is easier to blame superficial symptoms rather than real causes, they have persistently attacked the best universities in the country for admitting “too many” students from independent schools. Actually, it would be a truly disgraceful situation if good schools could not get their pupils into good universities because of social engineering. It would break the virtuous circle by which high standards are maintained. The right question, barely addressed in public policy, is: “Why are so many state schools still so bad that they cannot prepare pupils for the top level of higher education?” Recently, Mrs May’s people have started to test the water about bringing back grammar schools. It is apparent from the reaction, including among some Tories, that the bad fairy of equality leads many people to think that selection, because it leaves some out, must automatically be wrong. But surely a good school is better than a bad one, and more grammars mean more good schools. “Life chances” cannot, in reality, be absolutely equally available to everybody, everywhere, always. That is why they are called chances, not certainties. The art is to create a culture in which they are more likely to crop up. The late Frank Johnson, famed sketch-writer on this newspaper, once commented to me on how the Left had changed in the past 30 years. “They failed when they nationalised companies,” he said, “so now they are trying to nationalise people instead.” That is what the rage for equality does, taking power over ethnic and sexual questions, over relations between men and women, over children, over school and university admissions, over employment and who pays whom what. A prime minister who accepts its premises, because they sound “fair”, will find herself trapped in its oppressive conclusions.

33 Article B The Guardian 6 November 2014 By Simon Jenkins Our addiction to criminalising human behaviour makes a mockery of private responsibility From drinking while pregnant to urinating on a war memorial, the law’s ambition has no limits If poisoning your foetus with alcohol is a crime, why is it not a crime to abort it? If alcoholism in pregnancy is “attempted manslaughter”, as a QC told the court of appeal this week, surely abortion is murder. Indeed if alcoholism before birth criminally harms a baby’s life, what about alcoholism and a dozen other cruelties after birth? How many are the misdeeds we inflict on our children to which Britain’s “cult of criminality” should now turn its attention? We need a philosopher – as Raymond Chandler would say – and we need one fast. All we get are bloody lawyers. The motive for this week’s court case in London had nothing to do with the health of mother or child. It was blatantly financial. A local council is acting on behalf of a seven-year-old girl – “CP” – who suffers from acute “foetal alcohol syndrome”. The claimed cause was her mother’s drinking during pregnancy. The suit is intended to shift the cost of caring for her from the council to the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority on the grounds that the girl is victim of “violence against the person”. In America hundreds of (mostly black) mothers are now jailed for this offence, to whose benefit it is unclear. In the British case the mother is not charged with any crime, but it is argued that a crime took place. Since the offence is against a person and a foetus is not a person, such playing with words must have far wider implications – on abortion, for example. The advance of criminal law into these recesses of private morality is ominous. Fertility and embryology have been relatively free of legal wrangles in Britain, despite such high-profile cases as Diane Blood’s 1997 bid to obtain her dead husband’s semen. Scientists and their ethics committees have struggled to regulate an area of biology now evolving by leaps and bounds. When serving on one such committee I learned that two inputs were of little help: those of religion and the law. Individual priests and lawyers might be perfectly open-minded but their professional background could curse them with dogma, prejudgment and false certainty. The moral complexity of

34 genetic engineering, gamete selection and foetal surgery ran way ahead of old concepts of right and wrong. When really does “life” begin? How far should we manipulate an embryo? What is a “too late” abortion? Where does parental responsibility end and state responsibility begin? My response to this week’s case was initial horror at a squad of lawyers charging over the hill into an area of private tragedy, and for money. They see the mother as responsible for consciously disabling her child, but I assume they distinguish between a mother aborting a foetus and a mother harming a foetus she intends to bring to life. In the first case she “harms herself,” in the other she harms a future live person. It seems a fine distinction. I still cannot see how we can call something a crime without a criminal agent. In cases such as thalidomide and traffic accidents, compensation is paid that acknowledges the foetus as distinct from the mother. But excessive drinking is a deliberate act. If it is a crime, the mother must be the criminal. This wedge can only be driven on towards the American treatment of women who endanger their foetuses in this way. The response from most sensible people is that foetuses are not persons, whatever they turn out to be. Alcoholic mothers therefore need warning, care and treatment, not criminalisation. In extreme cases – say, where an alcoholic woman seems determined to conceive when drinking – the courts can order sterilisation. But beating mothers about the head with blame, punishment and, in the case of wealthy ones, presumably huge compensation payments, can only make things worse. If the court of appeal throws this case out, we might hope to focus similar tolerance on drug abuse, shop-lifting, antisocial behaviours and petty crimes for which imprisonment is such a primitive answer. Britain is prison mad. When that old softie Margaret Thatcher left power, there were 45,000 Britons in jail. The number has doubled. Then there were130 jailed shoplifters. Now thousands pass through prison each year for offences treated in most of Europe like a parking violation. I have on file cases of Britons recently imprisoned for crimes as relatively mild as abusive tweeting, poll-rigging, Boat Race obstructing, cathedral desecrating, job-application falsifying, expenses fiddling, urinating on a war memorial, speeding-point switching, licence fee non-paying, and googling in court. Lord Baker, when home secretary, thought of rationing jail-crazy magistrates to a fixed number of cells each week, after filling which they would not be able to give custodial sentences.

35 When Ken Clarke as justice minister tried to rein back this lunacy, David Cameron sacked him. Now we have the proposed crime of “emotional violence” – including “reducing self-esteem” by calling someone fat – showing there is no limit to the law’s ambition. To be against jailing people for such offences is not to condone what they do, merely to apply some sense of proportion. The mob craving to bring coercive law into every realm of human behaviour has long troubled ethicists. Oxford’s Jonathan Glover sought to apply moral precepts to everyday life in his excellent book, Causing Death and Saving Lives. He quoted from Karamazov the brother’s euphoric cry that “everyone is responsible for everyone else and in every way”. It was, he said, heavy with “nightmare implication”. Such paternalism – or perhaps control freakery – led the last Labour government to create 4,300 new offences through 50 criminal justice acts. It led Tony Blair to justify war against one state after another, for its own good. Glover asked only that we “work out what things are most important and then try to see where we ourselves have a contribution to make”. We cannot spend our lives trying to save the lives of others, least of all others’ unborn infants. There must be some room left for private responsibility. The ethics that swirl round childbirth can seem so intractable that every case is a moral blind alley. In 2012-13 there were 252 diagnoses of foetal alcohol syndrome, 80 of which are awaiting the outcome of the current claim. If the court somehow contrives a “crime without a criminal” so as to gain compensation, the impact on thousands of distressed mothers will surely be appalling. The best hope is that publicity for this case will merely promote healthier pregnancy – and perhaps persuade us that what causes harm does not have to be a crime.

Article C The Times 5 April 2016 By Melanie Phillips These awful tattoos show we’re turning pagan The craze for body art signifies a deep shift in western values away from respect for humanity David Beckham is surely our most decorated public figure. Literally. Much of his body is covered in tattoos. On his arms it is hard to see any area of skin that

36 isn’t inked over with elaborate designs and messages. As a result, his arms look less like human limbs than artifacts. One wonders why Beckham, the manifest advantages of whose physique are given to few other men on earth, should want to mutilate himself in this way. At the same time, I struggle to explain quite why tattoos produce such a visceral reaction. I think it’s something to do with being human. Whatever our status in life, underneath all externals we are equally naked. The very blankness of our skin advertises that we become what we make of ourselves. Tattooing turns our human potential into something fixed and manipulated by others. We become someone else’s creation. It is a kind of effacement of the self. Tattoos have nevertheless been fashionable for years, along with other forms of mutilation such as body-piercing. Who now turns a hair at a nose stud or a ring through the belly-button? Once the preserve of sailors, navies and criminals, tattoos now widely advertise the hipness of celebrities and the middle classes. Even Sam Cam sports a dear little dolphin near her ankle. Various explanations might be offered for the appeal of the tattooist’s needle. The whiff of rebellion against bourgeois convention appeals to the fashionably rebellious bourgeoisie. There’s perhaps a degree of narcissism and a yearning to be unique. Maybe also, for some, inarticulacy plays a part: those with a poor command of language may find satisfaction in using their own skin as a statement. Surely, though, something rather deeper is going on. Tattooing or body alteration has been around since the earliest known societies. Heavily associated with such pagan cultures, it typically involved propitiating the gods or either summoning or warding off demonic forces. In this context, David Beckham’s tattoos are particularly interesting. Most are a form of homage to members of his family. Most recently, he had the number 99 tattooed on his little finger to mark the year he and his wife Victoria got married. The words Pretty Lady hover on his neck above the name of his daughter Harper. On his back, a large guardian angel bestows protection on his sons Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz, whose names are tattooed above and below. Christian themes are much in evidence, with a veritable tableau portraying Jesus being carried by three cherubs believed to represent his three boys. His tattoos, he says, are all about the people in his life, “my wife and sons who I want with me always”. When people see him, they inescapably see the

37 tattoos. “You see an expression of how I feel about Victoria and the boys. They’re part of me.” Beckham clearly exhibits a touching love for his family. However, his tattoos do more than advertise that closeness. He appears to believe they can manufacture a desired reality, to keep his family always with him and even to become literally part of him. This fantasy erases the boundary between living beings and manufactured things. It objectifies the body. It also comes close to using the body to worship images. All this, regardless of the Christian themes pictured on his skin, is pagan. It is no coincidence that the fashion for tattoos and piercings has taken place at the same time as the huge increase in popularity and acceptance of paganism. The numbers of people identifying as pagan jumped from 42,000 in the 2001 census to 56,000 in 2011. Pagan “priests” are allowed to use wine and wands during ceremonies in jails. A pagan police association has been set up to represent officers who “worship nature and believe in many gods”. A few years ago, Cornwall decided to teach witchcraft and druidry in school religious studies lessons. As paganism has risen, so Christianity has been declining. The number of people saying they are Christian dropped from 72 per cent in 2001 to 59 per cent in 2011. The route to this transformation lies in environmentalism, with its pagan governing premise. This asserts that the despoliation of the planet has resulted from mankind’s illegitimate assertion of superiority over the natural world. It therefore tells us to value people less than inanimate matter. Obviously, not all environmentalists sport tattoos and not all tattooed people are pagan. Nevertheless, these are all aspects of a deep shift in the west’s value system which has systematically eroded the notion of innate respect for humanity, and therefore respect also for the body that encases it. Tattooing the body is prohibited in the Bible precisely because this was seen as a pagan practice associated with investing inanimate objects with magical, god-like properties. Tattoos moreover denigrate humanity because they commodify the self. They therefore embody a repudiation of the moral codes which prioritise care for others. If bodies can be instrumentalised, mutilated and turned into objects, so too can people. I’m sure David Beckham is a splendid fellow. I doubt whether he is a pagan, although his spiritual side seems to be a little vague. But when it comes to the

38 image of himself he chooses to project, he would appear to have become a pagan god for our desacralised age.

Questions for discussion 1. What political, cultural and social stance do the two editorials adopt? 2. Which columnist uses the highest number of facts to ground his/her opinion? 3. Choose one editorial or one column the opinion of which is closest to yours and one that you disagree most with. 4. Which of the five articles above is the most controversial in your opinion? 5. What columnists do you know in your national newspapers? Do you have a favourite one?

3.3 Feature Articles

3.3.1 Eye-witness News Feature

Keeble (2015, 34) defines eye-witness news feature as the journalist’s observa- tions of a newsy event that “can incorporate descriptions, conversations, interviews, analysis, comment, jokes. The “I” of the reporter might also be present”. The eye-witness news feature gives the reader a chance to experience an event through reporter’s attendance and presentation of it.

Article A The Telegraph 16 August 2016 By Paul Hayward Ordinary people doing extraordinary things – the lifeblood of Games Simply by wanting to sample spirit of Rio, athletes and fans have created it By now you will have noticed good news and bad news speeding down the highway of Olympic life like two juggernauts in a death race. The inspirational vies with the corrupt, and our brains divide between enjoyment and disquiet. One of those sides has to win in the end, right? This is the Olympics, and we need to hand the medals out. The British, in their wonderland of golds, already know their answer, having lavished money on a project that is more social engineering than mere sporting expedition. Around that story of ‘Team

39 GB’ success, though, the old question of what to feel about the modern Olym- pics will always be a tricky one. On any given day out here we can hail Laura Trott and Jason Kenny as bicycling king and queen, then learn that an International Olympic Committee member has been arrested in his hotel dressing gown for alleged ticket touting; that boxing judges have been sacked, or American swimmers accused by Brazilian authorities of fabricating an armed robbery, which is a shocking way to treat a city with enough reputational problems already. Why is the Olympics still so uplifting, despite a history of endemic doping and governing body corruption? Because the vast majority who poured into Rio did so to make the best of their lives and support the efforts of others. Under the weight of bad news, and reasons to give up on Olympic sport, Rio was teeming with people who just wanted to be part of a collective spirit that no drug cheat can kill and no chiselling panjandrum can erase. One day this week, I bumped into Britain’s trampoline silver medallist, Bryony Page, waiting for a bus in the dark, in the rain, with her hood up. A fellow athlete – French, possibly – asked her: “What do you do?” And Shaw said: “Trampoline. You?” She had been to watch Britain’s track cyclists in the velodrome. The previous evening she was at the athletics to see Usain Bolt in the 100 metres. She was euphoric about those experiences. She had no entourage, no car to collect her, no PR minder to tell me I could speak to her for only two minutes. She was an ordinary person who had done an extraordinary thing and felt privileged to be at the Olympic Games: a demobbed silver medallist turned tourist. Plainly, most of the 10,000 athletes who converge on the Games come to make up the numbers. Most have personal bests that put them nowhere near a podium. For them there will be no Sports Illustrated cover shot, no whirl of post-victory sponsor parties and interviews. The day after my encounter with Shaw, a man on the excellent new metro Line 4 from Barra, site of the main Olympic Park, into Rio, was showing other travellers pictures of him carrying the Olympic torch. He was still wearing his gold and white shirt from his brush with the flame, which, unusually, has been virtually invisible at these Games (presumably it would have cost too much to run a gas pipe up to the Christ the Redeemer statue). You could see his friends and family growing a little weary of his excessive pride. But, contrary to many reports, the train was packed with Brazilian spectators, who have made more noise in the second week than in the first.

40 Who are the Games for? Certainly not those who forget we are in a developing country with shocking inequality but a sharp political awareness of injustice. The Western habit of demanding a flawless visitor experience is particularly risible when the countries from which we come are beset by their own problems. How can we moan about slow media buses when people are paying £50 on Southern Rail to stand for 50 miles from the south coast to London (assuming the train has not been cancelled). This need to portray every Olympic host city as a disaster zone – the place where the Olympics went to die – is a distraction from the real crimes and misdemeanours. There is robbery outside the Olympic bubble, for sure, much of it doubtless born of socio-economic conditions. But we also know there is skulduggery inside it, which makes pontificating at Rio feel dubious. More urgent problems than a diving pool turning green are the cynical buck- passing by the IOC over Russia, the persistence of corruption allegations in boxing, and the arrest of Ireland’s Pat Hickey on charges relating to $3 million of black market ticket sales, carrying echoes of Fifa. As we know, many world governing bodies are failed states, because they lack the corrective of external oversight. ‘Clean’ athletes are sickened by having to compete against proven cheats, and despair of those in power, which is why so many took the law into their own hands and publicly denounced convicted dopers here in Rio. It is a hard sell to athletes to observe the Corinthian tradition if they look up and see Thomas Bach, the IOC president, cosying up to Vladimir Putin, or naked IOC executive members answering the door to Brazilian police. Off the field of play as we head into the final weekend, no Rio story in a deluge of news bulletins can match Ryan Lochte and three other American swimmers apparently fabricating an armed robbery to conceal their own unruly behaviour on a night out. Rather than castigate the quartet, who might have been making a movie called, ‘Dude – Let’s Get out of Brazil Real Quick’, Rio 2016’s chief spokesman, Mario Andrada, forgave them for wasting police time and tarnishing his country’s image. “We need to understand that these kids were trying to have fun. They came here, they represented their country to the best of their abilities. They trained for at least four years and they competed under gigantic pressure,” he said.“Sometimes you take actions that you later regret. They made a mistake, it’s part of life.” Thus Rio displayed a nobility the Olympic family sometimes lack. The guardians of the Olympic spirit are not always visible, or audible. But they keep the ‘greatest show on earth’ alive.

41 Article B The Times 10 July 2016 By Marie Colvin Final dispatch from Homs, the battered city Marie Colvin was the only British journalist reporting from inside the besieged Syrian enclave of Baba Amr. This is her final report This article first appeared in The Sunday Times on February 19, 2012 Syria, 2012 They call it the widows’ basement. Crammed amid makeshift beds and scattered belongings are frightened women and children trapped in the horror of Homs, the Syrian city shaken by two weeks of relentless bombardment. Among the 300 huddling in this wood factory cellar in the besieged district of Baba Amr is 20-year-old Noor, who lost her husband and her home to the shells and rockets. “Our house was hit by a rocket so 17 of us were staying in one room,” she recalls as Mimi, her three-year-old daughter, and Mohamed, her five-year-old son, cling to her abaya. “We had had nothing but sugar and water for two days and my husband went to try to find food.” It was the last time she saw Maziad, 30, who had worked in a mobile phone repair shop. “He was torn to pieces by a mortar shell.” For Noor, it was a double tragedy. Adnan, her 27-year-old brother, was killed at Maziad’s side. Everyone in the cellar has a similar story of hardship or death. The refuge was chosen because it is one of the few basements in Baba Amr. Foam mattresses are piled against the walls and the children have not seen the light of day since the siege began on February 4. Most families fled their homes with only the clothes on their backs. The city is running perilously short of supplies and the only food here is rice, tea and some tins of tuna delivered by a local sheikh who looted them from a bombed-out supermarket. A baby born in the basement last week looked as shellshocked as her mother, Fatima, 19, who fled there when her family’s single-storey house was obliterated. “We survived by a miracle,” she whispers. Fatima is so traumatised that she cannot breastfeed, so the baby has been fed only sugar and water; there is no formula milk.

42 Fatima may or may not be a widow. Her husband, a shepherd, was in the countryside when the siege started with a ferocious barrage and she has heard no word of him since. The widows’ basement reflects the ordeal of 28,000 men, women and children clinging to existence in Baba Amr, a district of low concrete-block homes surrounded on all sides by Syrian forces. The army is launching Katyusha rockets, mortar shells and tank rounds at random. Snipers on the rooftops of al-Ba’ath University and other high buildings surrounding Baba Amr shoot any civilian who comes into their sights. Residents were felled in droves in the first days of the siege but have now learnt where the snipers are and run across junctions where they know they can be seen. Few cars are left on the streets. Almost every building is pock-marked after tank rounds punched through concrete walls or rockets blasted gaping holes in upper floors. The building I was staying in lost its upper floor to a rocket last Wednesday. On some streets whole buildings have collapsed – all there is to see are shredded clothes, broken pots and the shattered furniture of families destroyed. It is a city of the cold and hungry, echoing to exploding shells and bursts of gunfire. There are no telephones and the electricity has been cut off. Few homes have diesel for the tin stoves they rely on for heat in the coldest winter that anyone can remember. Freezing rain fills potholes and snow drifts in through windows empty of glass. No shops are open, so families are sharing what they have with relatives and neighbours. Many of the dead and injured are those who risked foraging for food. Fearing the snipers’ merciless eyes, families resorted last week to throwing bread across rooftops, or breaking through communal walls to pass unseen. The Syrians have dug a huge trench around most of the district, and let virtually nobody in or out. The army is pursuing a brutal campaign to quell the resistance of Homs, Hama and other cities that have risen up against Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, whose family has been in power for 42 years. In Baba Amr, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), the armed face of opposition to Assad, has virtually unanimous support from civilians who see them as their defenders. It is an unequal battle: the tanks and heavy weaponry of Assad’s troops against the Kalashnikovs of the FSA. About 5,000 Syrian soldiers are believed to be on the outskirts of Baba Amr, and the FSA received reports yesterday that they were preparing a ground assault. The residents dread the outcome.

43 “We live in fear the FSA will leave the city,” said Hamida, 43, hiding with her children and her sister’s family in an empty ground-floor apartment after their house was bombed. “There will be a massacre.” On the lips of everyone was the question: “Why have we been abandoned by the world?” Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, said last week: “We see neighbourhoods shelled indiscriminately, hospitals used as torture centres, children as young as 10 years old killed and abused. We see almost certainly crimes against humanity.” Yet the international community has not come to the aid of the innocent caught in this hell. Abdel Majid, 20, who was helping to rescue the wounded from bombed buildings, made a simple plea. “Please tell the world they must help us,” he said, shaking, with haunted eyes. “Just stop the bombing. Please, just stop the shelling.” The journey across the countryside from the Lebanese border to Homs would be idyllic in better times. The villages are nondescript clusters of concrete buildings on dirt tracks but the lanes are lined with cypresses and poplar trees and wind through orchards of apricot and apple trees. These days, however, there is an edge of fear on any journey through this area. Most of this land is essentially what its residents call “Syria hurra”, or free Syria, patrolled by the FSA. Nevertheless, Assad’s army has checkpoints on the main roads and troops stationed in schools, hospitals and factories. They are heavily armed and backed by tanks and artillery. So a drive to Homs is a bone-rattling struggle down dirt roads, criss- crossing fields. Men cluster by fires at unofficial FSA checkpoints, eyeing any vehicle suspiciously. As night falls, flashlights waved by unseen figures signal that the way ahead is clear. Each travelling FSA car has a local shepherd or farmer aboard to help navigate the countryside; the Syrian army may have the power, but the locals know every track of their fields. I entered Homs on a smugglers’ route, which I promised not to reveal, climbing over walls in the dark and slipping into muddy trenches. Arriving in the darkened city in the early hours, I was met by a welcoming party keen for foreign journalists to reveal the city’s plight to the world. So desperate were they that they bundled me into an open truck and drove at speed with the headlights on, everyone standing in the back shouting “Allahuakbar” – God is the greatest. Inevitably, the Syrian army opened fire.

44 When everyone had calmed down I was driven in a small car, its lights off, along dark empty streets, the danger palpable. As we passed an open stretch of road, a Syrian army unit fired on the car again with machineguns and launched a rocket-propelled grenade. We sped into a row of abandoned buildings for cover. The scale of human tragedy in the city is immense. The inhabitants are living in terror. Almost every family seems to have suffered the death or injury of a loved one. Khaled Abu Salah, an activist who took part in the first demonstrations against Assad in Homs last March, sat on the floor of an office, his hand broken and bandages covering shrapnel wounds to his leg and shoulder. A 25-year-old university student, who risked his life filming videos of the slaughter of Baba Amr residents, he narrowly escaped when he tried to get two men wounded by mortar fire to a makeshift clinic. He and three friends had just taken the wounded to the clinic, which was staffed by a doctor and a dentist, and stepped away from the door when “a shell landed right at the entrance”, he recalled last week. “My three friends died immediately.” The two men they had helped were also killed. Abu Ammar, 48, a taxi driver, went out to look for bread at 8am one day last week. He, his wife and their adopted daughter had taken refuge with two elderly sisters after their home was hit by shells. “When I returned the house was obliterated,” he said, looking at all that remained of the one-storey building. Only a few pieces of wall still stood. In the ruins a woman’s red blouse was visible; bottles of home-made pickled vegetables were somehow unscathed. “Dr Ali”, a dentist working as a doctor, said one of the women from the house had arrived at the clinic alive, but both legs had been amputated and she died. The clinic is merely a first-floor apartment donated by the kindly owner. It still has out-of-place domestic touches: plasma pouches hang from a wooden coat hanger and above the patients a colourful children’s mobile hangs from the ceiling. The shelling last Friday was the most intense yet and the wounded were rushed to the clinic in the backs of cars by family members. Ali the dentist was cutting the clothes off 24-year-old Ahmed al-Irini on one of the clinic’s two operating tables. Shrapnel had gashed huge bloody chunks out of Irini’s thighs. Blood poured out as Ali used tweezers to draw a piece of metal from beneath his left eye.

45 Irini’s legs spasmed and he died on the table. His brother-in-law, who had brought him in, began weeping. “We were playing cards when a missile hit our house,” he said through his tears. Irini was taken out to the makeshift mortuary in a former back bedroom, naked but for a black plastic bag covering his genitals. There was no let-up. Khaled Abu Kamali died before the doctor could get his clothes off. He had been hit by shrapnel in the chest while at home. Salah, 26, was peppered with shrapnel in his chest and the left of his back. There was no anaesthetic, but he talked as Ali inserted a metal pipe into his back to release the pressure of the blood building up in his chest. Helping tend the wounded was Um Ammar, a 45-year-old mother of seven, who had offered to be a nurse after a neighbour’s house was shelled. She wore filthy plastic gloves and was crying. “I’m obliged to endure this, because all children brought here are my children,” she said. “But it is so hard.” Akhmed Mohammed, a military doctor who defected from Assad’s army, shouted: “Where are the human rights? Do we have none? Where are the United Nations?” There were only two beds in the clinic for convalescing. One was taken by Akhmed Khaled, who had been injured, he said, when a shell hit a mosque as he was about to leave prayers. His right testicle had had to be removed with only paracetamol to dull the pain. He denounced the Assad regime’s claim that the rebels were Islamic extremists and said: “We ask all people who believe in God — Christians, Jews, Muslims to help us!” If the injured try to flee Baba Amr, they first have to be carried on foot. Then they are transferred to motorbikes and the lucky ones are smuggled to safety. The worst injured do not make it. Though Syrian officials prohibit anyone from leaving, some escapees manage to bribe their way out. I met refugees in villages around Homs. Newlywed Miriam, 32, said she and her husband had decided to leave when they heard that three families had been killed and the women raped by the Shabiha militia, a brutal force led by Assad’s younger brother, Maher. “We were practically walking on body parts as we walked under shelling overhead,” she said. Somehow they made it unscathed. She had given an official her wedding ring in order to be smuggled out to safety. Abdul Majid, a computer science student at university, was still shaking hours after arriving in a village outside Homs. He had stayed behind alone in Baba Amr. “I had to help the old people because only the young can get out,”

46 said Majid, 20, wearing a leather jacket and jeans. He left when his entire street fled after every house was hit. “I went to an army checkpoint that I was told was not too bad. I gave them a packet of cigarettes, two bags of tea and 500 Syrian pounds. They told me to run.” Blasts of Kalashnikov fire rang out above his head until he reached the tree line. He said the soldiers were only pretending to try to shoot him to protect themselves, but his haunted eyes showed he was not entirely sure. If the Syrian military rolls into Baba Amr, the FSA will have little chance against its tanks, superior weaponry and numbers. They will, however, fight ferociously to defend their families because they know a massacre is likely to follow any failure, if the past actions of the Assad regime are anything to go by. The FSA partly relies on defections from Assad’s army because it does not accept civilians into its ranks, though they perform roles such as monitoring troop movements and transporting supplies. But it has become harder for soldiers to defect in the past month. Abu Sayeed, 46, a major- general who defected six months ago, said every Syrian military unit was now assigned a member of the Mukhabarat, the feared intelligence service, who have orders to execute any soldier refusing an order to shoot or who tries to defect. The army, like the country, may well be about to divide along sectarian lines. Most of the officers are members of the Alawite sect, the minority Shi’ite clan to which the Assad family belongs, while foot soldiers are Sunni. The coming test for the army will be if its ranks hold if ordered to kill increasing numbers of their brethren. The swathe of the country that stretches east from the Lebanon border and includes Homs is Sunni; in the villages there they say that officers ordering attacks are Alawites fighting for the Assad family, not their country. The morale of Assad’s army, despite its superiority, is said to be low as it is poorly paid and supplied, although this information comes mostly from defectors. “The first thing we did when we attacked the house was race to the refrigerator,” said a defector. Thousands of soldiers would be needed to retake the southern countryside. Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father and former president, crushed his problems with Islamic fundamentalists in 1982 by shelling the city of Hama into ruins and killing at least 10,000 men, women and children. So far his son appears to have calculated that a similar act would be a step too far for his remaining allies of Russia, China and Iran.

47 For now it is a violent and deadly standoff. The FSA is not about to win and its supplies of ammunition are dwindling. The only real hope of success for Assad’s opponents is if the international community comes to their aid, as Nato did against Muammar Gadaffi in Libya. So far this seems unlikely to happen in Syria. Observers see a negotiated solution as perhaps a long shot, but the best way out of this impasse. Though neither side appears ready to negotiate, there are serious efforts behind the scenes to persuade Russia to pull Assad into talks. As international diplomats dither, the desperation in Baba Amr grows. The despair was expressed by Hamida, 30, hiding in a downstairs flat with her sister and their 13 children after two missiles hit their home. Three little girls, aged 16 months to six years, sleep on one thin, torn mattress on the floor; three others share a second. Ahmed, 16, her sister’s eldest child, was killed by a missile when he went to try to find bread. “The kids are screaming all the time,” Hamida said. “I feel so helpless.” She began weeping. “We feel so abandoned. They’ve given Bashar al-Assad the green light to kill us.” Loyalties of ‘desert rose’ tested Asma, the British-born wife of President Bashar al-Assad, may well be feeling a sense of divided loyalty as the violence continues in the Syrian city of Homs. Her family are from the area, which has been a focal point for many of the recent protests against her husband’s regime and the Syrian army’s brutal response. Despite growing up in Acton, west London, Asma visited her family’s home in Homs every year throughout her childhood. She is also a Sunni Muslim, unlike her husband, who comes from the country’s minority Shi’ite community. Asma, 36, has been criticised for displaying an “ostrich attitude”, keeping a low profile as the conflict has intensified. She has refused to comment on the way her husband’s regime has used tanks and other lethal means to crush protesters. In an email sent earlier this month, her office merely said: “The first lady’s very busy agenda is still focused on supporting the various charities she has long been involved with as well as rural development and supporting the President as needed.” The daughter of a consultant cardiologist and a retired diplomat, Asma was born in London. She attended a Church of England state school in Acton and gained a BSc in computer science and a diploma in French literature from King’s College London.

48 She went on to work for Deutsche Bank and married Assad in Syria in 2000. Now a mother of three, she was once described by Vogue as a “rose in the desert”. In Homs, the beleaguered people may now take a different view.

Questions for discussion 1. Eye-witness articles are believed to be overtly subjective. Do you agree with it and why? Illustrate your answer with examples from the articles. 2. Did the reporter manage to convey the spirit of the event to you as a reader and how?

3.3.2 Participatory Feature

To write a participatory feature a journalist engages in an interesting activity and records his experience. The activities can range from travelling to exiting or obscure destinations, being involved in various sports to undertaking certain jobs. The articles are usually written in the first person essay style because they are primarily about a journalist’s involvement. The genre of participatory feature was established in the 1960s by an American writer and journalist George Plimpton who was also an actor and an amateur sportsman. He had participated in a number of competitions together with professional sportsmen as well as had acted on stage along with professional actors and then described his experience from the point of view of an occasional amateur.

Article A Mirror 15 June 2014 By Warren Manger 24 hours homeless: Spikes aren’t as bad as being punched, kicked or spat on As fixed pavement deterrents are used to clear Britain’s streets of homeless, our man spends a day down and out in London My concrete mattress outside the shop window is cold and bone-achingly hard - just like life on the streets for Britain’s forgotten homeless. Night after night 2,400 people sleep rough in doorways and pavements across the country.

49 But this “unsightly and unwanted” band of homeless people is facing an added difficulty - spikes are being put up in regular resting places. This week there was controversy when pimply metal slabs were fitted outside a block of flats in London to repel those looking for a place to rest. Only a petition signed by 130,000 angry people in Southwark, South London, forced the removal of a method normally used to keep pigeons off roofs. I might as well be a pigeon tonight, not worth a glance, as I spend 24 hours roughing it on the street just a couple of miles from those flats in Southwark. In my doorway I see a passer-by and ask: “Can you spare any change please?” Clearly uncomfortable he gives me a poisonous stare before turning his head away and quickening his pace. “C***,” I hear him growl as he hurries on. Such hostility towards the homeless is not uncommon. At least I didn’t get a kicking. A fate steadily on the increase for the thousands on city streets – a number that has risen 37 per cent in the past five years. So I turn to some battered veterans of vulnerability for wisdom and advice. Kieran Duggan is only 21 but he is ages old in hardship. He has been homeless from the age of nine and his only possessions are the clothes he is wearing. He has epilepsy and asthma. He has already been hospitalised with hypothermia four times. Yet he has no sleeping bag to keep out the cold, only the clothes he is wearing. “Being on the streets so young I was really vulnerable,” he says. “I’ve been jumped on and attacked, I’ve had my phone stolen, I’ve even been urinated on. “Most nights I don’t even try to sleep, I just walk and walk. Sometimes I’ll sit on a bench and fall asleep until a copper comes and shines a torch on me and moves me on. That happens all the time.” It’s not long before I experience that myself on a bustling street just off Leicester Square where hundreds of people are enjoying a night out. At first I wonder if the sleeping bag wrapped around me has the same magical powers as Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak. Feet fall inches from my crossed legs, but their owners never look down. That illusion is soon dispelled as the police approach me. The first bobby is tall and imposing but kind and compassionate. He asks if I’m OK and warns me begging is illegal before wandering off. Ten minutes later I’m surrounded by three more officers who are far less friendly. They tell me I’m not allowed to sit on the pavement and I have to move.

50 Where to? They don’t really care - but I can’t stay here. My ankles are numb from sitting contorted on the cold pavement, but I struggle to my feet and stumble off. My search for a new spot is hindered by the new wave of metal spikes that have sprung up outside shop windows. I find Mikey Ovens, 36, sat near Trafalgar Square with his pet Staffordshire terrier Lucky. He has been on the streets for 10 years. “Some people are really friendly and generous,” he reassures me. “But some are just nasty. Last week a guy kicked me and my dog while we were sleeping. When my dog growled at him I got in trouble, even though she was just defending us. That’s what happens when you’re homeless.” Further along on the Strand those words of warning are echoed by Dave Hardy, 35, and Paul Marsden, 44. Dave, originally from Paddington, has been on the streets for four months after spending five years living with family in Ireland. When he moved home he was no longer classed as a British resident and was refused housing benefit. Within four weeks he got a brutal lesson in how hard life on the streets can be. “Two geezers came up to me while I was sleeping, one of them kicked me in the face so hard he knocked my tooth clean out,” he says. “Then they grabbed my phone. What kind of human being robs a homeless person?” Paul has been homeless for about a year since losing his job while battling depression. He sleeps in squats whenever possible, but often finds himself on the streets. “Spikes on the pavement don’t seem so bad compared to some of what we have to deal with,” he says. “You’ll see a lot of guys sleeping in doorways around here. I don’t do that, it’s not safe. You get punched, kicked, spat on. People go through your pockets. I even heard about one guy who was set on fire.” I try for a little more change before I bed down for the night. People give me a wide berth, as if my homelessness might be contagious. By 2 am the stream of passers-by has slowed to a trickle and a chill creeps into the air. I settle on my concrete bed and try to drift off, but the noise of traffic and fear of attack make sleep impossible. So I sit up bored and realise why some on the street turn to alcohol to pass the long, empty hours. Even now the cruel jokes continue. One person on their way home shouts at me: “Wake up, time for breakfast.” Thankfully five Good Samaritans take pity and give me money. In the early morning light I count £6.90, which we handed to a homeless charity. I make one final stop before walking to the tube. I return to the back street

51 where I met Kieran the night before. As I offer him my sleeping bag his eyes water and he thanks me repeatedly. It’s amazing what a simple act of kindness means on these streets.

Article B Mirror 15 June 2014 By Gemma Aldgridge Counterfeit Street: Sunday Mirror investigates hidden ‘shopping mall’ of fake designer and electrical goods Hidden behind the shutters of apparently derelict shops lies an Aladdin’s Cave of fake goods which attracts buyers from across the UK. The shutters are down and the windows boarded up on the once-bustling high street. The derelict shops in the shadow of Strangeways Prison, Manchester, give all the appearance of being completely abandoned, sad and crumbling casualties of the economic crisis. But behind the locked doors of Bury New Road, in a maze of back alleys and basements, a new trade is flourishing – fake designer goods worth millions of pounds change hands here every year. It’s a hidden shopping mall and cash-and-carry all rolled into one, a secret outlet village where rogue traders buy fake supplies in bulk and sell them on across the country. The Government last week announced plans to crack down on the selling of fake goods, es pecially on the internet. It came after a report showed the number of illegal website links removed worldwide in the past year had soared by a huge 620 per cent to 72 million. But despite a recent clampdown on illegal goods by Greater Manchester Police , anyone can just wander in to this Hooky Street-style den of “designer” goods. We were able to buy must-have items such as a fake Louis Vuitton satchel for £15, counterfeit Jimmy Choo shoes for £10, fake Beats headphones for £5 and a “Nike England” shirt for £20, all way below prices for the real thing. And we weren’t alone. Hordes of shoppers from across the UK come to buy fake handbags, watches, sunglasses and sports gear from a labyrinth of more than 20 black market stores.

52 Each is the size of a large garage. The operation works like a well-oiled machine – and it’s easy to see why people come here to spend what little money they earn or receive in benefits in a time of austerity. “People come here because they don’t want to pay any more than this. Times are hard and it’s all they can afford,” a stallholder tells us, by a rack of fake Gucci tops. On the day we are there some lads with thick-Liverpool accents each buy an “England shirt” for £20. Nearby, an elderly man sizes some shirts for his grandchildren and a young mum rifles through the bargain bins as she bounces a toddler on her hip. Though that all helps swell the black-market coffers, it is not how the big money changes hands. The real profits come in bulk sales. Members of the buy-to-sell network pick up job lots such as 200 “designer” shirts for £3,000 in cash. They then sell the shirts on at £30 a piece – double their outlay but still only a fraction of what the real thing costs. “Lots of people come here from far away,” one seller tells us. “We get people from Scotland, Birmingham and London as well as Manchester. You can’t come all the way from somewhere like Birmingham for one tracksuit, so they buy more and sell on. They will spend £500 or £600. They buy something for £25 and sell it for £40 – that’s a tidy profit.” As you walk down the pavement of the mile-long road in North Manchester, young men lurk on street corners outside the locked shutters. Look closely and you can see their mobile phones are walkie-talkies for communicating with their colleagues on the inside. These men are the spotters. They bring customers in and keep police out. If they see a police car it’s down to them to raise the alarm. We arrive on Saturday morning and within minutes a spotter mutters: “You want to go shopping?” When we give him the nod he unlocks the door of a shuttered electrical shop. We discover the inside is bursting with fake designer sports gear. Dodgy Ralph Lauren track suits, Superdry hoodies and North Face jackets hang from wires. Copied Nike, Converse and Adidas trainers are lined up for £25 a pair and shorts go from as little as £10. A sea of cardboard boxes on the floor are filled with “designer” T-shirts next to a sign reading “3-4-£10”. And look-a-like electrical goods like the Dr Dre Beats headphones we bought for £5. The Liverpool lads are more interested in England football gear. The place

53 is the hub of a huge fake kit trade. Dealers are cashing in on the World Cup by buying “England shirts” here and flogging them via the internet. “If you buy more, they get cheaper,” the seller explains. “Two for £35 and if you buy enough we can go down to £15 – that’s almost cost price for us. If you want more you call me and I will get them for you no problem.” But he warns: “You need to get them quickly because they will only sell for two or three weeks while England survive in the tournament.” We later phoned the man, who called himself Hassan, and he promised he could provide 200 or more shirts the following week. “You can use a courier service to your home and whatever they charge depends on the weight of the box,” he told us. Our investigators bought an England shirt for testing by trading standards, but as they tried to leave they found the front door had been locked. They are not allowed to go out that way to avoid attracting attention to the premises. Instead, they are ushered through a long corridor and out via a fire exit which backs on to a narrow alley lined with open doors. Here, men sit outside on stools, enticing shoppers in to view their wares. In the maze of alleys, out of view of the main street, there is no shame or discretion about what these men are doing. They call to customers as they pass, promising low prices and high quality and huge discounts for those buying in bulk. Each doorway is like an entrance to an Aladdin’s cave of fakes. When we ask if the products are real, the stall holders laugh – but still go for the sale. “Handbags start at £15,” one man says, inviting us inside. We go down a rickety staircase into the basement where there is a room full of bags and purses bearing the names of Mulberry, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Chanel. None cost more than £35, a fraction of the real price. “They are good quality, they come from China,” the trader says as he offers us “MiuMiu” purses for £7. Some fakes are better than others, but they are all fairly convincing. Some are even leather, and lined with the logo material. At another stall, we bought a “Louis Vuitton” bag for £15. “Prada is £17, Chanel is £16. That’s the lowest we can do,” the seller told us. Perfume is also on offer. “It’s not real but it’s a very good copy,” we are told. “It comes from Turkey. You put it on today and you can still smell it tomorrow. Lots of my customers buy here and sell it on the internet as the real thing.” It’s clear as shoppers walk around holding bulging bags that stallholders are doing a roaring trade. One trader reveals that lorry loads of stock come

54 in weekly on Mondays or Tuesdays from a single supplier who imports them from abroad and distributes them among the shops. It’s also clear from the way the men behave that they are all part of one operation. Rather than competing with one another, they usher customers from one shop to the next, sharing stock when they run out of a certain size or colour. “We have one supplier for most of the street so if it’s not here you might not get it,” one seller tells us. Making or selling fake goods is against the law. Sellers can be fined or even go to jail. The police have already tried to crack down on the Manchester trade. In 2010, officers seized more than £3million of fake clothing in the city and 13 people were arrested. A further raid of warehouses in the area uncovered another £2 million in bogus products. And only 10 days ago, there was another swoop on nearby Cheetham Hill, which is infamous for its bootleg tobacco and alcohol traders. Business Secretary Vince Cable said: “These scams show why urgent action is needed to protect consumers. Tough laws are in place to crack down on fake goods and piracy now carries a sentence of up to 10 years. “The selling of fake goods is a global problem which is why the Government is working with countries around the world to tackle this type of crime.” The Citizens Advice Bureau also warns shoppers that counterfeit goods could contain harmful substances. And if they are electrical – such as headphones – they could even kill. They say: “If you buy fake goods you could harm your health, commit a crime and help fund crime.”

Article C The Telegraph 13 August 2016 By Julian Bennetts Welcome to the future of doping Forget drugs, electrical stimulation of the mind is the next big thing. Julian Bennetts tries it I am sitting on a chair in a gym trying to ignore the fact that, a few feet away, a man in a white coat is about to send an electrical charge directly into my brain. The device I am about to road-test could represent the future of doping, but this is a world away from the tales of unmarked glass phials, corrupt coaches

55 and crooked athletes. Rather than using illicit substances to boost the body, this technology is legal and serves to boost the mind. The theory, known as Transcranial Direct-Current Stimulation (tDCS), is that low-level electronic pulses targeted at specific areas of the brain can stimulate them into working either more or less effectively. From an inauspicious start in the 1960s, when brain implants were used to ‘cure’ homosexuality, techniques such as tDCS have been developed over the past 15 years to treat individuals with severe depression and mental illnesses. Increasingly it has also been used by the US military, including snipers and pilots, and now it is being embraced by the world of sport, with some Rio athletes having taken advantage of it. TDCS is so new that neither the World Anti-Doping Agency nor the International Olympic Committee has any rules in place regarding its use, with Wada saying it “is gathering information before a decision is taken” and that “for now, this methodology is not considered prohibited”. There are also no rules for journalists, so I decided to test it to discover whether brain training could become as common in an athlete’s life as going to the gym. I enlisted the help of Dr Balder Onarheim, from PlatoScience. Based in Copenhagen, Plato is attempting to bring the technology into the European market. Another company, Halo, has already done so in the United States, where it is used by the Golden State Warriors basketball team, the US ski jumping team and some Olympic athletes. One of Halo’s clients is Sierra Leone sprinter Hafsatu Kamara, who, despite being eliminated in the first round of the women’s 100 metres, claims that by using neuropriming – the term Halo uses in its promotional material – the amount she could lift during weighted hip thrusts went from 100kg to 120kg. It is also claimed that the US ski jumping team improved their ‘propulsive force’ by 13 per cent, and their ‘jump smoothness’ by 11 per cent after using the technology for four weeks. Among the other clients quoted by Halo – which declined to comment for this article – is sprinter Mike Rogers, a member of the United States’ World Championship-winning 4 x 100 m relay squad. They represent a broad range of sports, and Onarheim believes that demonstrates how the technology is suitable for almost anyone. “We can tune an athletes’ brain up or down for particular skills that are desirable for their sport,” he says. “For example, you can improve focus and turn off background noise, silence everything going on they don’t need. You can turn down aspects of self-awareness, or self-criticism. We can target the

56 feeling of being tired. When your brain says ‘no more’ you can limit those thoughts so you can push yourself further. “Another thing we can do is target motor areas – basically moving your limbs – particularly while training. If you stimulate the areas responsible for moving your limbs that should in theory make your physical workout more effective as your brain is better at doing what it is trying to do. “You can build the optimal brain so in the end all the cognitive effects an athlete would like to be better at can be trained, so that you go to competition without the device but have better cognitive abilities than ever before.” Perhaps the most intriguing potential of the technology is the ability to recreate feelings and mindset. “We hope we will be able to copy-and-paste your brain,” says Onarheim. “If I take a scan of your brain at your very best, and then take another of your everyday brain, I can give you stimuli to get your brain functioning to its best. “So if you have a great sensation you can map the brain and ask for it again later. If you win Olympic gold then we will be able to copy your brain at that moment and replicate it. Taking that further, we can give you that feeling before your next competition, so you will go into it with a winning mindset.” I am a long way from an Olympic athlete, but given companies involved in tDCS ultimately intend to take the technology to a mass market, I set about a normal weights training session before Onarheim attaches the device, telling me that my brain will be tuned to similar settings to an army sniper – the two electric pads at the front of my head ‘tuning up’ the areas used for concentration and focus, while the pad at the back ‘turns down’ background noise. When he turns the Plato device on I feel a light heat on my temples and a slight buzz, similar to the first drink after a long day. I begin to exercise, aware that distractions, such as the air conditioning and fellow gym-goers, have receded. To my surprise, I can lift more than normal without feeling I am exerting myself too strenuously. That feeling comes and goes, but I do feel stronger and more energetic. Perhaps more surprising are the effects when it comes to cognitive tasks. I sit at my laptop to write about my experiences with the device still attached. Onarheim switches it on and for 15 minutes – you are recommended not to use it for more than 30 minutes a day – electronic pulses are sent through my brain. I do so at home, with the usual domestic background buzz. But with the device on I find I am able to shut out it all out and accomplish far more in that time period than I usually would.

57 It is hard to know how much the results are psychosomatic – something Plato acknowledges and is careful to allow for in its testing. Certainly there is no claim that strength can be improved after using the device for just 15 minutes. But the increase in focus was noticeable. But if the technology works, it is difficult to see why Olympians would not be prepared to use it. And sport could find itself having to contend with a whole new doping frontier.

Questions for discussion 1. How do you know that the articles above are participatory features and not real-life stories with authentic characters? Find proof in the texts. 2. Do you remember any participatory feature that inspired you or dramati- cally changed your mind? 3. When can participatory features be considered unethical and why?

3.3.3 Profile

These types of articles sometimes are also called interviews.Profiles are verbal pictures of well-known people drawn on the basis of interviews with them or with other people close to them in their private or social lives. Profiles are mostly written in the 3rd person and contain little or no evaluation. The news angle in profiles is quite prominent. Keeble (2006) suggests that not only celebrities but also planes, hotels, shops and even Father Christmas can be profiled. Obituaries are considered to be a subgenre of profiles. Though they are often written beforehand, obituaries are published after the death of the subject.

Article A The Times 22 May 2016 By Richard Benson Helena Bonham Carter at 50 The convention-defying actress is back on screen this week in Alice Through the Looking Glass. She talks about being single, her 100-year-old knees and having her very own girl squad The other day, I was getting changed at the gym,” says Helena Bonham Carter, adjusting her vast bird’s-nest hairdo while talking at 90 miles an hour, “and

58 this woman, a stranger, looked me up and down and said, ‘Do you have a broomstick at home?’ I thought, ‘Honestly, I’m just trying to do some exercise here.’ Another time I was doing yoga, and someone tweeted ‘Bonham Carter’s wearing bloomers to the yoga!’ I was going to tweet back saying they’re not bloomers, but then I realised that actually they were. Hahahahaha!” This is how conversations tend to run with Bonham Carter — intelligent points segueing into self-effacing personal anecdotes, before exploding in fruity, tobacco-smoked, whisky-marinated laughs. We were supposed to be talking about media intrusion, but never mind. What did she tell the gym woman? “I said, ‘Of course I have.’” And do you? “Of course. I do witches, you know! Now,” she says, looking at the sofa on which we are sitting, “budge up, because I’m going to lie down while we talk. But it’s just because I’m knackered, don’t be getting any ideas. Heheheheheh!” The grande dame of goth, with her black lace corset and army boots, is here to do publicity for her latest film, Alice Through the Looking Glass, in which she reprises her 2010 role as the Red Queen from Alice in Wonderland. She turns 50 on Friday, but finds no shortage of good parts; in fact, since she ditched her English-rose image in 1999 by starring as Brad Pitt’s girlfriend in Fight Club, her characters have become increasingly varied and unusual. Unlike some actors, she finds Hollywood and popular culture in general are becoming less ageist, “because they know we are bored with looking at the same kind of people. It’s the same as the way sexuality has gone, everyone wants to try everything now.” One thing she is less keen on is social media. “Apparently there are people pretending to be me,” she says indifferently. “But I don’t do it much, because I don’t have time to answer everyone. My kids aren’t interested yet, and I hope it stays like that, because I hate the liking and disliking. I think it puts young people in such positions of vulnerability. I do hope we’ll give our children enough sense of self-esteem to listen to their own intuition.” This “we”, of course, is Bonham Carter and Tim Burton, her now former partner (“boyfriend” was her preferred term), who directed her in seminally batty films such as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the first Alice. Having begun their relationship in 2001, after Burton cast her as a chimpanzee in Planet of the Apes, the tousle-topped power couple separated in 2014, causing what seemed a remarkably heartfelt sadness among their fans.

59 Although they never married (she doesn’t believe in marriage, thinking “people are not necessarily meant to be together for ever”), they have two children, Billy Ray, 12, and Nell, 9, and still operate as a family. “Both of us are strongly individualistic and have always done our own thing, but I’d still like to think we have a partnership in raising the children,” she says. “That definitely still exists.” The partnership works because they still maintain their famously unconventional domestic arrangements. They live in a short terrace comprising three 19th-century artists’ cottages in Belsize Park, northwest London, which are connected internally, with Bonham Carter, Burton and the children and nanny each using one as their own territory. She isn’t dating yet, but is coming to terms with being single. She recently told Harper’s Bazaar that she knows she’ll fall in love again at some point, but is “beginning to have fun again, which is nice. I can now watch whatever I want on telly. I go to bed early, probably about 8 pm. I’m being entirely selfish, or as selfish as you can be when you have kids.” She also says she sees no barrier to working with Burton again. “I understand him well and he understands me. It might be easier to work together without being together any more.” He was a co-producer on Alice Through the Looking Glass (it was directed by James Bobin), but she didn’t mind reprising the Red Queen role he created for her, a character she based partly on the then-two-year-old Nell. So it sounds terribly sanguine, but I wonder if, in darker moments, she doesn’t have the sense of failure that most of us have when a relationship ends? “No, because I think the success of a relationship…” she pauses and thinks for a moment. “If it isn’t for ever, that doesn’t mean it’s a failure. The important thing is that you have to allow the other person to grow. And if they’re not going in the same direction, however heartbreaking, you have to do what is right for that growth. It’s hard to do something for ever because life is very short.” She pauses again, and suddenly resets herself. “And yet, at the same time, it can feel very long. Ha-ha-ha!” What kind of growth she means she doesn’t say, but perhaps, behind her laugh, there’s a glimpse of the Burton and Bonham Carter who, for all their outward kookiness, are in fact hard-working, high-profile establishment figures. Bonham Carter, the great-granddaughter of the former prime minister Herbert Asquith, hails from a distinguished family and is close to the Camerons; Burton is one of Hollywood’s highest-earning directors and

60 estimated to be worth $140 m. They are often seen out and about in Belsize Park displaying no airs and graces whatsoever, but talking to her, you occasionally sense the dedication and strain required to maintain their positions. Nell, she says, once talked about directing, but decided against it because “Dad’s always stressed”. (“I said, OK, that is a point.”) Her most important support network is a local girl squad that dates back to her pre-fame days. She grew up only a few miles up the road in Golders Green, and is still close to her classmates from South Hampstead High School — she has known her oldest friend since they were both four. “So there are all these 50th parties now. It’s, like, do we all have to have a party? It’s exhausting. But then I think, well, I made it!” No angst, then? No staring at the ceiling at 3 am with “the fear”? “Well, it’s preferable to being dead, isn’t it? I don’t think it’s something you can bother much about. I’m here, I’m reasonably healthy and I’m having fun. Anyway, we don’t all age at the same rate, do we?” She freely admits to having a bit of Botox now and again, but tries to focus on the body parts that are holding up well, because “you can get depressed about little bits, and feel like, ‘Oh God, a wrinkle!’ But if you do that, you get a negative list in your head. The thing is, bits of you age at different speeds. I mean, my knees are incredibly old, they’re about 100, but there are other bits of me that are not so old. There are a lot of really active older people, and if you keep your basic health, including your mental health, you can only get better.” In some ways, she has already proven her point about improving with age. While entertainers usually start wild and grow more conservative, she began as a Merchant Ivory twee lady and turned into a midlifer with a unique, bonkers signature look that made her a fashion icon after 40. She usually wears Vivienne Westwood on the red carpet, but at 45 was cast by Marc Jacobs in his Juergen Teller-shot campaign for his AW11 collection. It has been a gratifying experience for a woman who, after her role in A Room with a View in 1985 made her famous at 20, found that media attention made her feel somewhat anxious about her appearance. “I was called an English rose, but I never looked British. My mother is half-French, half- Spanish, and I look like her, dark. When I was young, it was weird. Until you have a bit of confidence in yourself and learn not to pay too much attention to body shape or looks or what people say, it can be lethal.” It was partly through a shared sense of style that she bonded with Johnny Depp, whom she describes as her “little brother” and who is godfather to both

61 Billy Ray and Nell. “When we meet, it’s always ‘What have you come as?’” she says. “We’ll both be looking at each other, because we both like getting dressed up. We both wear too much. I’m really envious of all his accessories and paraphernalia. He loves to disguise himself, as I have a tendency to do, too.” I ask who else she’d like to work with, and she says “anyone with talent and a vision”, though not if it means spending a long time in Hollywood (“It has a different outlook to me, though I do like the weather and the parking”). Maybe a big TV series, a Netflix, say, or HBO? Certainly, she says, because the quality of writing is there now, and “most telly gets seen. You have an automatic audience of a few million, which isn’t the case with a low-budget film. I’ve done many films like that, that I’m proud of, but that have hardly seen the light of day. “There are specific people I’d like to do things with, but, to be honest, I can’t think of them because I’m knackered after a long photoshoot, and what I’d really like is a nice long snooze,” she says. “I want to do something I haven’t done before, and if not, I’d like to be at home. I like pretending to be other people, and it’s a bonus that I get paid for it.” She laughs again, and then it is time for her to leave for the school run. It is tempting to make a pseudo-profound point about pretending to be other people and not knowing who she really is, but it just seems that she’s happiest mucking about with the kids or immersed in work — like every other middle- aged person in Britain, except she does it dressed in a black lace bodice and army boots while laughing in the pasty face of convention. Which is probably why we love her so very much – broomstick, bloomers and all.

Article B The Telegraph 7 March 2011 By Nigel Farndale Ian McEwan interview He would rather trash politicians than watch trashy TV. But how does our greatest living novelist unwind? Not easily… As well as the hundreds of books on the shelves there are, on various other tables and surfaces in this high-ceilinged drawing room, further neat piles of books. It is as if Ian McEwan, the man who lives here, needs them to be within reach at all times, lifebuoys to a nervous swimmer.

62 But there are also hints of a life beyond books, a hinterland: the Bridget Riley paintings that frame the fireplace, the electric guitar on a stand and the drinks, a collection of bottles on a lacquered Chinese cabinet. One of them is Johnnie Walker Black Label, the favoured poison of his friend Christopher Hitchens. It is half empty, or half full, depending. “That? Yes, that’s his. No one else drinks it. I hope he will one day come back to finish it.” The Hitch has cancer, a subject he has written about with great poignancy, wit and grace for Vanity Fair. “He still drinks, but more wine than Scotch. Because he’s so oxlike in his strength I don’t think he knew how to be ill. I’m going over to Washington to see him next week.” You imagine that Martin Amis will also have a half full bottle of Black Label somewhere in his house, also keeping vigil. There are other members of this gang, such as Salman Rushdie and Richard Dawkins, but McEwan, Amis and the Hitch form the unholy trinity, as reflected in a photograph taken about five years ago in Uruguay. McEwan has a brotherly arm around Hitchens’ shoulder. There must have been many philosophical discussions among these friends over the years about the nature of mortality, but now that one of them is having to confront his own, does that change the terms of the debate, from the abstract to the concrete? “Well we’re all getting to that age, late fifties and early sixties, when people get ill. It all begins to feel horribly finite. But I don’t think it becomes harder to talk or write about. If anything it becomes harder to avoid. It becomes an inevitable subject, as it became for Roth and Bellow and Updike.” At 62, Ian McEwan at least has the consolation of being described as our greatest living novelist, thanks to his having pulled off the unusual feat of writing literary novels that sell like commercial ones, by the million, most notably with Atonement in 2001. He began as a writer of short stories, having his first collection, First Love, Last Rites, published in his mid-twenties. It won the Somerset Maugham award in 1976 and, since then, his books have won just about every award going, including the Whitbread for The Child in Time (1987) and the Booker for Amsterdam (1998). His latest, Solar, is a little about global warming and a lot about a womanising Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose best work is behind him. It won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. More typical of his oeuvre is Saturday (2005), a meditation on the post- 9/11 world, one that is far from comic. Its protagonist, the neurosurgeon Henry Perowne, lives in a large Georgian town house that is based on this one,

63 overlooking the same square in central London. It won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. McEwan’s is an idiosyncratic literary voice, but if he can be compared to anyone it is the American novelist John Updike. They were friends and Updike’s death two years ago affected McEwan deeply. “I did feel something really dropped out of my world. It was the death of an irreplaceable consciousness. He was such a great namer of things. From the time I read Rabbit Run at the age of 18, he had always been there. Always more essays, more poetry, more stories. I went to stay with him with my wife in 2008 and had a really nice time and we were making arrangements to go again.” At least with Updike McEwan has three shelves of his books. “Yes, in that sense he is still a living presence for me. But like this idea of living on in the memories of others, that’s no real life for a fellow, is it?” So it’s no consolation for him to think he might live on through his work? “Not really.” What about through his genes, his two sons? “Yes, but you get watered down with each generation. Your grandchildren will have a quarter of your genes and their children an eighth. It’s a fade out.” McEwan of course, like The Hitch and Dawkins, is an avowed atheist and when we talk about the Christian belief in an afterlife he says: “Do you think they really believe it? I’ve been to funerals where I was pretty sure the majority were atheists and they listened to the vicar say that the deceased had gone to a better place and everyone’s toes curled. “We can’t prove it’s not so, but the chances that it is are rather meagre. If they did believe you all meet up again in this big theme park in the sky why were they crying? How can you say you believe in the afterlife and weep at the finality of death?” There may be no immortality through books, but does he ever feel the urge to account for his life in a memoir, as several of his friends have done? “I would love to write a book as good as Experience, or Hitch-22, but I keep drifting into another novel. I’ve got notes.” Is his “Ian McEwan shelf” an extended memoir, the story of his literary life in several volumes? “It’s a metafiction, I suppose. The row of books an author ends up with. It is not something you could have plotted, one leading to the other. Knowing that it’s finite, knowing that you might be two thirds of the way through, or even that you might be at the end now because you may run out of time and fall ill, or be knocked down by a bus, that’s a strange feeling.”

64 Like Hitchens and Amis, McEwan has had episodes in his life that have been stranger than fiction. In 2003, he discovered he had a long lost brother. “Yes, and he wrote a book about it called Complete Surrender which was what the advert in the paper had said when he was put up for adoption. That had my father’s fingerprints all over it. ‘Complete surrender’ being a military term.” (His father, a domineering man, had been an army major who had been commissioned from the ranks.) But would there also, I ask, be episodes in his life which he found too painful to write about? He is happily married now to the journalist Annalena McAfee, but there was an earlier marriage to Penny Allen which ended acrimoniously. The acrimony indeed made headlines in 1999 when Allen absconded with their youngest son to France, McEwan having been given sole custody of both their sons. In the ensuing proceedings at the High Court in London, Allen was criticised by the judge for having conducted a “vitriolic campaign” against McEwan, and was barred from speaking publicly about their relationship. McEwan, for his part, was commended as “a model of courtesy and restraint”. “Yeah well that would have to be dealt with if I were to write a memoir,” he says now. “I don’t think it would be too painful personally, it’s just I feel that since I’m the one who has access to all the channels of communication it would be unbalanced and unfair to use them. Also I don’t like reading people moaning on about their divorces. Funny how you always hear the version of the good person. Yet there are always two sides.” One event I’d like to read about in his memoir, I say, is the fatwa; when it was issued Salman Rushdie took refuge in McEwan’s cottage in the Cotswolds. “Well it wasn’t my cottage. We were borrowing it from friends. I don’t think I ever admired a man more than him that night because it was so fresh and frightening as it was unfolding. We listened to the news together over breakfast the next morning and he was the lead item. Salman’s writing a memoir of the fatwa now.” I guess for his generation that was when they were forced to face up to the meaning of Islamofascism. “Yes, that was why we fell out with parts of the Left. Salman’s experience was chapter one and 9/11 was chapter two. “We had already seen the difficulties of reconciling freedom of expression with inclusivity and pluralism. The Left, or at least the SWP, were aligning themselves with Islamism because they saw them as the shock troops of anti- Americanism.”

65 Rattling the cage of the unreconstructed Left does seem to have become a hobby of McEwan’s. When I meet him he has just stepped off a plane from Israel where he has been accepting the Jerusalem Prize, much to the annoyance of the pro-Palestinian Left in this country. As it turned out, he wanted to use the platform to have a go at his hosts, the Israelis. “I’m not a very political person actually. I found myself standing with this speech burning a hole in my pocket, talking to the mayor who I know is quite a tough guy and Shimon Peres. I thought how did I get myself into this? Not looking forward to this at all.” When you go to a place like Israel though, he adds, it does affect your writing. “There’s only one subject in Israel. It’s a place fatally lacking in small talk, and I mean that as a compliment. I re-read the thing I am working on on the plane last night and it left me cold. Suddenly it didn’t look as interesting.” Can he say what it’s about? “It’s too fragile to talk about. I might talk it out of existence. But it’s historical. Set in the Seventies.” I wouldn’t be surprised if, before he gets to work properly on that, he feels the urge to write about the Arab Spring. His fiction, after all, often inhabits the space where public events overlap with private lives. And he is gripped by the rolling news coverage at the moment, not least because part of his childhood was spent in Libya. “My expertise on Libya is limited by the fact that I haven’t been there since 1960,” he says. “But what a brute. I always thought Gaddafi was a vicious, crazy person. That footage of him making his long, rambling speech as he stands by the ruins left from the American bombing, that’s my old primary school. That’s where I went to school from six to 11 and he’s made it his headquarters.” It is understandable that he doesn’t like talking about a book that is in its embryonic stages, but what about books that are finished? In his preface to A Move Abroad (1983) he wrote about the sense of betrayal he felt towards his books when he talked about them on publicity tours, becoming “practised at a certain kind of wind storm of words, a self-protecting blather”. Does he still resent talking about his books? “I don’t resent it at all and for the first few months after publication I am a sincere double glazing salesman. I’m engaged, but inevitably repetition dulls that. On the positive side it does let you let go of a book, somewhere among all those explanations lies a useful death.” In the film A Ploughman’s Lunch, written by McEwan, there is a scene in which two characters at a poetry reading mock a member of the audience for

66 asking the poet where he gets his ideas. I tell McEwan I remember him giving a reading in 1986 and the first question afterwards was… where do you get your ideas? He answered politely on that occasion, but does he feel vague contempt for such questions? “No, I feel very protective of anyone who asks a stupid question. I can’t bear it when other people laugh at them. We were in Dublin about five years ago and a girl stood up and said ‘What’s it like to be you?’ Everyone laughed at her and she blushed. I said it’s a very good question for a novelist because what it’s like to be someone is at the heart of what we do. Actually I don’t remember this happening, but Annalena does and now the memory has been planted as if it is my own.” He says that when you agree to do a book tour you enter an agreement. “You have to give yourself to it and it is a self-selected group. You are animated by the good will. The people who loathe you aren’t there.” Speaking of which, there was a rather bitchy piece about him in the Evening Standard last year, about there being a McEwan backlash. “Yes I saw that.” Was it motivated by jealousy, does he suppose? “I think they were getting people to say what were the books of the decade. So inevitably someone said the worst book was Atonement and then they found some other examples of people saying that online and ran them all together, very kindly. An example of the road rage you get on the internet. Do you ever read the comment threads under your articles on the web?” “God no! Never go below.” Zadie Smith, among others, has referred to a certain writing style as being McEwanesque. What does he take that to mean? “I suppose it once would have meant weird, psychotic violence and the macabre. What do you think it means?” An accumulation of detail. A certain realism. A belief that anything has the potential to become interesting if you examine it closely enough. And there’s often a random event that acts as a pivotal moment for the characters, and they have to live with its consequences. “But doesn’t all fiction have that? If you inhabit your own mind you feel free to do anything. We know what we mean by Pinteresque and Kafkaesque but I don’t really know what McEwanesque means. Perhaps it just means I have a name ending in an open vowel sound.” He heads off to make us both mugs of tea and when he comes back he is

67 holding something he has just opened in the post. It is a card with a black- and-white photograph on it of a child pushing a pram. Beside the child is a man in African dress. “Your starter for 10. Who’s that?” I examine it. “You? As a child in Libya?” “Richard Dawkins. It’s him as a child in Kenya. It’s an invitation to his 70th birthday party. Such a strange picture.” It occurs to me that the term McEwanesque might apply to his life as much as to his work. He seems to regard the world with a mixture of wry amusement and bird-like curiosity. He also seems to be a methodical man, deliberate and unhurried. Indeed he tells me, rather surprisingly, that he is a slow reader, 30 pages an hour. One imagines he’s not much given to frivolity. In fact, I say, I have an image of him gliding from one Hampstead dinner party to another, all fine wine and cerebral conversation. Does he ever slum it intellectually? Watch My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding on telly while eating a Big Mac? “Er, I don’t eat Big Macs. Where do I let my hair down? Walking in the country with friends is where I feel completely free. I’ve never had a great taste, as Martin and Hitch have, for seeking out low culture. Violent films and so on.” Or trying out a brothel in the name of research? “Yes, but they did that a long time ago. I occasionally watch a football match on television, but I cannot bear the commercials. I watch The Wire but I suppose that is considered high culture. I can never knuckle down to reading all the way through The Sun, as Martin can. That for me would be such an effort.” He stares unseeingly out of the window. “I like the picture you paint of my life of cerebral conversation and fine wine but it’s not quite like that. I do like to go to a bar and listen to bands play the blues. That is an intense pleasure for me. I like to be 12 feet from the band, not in a seat, near the bar, beer in hand.” So that’s what the electric guitar is for, the one in the corner of this room? “Actually it was a 50th birthday present from my wife. I had every intention of learning how to play it but I never seem to have had the time.” Ah yes, time. In his early novels, it was often presented as something elusive and protean, a McEwanesque conceit. As he gets older he seems to be more accepting of the idea that time is also linear, that it can “wind polish” your life, and that, for your friends as well as for yourself, it can, and must, run out.

68 Article C The Guardian 19 February 2014 Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird author, dies aged 89 Writer whose 1961 novel became a defining text of 20th-century literature and of racial troubles in the American south has died in Monroeville, Alabama Harper Lee, whose 1961 novel To Kill a Mockingbird became a national institution and the defining text on the racial troubles of the American deep south, has died at the age of 89. Lee, or Nelle as she was known to those close to her, had lived for several years in a nursing home less than a mile from the house in which she had grown up in Monroeville, Alabama – the setting for the fictional Maycomb of her famous book. The town’s mayor, Mike Kennedy, confirmed the author’s death. Until last year, Lee had been something of a one-book literary wonder. To Kill a Mockingbird, her 1961 epic narrative about small-town lawyer Atticus Finch’s battle to save the life of a black resident threatened by a racist mob, sold more than 40m copies around the world and earned her a Pulitzer prize. George W Bush awarded her the presidential medal of freedom in 2007. But from the moment Mockingbird was published to almost instant success the author consistently avoided public attention and insisted that she had no intention of releasing further works. That self-imposed purdah ended abruptly when, amid considerable controversy, it was revealed a year ago that a second novel had been discovered, which was published as Go Set a Watchman in July 2015. The house where Lee lived for years with her sister Alice sat quiet and empty on Friday. The inside of the house appeared unchanged from when she lived there – antique furniture was stacked with books, audio cassettes and gift baskets. Her neighbor for 40 years, Sue Sellers, said Lee would have appreciated the quiet. “She was such a private person,” she said. “All she wanted was privacy, but she didn’t get much. There always somebody following her around.” In recent years Lee’s health had declined. Seller said the last time she spent any real time with Lee they went to breakfast together. “The whole way home she drove her big car in the turn lane,” she said. “She couldn’t see. I was scared to death.”

69 The last time she saw Lee was a few months ago at the Meadows nursing home. Sellers brought flowers. “She just hollered out: ‘I can’t see and I can’t hear!’” Sellers said. “So I just told her goodbye.” Lee was born in Monroeville in 1926 and grew up under the stresses of segregation. As a child she shared summers with another aspiring writer, Truman Capote, who annually came to stay in the house next door to hers and who later invited her to accompany him to Holcomb, Kansas, to help him research his groundbreaking 1966 crime book In Cold Blood. Capote informed the figure of the young boy Dill in Mockingbird, with his friend the first-person narrator Scout clearly modelled on the childhood Lee herself. Lee was the youngest child of lawyer Amasa Coleman Lee and Frances Finch Lee. Her father acted as the template for Atticus Finch whose resolute courtroom dignity as he struggles to represent a black man, Tom Robinson, accused of raping a white woman provides the novel’s ethical backbone. Last year’s publication of Go Set a Watchman obliged bewildered fans of the novel to reappraise the character of Finch. In that novel, which was in fact the first draft of Mockingbird that had been rejected by her publisher, Finch was portrayed as having been a supporter of the South’s Jim Crow laws, saying at one point: “Do you want Negroes by the carload in our schools and churches and theaters?” Within minutes of the announcement of the novelist’s death, encomiums began to flow. Her literary agent Andrew Nurnberg said in a statement: “We have lost a great writer, a great friend and a beacon of integrity.” He added: “Knowing Nelle these past few years has been not just an utter delight but an extraordinary privilege. When I saw her just six weeks ago, she was full of life, her mind and mischievous wit as sharp as ever. She was quoting Thomas More and setting me straight on Tudor history.” Michael Morrison, her publisher at HarperCollins US, said: “The world knows Harper Lee was a brilliant writer but what many don’t know is that she was an extraordinary woman of great joyfulness, humility and kindness. She lived her life the way she wanted to – in private – surrounded by books and the people who loved her.” In Lee’s home state of Alabama, a center of the violent upheavals over civil rights that immediately preceded the publication of Mockingbird, literary experts reflected on the power of the novel to shift the ingrained assumptions of white Alabamans. Jacqueline Trimble, president of the Alabama Writers’

70 Forum that bequeaths the annual Harper Lee award for literary excellence, said that the book had a profound effect on white residents of the state. “She was able to take the politics of the civil rights era and make them human. She showed people that this was about their neighbors, their friends, someone they knew, not just about the issues,” Trimble said. Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, tweeted a quote from Mockingbird: “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

Article D The Guardian 12 August 2014 Robin Williams obituary Actor and comedian who made his television breakthrough with Mork & Mindy and went on to star in films such as Good Morning, Vietnam, Dead Poets Society and Mrs Doubtfire When the notion of getting in touch with one’s inner child entered popular currency, the standup comedian and actor Robin Williams, who has died aged 63 in a suspected suicide, was ripe to be its poster-boy. Partly it was his limitless energy and floodlight smile, or the frantic chatter that made it sound as if he were constantly interrupting himself or speaking in tongues. But he also resembled strongly a hirsute toddler who had broken out of the playpen to make whoopee. Many of his most popular performances were as child-men rampaging through the prissy adult world. His breakthrough came as the naïve extra- terrestrial Mork in the US sitcom Mork& Mindy, which ran from 1978 to 1982. For that part, the red-and-silver costume that he donned for a monologue at the end of each episode even resembled an infant’s romper suit. In Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), he played the real-life DJ Adrian Cronauer, whose wackiness in the face of war made him a hit with American troops. A swerve into straighter acting, as the literature teacher who challenges convention at a stuffy school in the late-1950s in Dead Poets Society (1989), did not upset this trend. Instead, he transferred deftly his comic skills into a dramatic setting as his character liberated pupils formerly rigid with obedience. Williams did not need to be visible on screen to continue his campaign of disinhibition: some of his most pure and untamed work was as the voice of the Genie in Disney’s Aladdin (1992), for which he improvised the lion’s share of his

71 dialogue while the animators worked around his ad-libs. Any magic that film exudes is largely down to him. It was with a certain inevitability that Williams was cast as the boy who was supposed never to grow up, but did, in Steven Spielberg’s Peter Pan sequel Hook (1992), and as a child with an ageing disorder that made him appear to be an adult in Francis Ford Coppola’s Jack (1996). Had these movies been better, or more beloved, they might have been known as Williams’s signature roles. That status should go instead to his deranged, emotionally naked (and sometimes physically naked) performance in Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King (1991) as a homeless man whose search for the Holy Grail is born out of trauma. He was Oscar-nominated for that, as well as for Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society; he finally won for playing a bereaved therapist in Good Will Hunting (1997). But no performer who had been through the extreme addictions and depression that Williams had (and about which he was candid in his standup routines and interviews) could fail to be aware of his own capacity for darkness. It was this that he gradually began to draw on in a run of serious and even abrasive parts which made the latter stages of his career arguably the most interesting (if the least amusing). Chief among these was Christopher Nolan’s Insomnia (2002), in which he played a suspected murderer hunted by a cop (played by Al Pacino). In the same year, he also starred as a children’s entertainer driven to madness when he is usurped by a younger rival in the bitter comedy Death to Smoochy, and as a lonely photo-counter employee who develops an unhealthy obsession with a family in the thriller One Hour Photo. Though he had not forsaken lighter material altogether, the impression was unmistakably that of a clown wiping off his makeup to show the tears underneath. Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Laura, a fashion model, and Robert, a senior executive at Ford Motor Company. He endured a lonely childhood in which he played mostly on his own in the large family home and was bullied at school for being overweight. The family moved to Marin County, California, when Williams was 16. He was then educated at Claremont Men’s College, where he studied political science and also took improvisation acting classes. He went on to study acting, first at the College of Marin and later at the Juilliard School, New York, from which he graduated in 1976. He auditioned for acting jobs but was forced to earn money instead working as a bartender and in an ice-cream parlour. After he began working the standup circuit in Los Angeles, he got early breaks on TV shows including The Richard Pryor Show and in a small part

72 in the sex comedy Can I Do It ‘Til I Need Glasses (1977). His zany audition for the small role of Mork in two episodes of the long-running sitcom Happy Days led the producer Garry Marshall to remark that Williams was the only alien to try out for the part: “I will never forget the day I met him and he stood on his head in my office chair and pretended to drink a glass of water using his finger like a straw.” His instant popularity guaranteed a spin-off series in which he muddled through earthly life with the help of a sympathetic housemate played by Pam Dawber. “The first season of Mork&Mindy I knew immediately that a three- camera format would not be enough to capture Robin and his genius talent,” said Marshall. “So I hired a fourth camera operator and he just followed Robin. Only Robin. Looking back, four cameras weren’t enough. I should have hired a fifth camera to follow him too.” The show was a ratings hit, and Mork’s -non sensical utterings, including his greeting “Nanu-nanu”, became unlikely catch- phrases. It was here that the child-like persona on which Williams’s career was founded began to take shape. The actor’s first major film role was as the lead in Robert Altman’s live- action version of Popeye (1980). Despite being financed by Disney, this oddball musical was very much an Altman movie, throwing caution and sometimes coherence to the wind. But Williams, bearing engorged prosthetic forearms and sounding unintelligible at times with a pipe lodged in the corner of his mouth, was both perfect and hypnotically strange in the part, opposite Shelley Duvall as Olive Oyl. In later films, he would be the eyecatching main attraction, ceding the spotlight to no one. Here, he was just one among many outlandish elements. In the pictures that immediately followed, he was positively restrained, as though not yet confident that his Morkishness could work in movies. He was the unassuming hero of an adaptation of John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp (1982) and the least wacky participant in the desert-island comedy Club Paradise (1986). But he showed, as a newly fired executive who averts a robbery in The Survivors (1983) and as a Russian saxophonist defecting to the US in Moscow on the Hudson (1984), that his unpredictable but essentially comforting persona was flexible enough to work in a variety of settings. His first hit movie, Good Morning, Vietnam, followed soon after, cementing for cinemagoers an image of Williams to rival the one TV audiences had enjoyed in Mork. The film could be mawkish, as could Williams himself, but this was tempered by its authentic irreverence.

73 The same could not be said of all Williams’s later films. There had always been a needy aspect to even his most scabrous standup routines, and he was never a dangerous comic: inflammatory material was rendered essentially fireproof by those love-me eyes, that gurning grin. Cinema, with its aggrandising close- ups and urging, saccharine scores, could sometimes be his worst enemy. Dead Poets Society had its share of sappiness, not least in the climax in which the students climb onto their desks and salute Williams with Walt Whitman’s line “O Captain! My Captain!” The star, to his credit, underplayed admirably. This was not the case in those films that earned him a reputation as a senti- mentalist. He twinkled unstoppably throughout Awakenings (1990), in which he played Dr Malcolm Sayer, based loosely on Dr Oliver Sacks, and in Toys (1992), where he was the pure-hearted saviour of a toy factory. Mrs Doubtfire (1993) provided an opportunity for Williams to let rip anarchically as a father bonding with his estranged children by posing as their Scottish nanny. That also gave him another smash-hit. But he was pimping for tears and goosebumps again as a man exploring the afterlife in What Dreams May Come, as a doctor trying to prove that laughter is the best medicine in Patch Adams (both 1998), as a simpering android in Bicentennial Man and as a Jewish shopkeeper foster- ing hope in the ghettoes of Nazi-occupied Poland in Jakob the Liar (both 1999). Williams had also been forging a separate career as a pillar of family entertainment in adventures such as Jumanji (1995) and Flubber (1997). This conti nued when he played Teddy Roosevelt in two Night at the Museum films (2006 and 2009); a third, in which he also appears, is due for release later this year. His decision to branch out into more challenging material in the early 2000s came directly after a stretch of ingratiating parts. But unlike, say, Bill Murray’s transformation into an indie icon after Lost in Translation, Williams’s work in films such as Insomnia felt for all its sincerity like a graft that did not take. His image as a human teddy-bear persisted even after he made World’s Greatest Dad (2009), a film he admired greatly, in which he played a father who fabricates his son’s diaries after the boy dies in an auto-erotic accident. Williams’s attempts to kill off his cutesy persona were very much of the one- step-forward, two-steps-back variety. For every World’s Greatest Dad or One Hour Photo, there were many more like the lacklustre comedies RV: Runaway Vacation (2006) or Old Dogs (2009). He was, however, a surprising addition to the cast of The Butler (2013), in which he played Eisenhower. Williams’s work-rate in the last decade was arrested by health problems and by occasional relapses into addiction, the most recent of which incurred

74 a spell in rehab. He had returned to standup in 2008 with a show entitled Weapons of Self-Destruction, though this was interrupted briefly by surgery to replace an aortic valve. “You appreciate little things,” he said after that procedure, “like walks on the beach with a defibrillator.” He is survived by his third wife, Susan Schneider, whom he married in 2011; his son Zachary, from his first marriage, to Valerie Velardi, which ended in divorce; and by his daughter, Zelda, and son, Cody, from his second marriage, to Marsha Garces, which ended in divorce. • Robin McLaurin Williams, actor and comedian, born 21 July 1951; died 11 August 2014.

Questions for discussion 1. Which of the profiles, in your opinion, succeeded in drawing the best verbal picture of the person in question and why? 2. Profiles are very popular as a genre. Why do you think that is a case? 3. How and why are direct quotes important in the profile? 4. How important it is describing the time and place of the interview?

3.3.4 Preview/Curtain-raiser and Retrospective

The articles of this genre set the scene for the events to happen in the near future. They focus not on the news but rather on describing and explaining the news. They will raise and channel the expectations of a reader by characterizing settings, characters and style of an upcoming event. If the article is looking back at the event, it is called a retrospective.

Article A The Guardian 8 February 2016 New Harry Potter book from JK Rowling coming out in July: the play script Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts I & II will be published the day after the play begins in London, picking up the wizard’s story 19 years after the final novel in the series Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s script of the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child is going to be published as a book moments after midnight on 31 July.

75 Timed to coincide with the boy wizard’s birthday, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child Parts I and II will be published by Little, Brown in the UK, Scholastic in the US, and Hachette in Australia. As well as Harry’s birthday, it is also the day after the play opens in London. Pottermore, JK Rowling’s online encyclopedia for the Harry Potter universe, will simultaneously publish the ebook edition. Rowling is working on the play with writer Jack Thorne and director John Tiffany and has said it is an official sequel to the original seven books. It will be set 19 years after the end of the final novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, published in 2007. Harry Potter is now “an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children”, according to a synopsis published on Pottermore last year, and the play will focus on Harry’s youngest son, Albus Severus. “While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places,” the Pottermore synopsis describes. Publisher Little, Brown released JK Rowling’s first adult book, The Casual Vacancy, as well as three crime novels written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith: The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm and Career of Evil. “JK Rowling and her team have received a huge number of appeals from fans who can’t be in London to see the play and who would like to read the play in book format,” said David Shelley, CEO of Little, Brown Literary agency The Blair Partnership, which represents Rowling, said the decision to publish the script of the play was taken following “massive public demand”. Split into two parts due to the “epic nature of the story” according to Rowling, those lucky enough to obtain tickets – the play sold out quickly when tickets went on sale in October – can see it either on separate days or in one epic double bill. Twenty tickets for each performance will be released in an online lottery every Friday afternoon for the duration of the play’s run. Bloomsbury, the UK publisher of the seven Harry Potter books, also announced plans to mark the 20th anniversary of the first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2017, with four new editions of the book, each representing one of the houses at Hogwarts school: Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw.

76 Article B The Guardian 10 February 2016 By Michael Billington Harry Potter and the cursed previews: the opening of plays has become absurd The West End’s preview practice dates back nearly 50 years. As it stands, the outdated system works against the public interest When does Harry Potter and the Cursed Child actually open? The first preview of this two-part show took place on Tuesday night: the second part follows on Thursday. Anxious for a scoop, the Telegraph and the Mirror have both published first-night reports with details of the show. But critics will not be invited to give their verdicts until after the official first night on 30 July. This seven-week gap, unprecedented in London though not in Ne w York, makes nonsense of the whole notion of a “first night” and raises serious questions about the idea of “previews”. In London, the preview practice dates back nearly 50 years. In 1968, the producer Michael Codron caused a furore by announcing that a West End double-bill of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound and Sean Patrick Vincent’s The Audition would have 10 “reduced-price previews” before opening to the press. The idea, imported from New York, was a response to a specific problem: the slow demise of the touring circuit which, in the past, had given creative teams the chance to iron out a show’s technical difficulties before a London opening. Codron’s innovation caused grumbles both from the Society of West End Theatre about prices and from the Critics’ Circle about abuse of standard practice. In the end, Codron won the battle and no one broke the reviewing embargo. Personally, I’ve never been that fussed about previews: I understand the need to get shows right and welcome the idea of lower-price tickets. But a pitch of absurdity was reached last year with the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet at the Barbican. Expectation ran high but a production that wasn’t technically complicated had a full three weeks of previews. The rest is hysteria. The Times famously broke the embargo and despatched their junior theatre critic, Kate Maltby, to review the very first public performance. I attach no blame to Maltby, who had little choice but to obey her editor’s instructions and who wrote a very intelligent, if largely negative, review. But the Times’s action was not only

77 unethical: it also provoked three weeks of media madness about a production that, when officially unveiled, turned out to be a dismal affair. Do we have to go through all this again with Harry Potter? Will we have to suffer nearly two months of press hoopla and online opinion-mongering before the official first night? I guess we will. There is even a danger that, by the time critics get to see the show, they will be reacting as much to the media hype as to what actually happens on stage. Since the whole preview business has got out of hand, I suggest three practical solutions. One is that, in the case of a production like Harry Potter which sparks intense curiosity, showbiz reporters should be formally invited to the first preview not to deliver a verdict but simply to describe the occasion. My second proposal is that preview prices, which have crept up in recent years, should never be more than half that of the cost of post-first-night tickets. My third idea is that no show, however complicated, should be permitted by the Society of London Theatre, as it is now called, to have more than two weeks of previews (maybe three weeks for a two-part show like Harry Potter and the Cursed Child). I doubt anyone will listen to me. But, as operated at present, the whole preview system is outdated, absurd and works against the public interest.

3.3.5 Life-style Feature

Life-style feature articles focus on travel, fashion, diets, popular sports, education, health and so on. They provide information as well as advise. They might be quite lengthy, but easy to read and personal in style.

Article A The Guardian 13 August 2016 By Katie Forster Creativity in Hastings: designers do like to be beside the seaside Nearly 950 years after its eponymous battle, the East Sussex town is undergoing an artistic renaissance When wallpaper designer Deborah Bowness moved to Hastings from London seven years ago, she didn’t expect to be working from a deserted

78 ballroom on the seafront. “It was decayed glamour, battered and worn, with huge windows that looked out on to the sea. I was there for six months,” she says, sitting in a deckchair outside her beach chalet. “In London, I worked in a garage with no natural light, so to have an empty ballroom felt ridiculous.” Bowness, known for her hand-printed wallpaper featuring trompe l’oeil bookshelves, lamps and dresses, is one of the many artists, designers and furniture traders who have flocked to Hastings and nearby St Leonards in recent years. “There is a proper creative community here,” she says. “I now work on an industrial estate, and there’s all sorts going on there: a vintage engineer with beautiful motorbikes, and two set designers.” Hastings was the place to be in the 1960s and 70s, with the likes of the Rolling Stones, the Kinks and Jimi Hendrix performing on the old pier. But years of neglect in the following decades left it a depressed seaside town with high levels of deprivation. The arrival of contemporary art hotspot the Jerwood Gallery, in 2012, and the unveiling of the pier in April (after a £14.2m revamp following a fire) have both boosted the creative credentials of the town, which has been nicknamed Shoreditch-on-Sea. Along with other coastal towns such as Margate, Whitstable and Leigh-on-Sea, it is fast developing a reputation as a more affordable alternative to London and Brighton. The pier, the redevelopment of which was part-crowdfunded, features a sleek contemporary cafe and terrace, and there are plans for open-air screenings. In the Old Town there is also an artisan brewery at the historic First In Last Out pub and an organic bakery, Judges, run by a co-founder of chocolate company Green & Black’s. Designer and Hastings resident Louise Body recommended the town to Bowness, who was sick of the capital’s relentless noise and expense. Body, from Reigate in Surrey, has been in Hastings for a decade. “It feels like Brighton did 20 or 30 years ago,” she says. “It’s easy to run a creative business here, because everything’s quite cheap.” Edward Dyke and Oliver Dean met at Central Saint Martins design school in London in 2006. Together they run homeware store Dyke & Dean in a historic area south of the station known as the America Ground. Their shop is in a grand Victorian building that used to house the printers of the Hastings and St Leonards Observer newspaper (it is now printed in Portsmouth). Their own lighting collection, which they sell alongside other homewares, is so popular they have had to move their workshop to the same

79 industrial estate as Bowness. The pair have another store in Berlin, a pop-up shop in London’s King’s Crossand are in talks to launch in New York. Design has always had ambitions in Hastings, says Dyke: “This building was based on one in St Mark’s Square in Venice.” While Dyke grew up in nearby Rye and now lives in Hastings, Dean lives in east London, where he manages the online business and commutes regularly to the shop – an hour and a half from Charing Cross. “Dragon Bar, a bistro on the high street, has a sister restaurant in Shoreditch,” says Dean. “When I came here, I thought: I know I can spend some time here.” Designer and food photographer Alastair Hendy also lives between London and Hastings. “A lot of people are moving here,” he says. He restored a Georgian shop on the high street, opening AG Hendy and Co in 2011, selling classic household products. Many look Victorian but are actually new, from old-fashioned ostrich feather dusters to a best-selling nail brush. “We don’t sell anything plastic,” says Hendy. “We want to make housework an enjoyable experience. It’s practical, but when it’s hanging up it doesn’t have to be in a cupboard.” Hendy has childhood memories of Hastings beach as his grandparents lived nearby. “There’s a bit of ‘us and them’ – locals and outsiders – but people are pretty warm.” While this stretch of the south coast is said to be one of the sunniest places in the UK, I’m told the windy winters can be gruelling. Luckily, the day I visit the town is a sun-soaked haven. I stop for lunch in West Hill cafe overlooking the sparkling bay, and watch a seagull steal another customer’s chips. Later, sitting on the beach, I devour an artisan pistachio ice-cream and start to consider moving here myself. Following the pier’s devastating fire, designer Stewart Walton, who runs the Hastings and Bexhill Wood Recycling Project, has been turning its salvaged wood into contemporary garden furniture. Residents have been snapping up the tables, chairs and keyrings made from the former landmark. “The wood has the spirit of all the musicians who played there,” says Walton, who employs people from the nearby jobcentre to work on his projects. Another designer who has been involved in community projects is letterpress printmaker Pea Crabtree, originally from Lancashire, who runs her Lucky Budgie studio on the high street. She is raising money to bring a vintage steamroller, used to make large-scale prints, to one of the town’s most deprived estates. She plans to run workshops with young people there to commemorate the 950th anniversary of the battle of Hastings in October.

80 Like everyone I meet, Crabtree has embraced Hastings, and extols the benefits of coastal life. “There is a spirit of fun here, like being on permanent holiday,” she says. “I don’t think I could ever live anywhere without the sea again.”

Article B The Telegraph 20 August 2016 By Daisy Buchanan FaceBragging is the new way to make us all feel inadequate The trend for creating an online portrait of a perfect life is toxic, says Daisy Buchanan, and it’s fuelling marriage breakdowns This time last year, my husband and I were planning our wedding. If you’ve ever been married, you’ll know that it doesn’t matter whether your initial plans include rose walls and ice sculptures, or just pork pies and an upstairs room in a pub, weddings have a way of engendering a kind of all-consuming madness that will see you having conversations with your loved ones that go: “I’ve commissioned the custom blackboard and ordered 200 lidless jam jars – have you had any luck with those metre-high chocolate ampersands?” Like many brides, I embarked upon a weird health regime. I briefly gave up alcohol, practised yoga, and rubbed rosehip oil into my face. This was because I wanted to look good on the day – but more than that, I wanted to look good when the day was documented on Facebook. The bar had been set high by other brides I knew, and I was genuinely terrified that my matrimonials wouldn’t measure up on social media. I had to look hotter and happier than I had ever been, regardless of how I felt on the inside. Secretly, the prospect of having unflattering photos was my second greatest anxiety about the day – the first being that my future husband would realise that his wife-to-be was vain and insane, and decide not to turn up. You’d hope the urge to FaceBrag – use social media to boast about the high points of your relationship – would ease after the wedding. However, it appears to be the beginning of a toxic trend, in which couples carefully curate an impossibly perfect picture of their loved-up lives together. Ostensibly, it’s sharing; in reality, it’s obnoxious showing off. Now divorce lawyers say they’re seeing a rise in the number of couples seeking separations because their relationships are “imperfect” and don’t measure up to what they’re seeing online. Holly Tootill of JMW Solicitors told

81 The Telegraph that around one in five marital splits on the firm’s books involve spouses complaining about their “imperfect” marriages – with social media a major conduit for discontent and unrealistic expectations. “[Facebook] looks so glamorous and so very exciting that people make negative comparisons with their own home lives and their husbands or wives as a result,” says Tootill. “More and more clients tell us that they regret how their marriage isn’t perfect in the way that they were led to believe it might be.” You don’t say. A few weeks ago, I had dinner with a friend and her partner, having frothed with low-level envy for months as I gazed at their perfect Facebook life. He’d tagged her in a picture up a ladder, looking winsome in dungarees, wielding a paintbrush, captioned: “The most beautiful woman in the world is making our home beautiful too!” I’d seen them dressed up outside a casino on an impulsive Vegas holiday (“#YOLO!”) and a photo she’d posted of smoked salmon and avocado toast (“So glad I married a man who brings me breakfast in bed!”). However, dinner was tense, because it was apparent that they were in the middle of an enormous argument, that continued whenever I went to the loo. “How was Vegas? It looked amazing!” I asked brightly. “We haven’t finished paying for it yet,” she said glumly, as he snapped, “I told you I was done talking about that!” Another friend posts plenty of pictures of her husband playing with the kids, advocating the joys of family life. I broached the subject with her after we’d had some wine. “It’s great that Dan is so hands-on, he seems like such a good dad,” I enthused. She laughed mirthlessly for a solid 10 seconds, and then looked like she was about to cry. “He’s with them for an hour or two on Sundays, tops. And he calls it ‘babysitting’,” she explained. Another friend’s neighbour got divorced last year, lost a lot of weight and seems to be posting pictures of her transformation by the hour (and permanently bikini’d). My friend told me: “I hear men grumbling that they don’t understand why their wives don’t go down the gym and do what she’s done. But what’s worse is that I then hear from the neighbour, who sees their wives posting about fabulous anniversary trips, and feels sad and lonely because she can’t imagine anyone whisking her away to New York for a wedding anniversary.” It’s a vicious circle. Facebook makes us feel inadequate, so we try to compete, putting a positive spin and a pretty filter on an ordinary moment – prompting someone else to do the same. I think social media turns us all into teenagers:

82 it doesn’t matter whether you’re 16 or 60, when you sign up to Facebook you put yourself under pressure to appear popular, fun and loved, regardless of your reality. It’s easy to see our friends as celebrities, and our Facebook feed as a Hello! magazine spread in which they’re inviting us into their gracious home to gaze upon their perfect lives and framed family photos. There isn’t an equivalent stream that reads like the National Enquirer, so we don’t see the other side – gossip, scandal and the holidays that start with a two-hour argument in a cross-Channel-ferry car park because no one sorted out the insurance. But what’s the solution? Live Tweeting arguments with spouses? Insta- gramming burned dinners and date nights gone wrong? Sometimes I feel inadequate about my partnership purely because my husband refuses to be in a relationship with me on Facebook. However, I think he might be onto something. In my first year of marriage, I’ve learned that when I feel insecure, I turn to social media for a boost. Yet, when I’m really happy, I simply can’t be bothered to put up a smug post.

Article C The Telegraph 20 August 2016 By Judith Woods Decided to lead a new life? Forget it Holidays can make us vow to live better back home. Judith Woods explains why it never happens You’ve just returned from holiday and you’re scrolling through those photos of precious moments in the sun. Wow, don’t you look radiant, rejuvenated and relaxed? Look – there’s a doorstop literary novel on your lap, a plate of exotic fruit on the table and a serene smile playing about your lips while you watch your children with genuine fondness as they shriek, splash and try to murder each other in the pool. You love this laid-back, laissez-faire version of you. So what’s stopping you from feeling like that every day? Absolutely nothing, that’s what! It surely just takes willpower. Forget those prosaic, pious promises we make on a grey January 1; they stem from a sense of duty not desire. It’s the Summer Holiday Resolutions that

83 we really care about. There’s nothing like a glorious week on the Algarve, 10 days in Andalucia or a fortnight island-hopping around Greece to give you a fresh perspective on what’s really important. The vows we make then are about self improvement and spiritual enrichment. Easy to embrace when it’s 36 degrees and someone has just handed you a daquiri. But Seven Sun Lounger Steps To A Better You once you’re back in Britain? Tricky. Here’s why… 1 Be more mindful Remember how each sun-dappled moment counted as you gazed across the lavender fields in Aix-en-Provence? And the days were packed with tiny incident: the leisurely walk to the boulangerie, the siesta after lunch, the aperitif before dinner? Back in Britain you’ll be lucky to get the last Warburtons at the corner shop, you feel guilty about napping during the day – and aperitif sounds poncey. 2 Eat fresh fruit for breakfast every day So easy, so refreshing – when five kinds of melon have been laid out on the hotel buffet. Passion fruit pips on Greek yoghurt, real pineapple chunks and mango smoothies are fine in theory. In practice, three days after your trip to Sainsbury’s, you’re looking at a rock-hard plum, a blackened banana and a load of fruit flies by way of a protein chaser. 3 Learn a language Who could resist the urge to master Italian? The mellifluous vowels, the fluting cadences all spur you on to sign up for evening classes. You will set off purposefully every Thursday night until it rains, when you will find a pretext not to go. You will never return. Or watch Inspector Montalbano without subtitles. 4 Read more books and watch less telly Great works of literature go hand in hand with travel; for every destination there is a splendid work of fiction bringing the landscape and people alive. Back home, you suggest rationing television, until everyone starts raving about the new series of Stranger Things and you succumb to a Netflix binge once more. 5 Set aside me-time and take up yoga Yoga is great, isn’t it? Part meditation, part fitness, ideal for your physical and mental wellbeing. In the UK, however, it’s rare to practise it by an infinity pool; instead you have to take your pick between a sweaty gym or a draughty church hall. And it’s at 9.30am on a Saturday, just when you most need a hair

84 of the downward dog. Oh and it’s a drop-in, which is ironic because almost the very first thing you do after joining is drop out. 6 Reconnect with nature It’s easy to admire the concentrated focus and beauty of a honeybee on a blossom or a tiny lizard on the stone wall when you have nothing else to do. But finding the joy in the natural world is considerably harder when you’ve come back to an empty fridge, half the garden has died and the cats keep peeing on the soft furnishings as punishment for going on holiday. 7 Eat more fish and salad You resolve to adopt a Mediterranean diet and feed the family mounds of whitebait and fresh salad every day. It’s the way you ate in Rimini, so why should it be any harder in High Wycombe? It’s not – as long as you take time off work in order to squeeze the tomatoes in the local market every day, lovingly prepare delicious salads from scratch, keep the kids off school so they can fit in a two-hour lunch, then a nap and stay up past midnight eating dinner. Which, when you think about it, is pretty much the definition of a holiday. So don’t be too hard on yourself. Truth be told, Summer Holiday Resolutions, like local alcoholic drinks, don’t travel well. But there is, of course, a better way to rediscover the very best version of you: book another break.

3.3.6 Timeless Feature

Timeless features focus on some interesting subjects and have no specific news angle. Time has no importance. The subjects under question are timeless. Such articles educate, entertain, explain, amuse and are simply enjoyable to read.

Article A The Guardian 10 November 2014 By Eminer Saner The working women’s charter: forty years on, women are still struggling Four decades after the launch of an ambitious charter, only four of the 10 demands have been met. What went wrong? The launch of the working women’s charter in 1974 was met with exhilaration, says Chris Coates. She remembers crowded conference halls and energetic

85 meetings, and exciting plans to shape the lives of working women. The charter had been drawn up by trade unionists and those active in the women’s liberation movement, and was a list of 10 demands, including equal pay, equal access to education, free contraception and “readily available” abortion, and more women in positions of power in politics and public life. Coates, a trade union activist, was at Congress House, the TUC headquarters, where the charter was presented to a packed conference room. “The idea was to then go and mobilise in local areas,” she says. “It was a real coming together [of different activist groups], which was probably the first time we tried to do that. I think that was the strength of the charter: trying to link up the ideas that had come out of women’s liberation with the organisational strength of the trade union. It was very exciting.” As the journalist Geoffrey Sheridan noted, writing about the working women’s charter campaign in 1974 for the Guardian: “The demands would be quite unexceptionable to anyone who has been active in the women’s movement, yet what is crucial about the charter is that it links up women’s situation at work with their position at home and in the family. It bridges what trade unionists ordinarily regard as ‘economic’ issues with ‘social’ issues. For women especially, these issues are inextricably intertwined.” Did Coates feel there could be lasting change? “It was a different time, anything seemed possible, and it seemed really possible that we could achieve all those things in a short space of time. I know part of that was the optimism of youth, but the strength of the trade union movement made a huge difference.” Forty years on, that optimism seems almost quaint (the charter itself suffered a blow when it was rejected by the TUC a year after it launched). “When I looked through it, I was quite surprised,” says Pamela Cox, professor of history and sociology at the University of Essex, who helped organise a conference in London at the weekend to mark 40 years since its inception. “I think even those who were very aware of the challenges women faced would probably not have thought that in 40 years, things would be quite as challenging.” Cox says only four of the 10 demands have been achieved. “We’ve seen real progress on equal access to education and training, and girls do very well at school and university. Equal legal rights is another area where we’ve seen change – women don’t need to ask their husbands’ permission for a mortgage, which was the kind of thing people in the 70s were fighting for.”

86 Reproductive rights are fairly ingrained, despite repeated challenges from anti-abortion campaigners. “One of their other demands was greater family allowances,” says Cox, “and although we’ve seen changes to that policy recently, support for working families is often better than it was in 1974.” But that’s about it, she says. Demands for 18 weeks’ maternity leave on full pay? Women can take up to 52 weeks’ statutory leave, but are only paid 90% of their salary for the first six weeks, before dropping further. The charter’s wish for more women in public and political life? Only 23% of MPs and one in 10 council leaders are women. Just 8% of high court judges, 17% of FTSE 100 directors and 36% of senior civil servants are female. Their demand for equal pay? The gender pay gap widened between 2012 and 2013, and now stands at nearly 16%. Cox points to Asda, which is facing mass legal action by shopfloor employees, mainly female, who claim they were paid less than the male employees working in the supermarket’s warehouse jobs. The 1974 charter came six years after the victory of the women at the Dagenham car plant, who had been paid less than men doing equivalent jobs, and which gave rise to the 1970 Equal Pay Act. Why, more than 40 years on, are women still having these struggles? “It’s partly that we’ve still got a gender-segregated labour market, with men and women grouped into particular kind of jobs, particularly at the lower end,” says Cox. “That helps to explain why the warehouse men of Asda get paid more than the women on the shopfloor, even though they are doing comparable work.” Sarah Veale, head of the equality and employment rights department at the TUC, says workers have become “very much individualised – women don’t know what other people are being paid and they often don’t realise that they are being unlawfully paid less than a man doing an equivalent job. You need something in law to oblige all employers to report every year on what their pay systems are.” The charter was careful to note that in bringing women’s pay in line with men’s, they shouldn’t allow men’s working conditions to be lowered. In any case, Cox says, the biggest problems now are zero-hours contracts and below living-wage pay. Many of the changes in work culture have had poor consequences for women, says Veale. “You’ll hear employers arguing that the only way the economy is apparently reviving is because they are able to be flexible, and flexibility is a wonderful thing, particularly for women, so they can collect their children from school. Although yes, that is the case, they’re not being paid while they’re doing that. A lot of women on zero-

87 hours contracts and precarious arrangements don’t want to have periods of employment time when they’re not being paid, and arrangements that are so flexible that they don’t have the faintest idea when they’re going to be needed and for how long.” Balancing work life with family is a crucial area where women particularly still suffer, says Cox. The 1974 charter called for free and flexible childcare, “and we’re nowhere near that. The cost of childcare is astronomical and that is one of the biggest issues facing mothers.” Others are taking note – on Monday, the CBI, the business lobby group not known for its radical feminist credentials, called on the government to extend free childcare for three- and four-year-olds to younger children. The other big issue for working mothers is job security and promotion, says Cox. “There are plenty of professional women I know who find themselves eased out when they have children, jobs reassigned, confidentiality agreements signed.”At the anniversary conference, a new charter – including demands to end zero-hour contracts and transparency in companies’ pay structures – was drawn up. How great it would be, says Cox, if this new charter were taken up by a wide range of women, galvanising younger feminists in much the same way that the original did. “That will be the key to scoring more than four out of 10 in the next 40 years.”

Article B The Telegraph 19 August 2016 By Kate Mulvey My girlie break was holiday hell A shared hotel room can expose a bitter truth – that you and your best mate have absolutely nothing in common, Kate Mulvey finds Sitting in the airport lounge with my friend Sal, my hair freshly highlighted, my suitcase full of brightly coloured kaftans and sparkly bikinis, I was looking forward to ten days of sun, sea and relaxation. Six hours later, as I sat on the balcony of our hotel room in Sicily, I could quite easily have tipped her into the swimming pool. What had turned me from easy-going and chatty into murderous and nit-picking? I’d booked a holiday with a single friend, in my fifties. Not only that, we’d arranged to

88 share a twin room. What I discovered, in the time it took me to unscrew the cap of my Clarins sun tan cream, is that after a certain age, single girls’ holidays are destined for failure. It had seemed such a great plan when hatched in the pub two weeks earlier. No exorbitant single supplement, a ready-made vacation buddy and split costs on the hire car. But I soon realised we were chalk and cheese. And therein lies the rub. According to new research, only 50 per cent of friendships are mutual – in other words, the people we think of as mates often don’t like us as much. Professor Alex Pentland, of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says one reason for this is that people find it too hurtful to admit that their feelings for others are not reciprocated. Which is how we find ourselves brunching, lunching, and even holidaying with people who secretly drive us mad. Naively, I had imagined getting up late, sun-filled days by the pool, leisurely girlie lunches and long evenings chatting to the locals. The reality was simmering resentment, a flaming row on the top of Mount Etna and an atmosphere you could cut with a machete. On day one, as I flung my neon hold-all on the bed, pulled on a bikini and flopped onto the sun lounger on the hotel balcony, she began unpacking two enormous suitcases, neatly placing tops and dresses in the drawers (all colour co-ordinated) and then turning on her laptop and checking work emails. My heart sank. It was like holidaying with the school matron and head girl morphed into one. Things did not get better the following morning. After a fitful sleep – did she have to stomp quite so loudly across the room at 3am for a wee? – I was woken to the sound of the Bee Gees. It was her alarm, and it was only 7.45am. I squidged my earplugs in further, pulled the cover over my head and screamed inwardly. I haven’t shared a room with a friend since my twenties. Back then everyone was in perfect synch (comatose for 12 hours straight, not rising before noon and collapsing on the nearest beach to top up our tans). But no matter how liberal and young at heart you may think you are, middle-aged women – particularly long-term single ones, like me – are so set in their ways we might as well be on our own planets. Add snoring (me), early morning conference calls (her), and your dream holiday can become hell on earth. She wanted the air conditioning on full blast. I told her it was like sleeping

89 in a meat packing freezer. Factor in the tidy/messy issue – she thought I was a slob who left wet bikinis on the bathroom floor, I thought she was a control freak who folded her swimsuits – and by day five we had retreated behind a wall of icy silence, peppered by sighs and put-downs. The trouble is, what seems like a perfectly good friendship back home can soon fall apart when you’re flung together 24/7. It would take years of four- hour lunches and coffee mornings to reveal what you learn about each other in two days on holiday: that apart from a shared love of Breaking Bad and handbags, you have nothing else in common. This, my friend Caron, 51, a producer, found out to her cost on a two- week break in Greece with a work mate. She was all sea, sunshine, and litres of ouzo. Her friend was more get up at dawn, and trudge around crusty amphitheatres in the 40C heat. “When she appeared the first morning at 8am sharp, selfie stick welded to her hand and map stuck under her arm, I wanted to bang my head against the wall,” recalls Caron. Another friend recalls how money – or rather, her lack of it – nearly brought her to blows with a friend on holiday in Spain. “I was on a tight budget,” says Josie, 52, an illustrator. “I simply couldn’t afford ‘fine dining’ every night at some swanky four-star restaurant. She refused to bend. We quibbled over the bill. There was a tearful meltdown, and I took to filling up on cheap tapas from the taverna down the road.” It was the end of a beautiful friendship. The moral of the story has got to be: sit down and have a frank discussion about what you want out of the holiday before you book. Being on the same page – money, booze, beach and bedtime-wise – is far more important than sourcing the ultimate figure-enhancing swimsuit, or even finding the perfect holiday location. Trust me. I learnt the hard way.

3.3.7 Reviews

Reviews are evaluations, analysis and descriptions of books, plays, films, television programs, exhibitions, concerts and so on. Reviews usually appear in the newspapers right after the event of publishing or performance or show.

90 Article A The Telegraph 23 July 2015 By Robbie Collin Pixar is at the peak of its heartstring-tugging powers with this poignant, joyful coming-of-age story One of the best things a film can do is make you cry. In life, we go out of our way to avoid upset, but when it comes to the movies, two hours of revulsion, heartbreak and mortal dread can count as a fun nightout. Most thinking on the matter nods towards the same conclusion: the emotions we think of as negative aren’t negative at all, but vital responses to unpleasant circumstances which, in and of themselves, are every bit as healthy and human as laughter. It’s only because film allows us to experience them without good reason that we can really thrill to their force, and feel them scouring away at the hulls of our souls. Watch Stella Dallas, Bambi or The Notebook, and it all becomes clear. Joy and sadness aren’t opposites, they’re allies. That idea may have never been expressed with quite as much elegance and human warmth as it is in Inside Out, the 15th film from Pixar and, I think, the animation studio’s finest to date. It takes place in two places at once: San Francisco, where 11-year-old Riley (Kaitlyn Dias) has recently moved with her parents from the rural Midwest, and inside Riley’s mind, where her five emotions – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust – are trying to make sense of the upheaval. Joy (a note-perfect Amy Poehler) is the gang’s leader. She looks like a star from a picture book, and shoots around the gleaming modernist dream- space of Riley’s HeadQuarters, doling out orders and pep-talks to her fellow emotions, whom she clearly considers her assistants. That’s because Joy has a particularly intimate bond with her human: since day one, Riley has always been her parents’ happy girl. Inside Out begins no less ambitiously than at the birth of human consciousness, with Joy stepping into a warm spotlight and tentatively clicking a button on a console. Out in the real world, newborn baby Riley laughs, and she watches her mother and father’s faces melt with delight. Back in her mind, a golden bowling ball-like object trundles down a chute from out of the darkness and comes to a stop near Joy’s feet. This is Riley’s first memory, and the first component Joy will use to build her psyche.

91 The director is Pete Docter, the long-serving Pixar genius behind Monsters, Inc and Up, and it feels very much like a companion piece to the first of those two films – though with the emotional directness of Up’s famously heartbreaking love and marriage montage and closing meditations on the meaning of a well-spent life. (My first full-throated sob during Inside Out came during that initial memory-forming scene around 30 seconds into the film, which must be some sort of record.) Like Monsters, Inc’s Monstropolis, Riley’s mind is a totally delightful, buzzingly ingenious fantasy world, but one that seems to explain your own memories of childhood – and, let’s not forget, the everyday lived experience of the film’s younger viewers – with a kind of exhilarated clarity. It’s as a result of the move that Sadness (Phyllis Smith) tries to become more involved in the running of HeadQuarters, for example, and a proprietorial strop from Joy results in them both being accidentally exiled to the furthest reaches of Riley’s long-term memory. This leaves behind Fear (Bill Hader), Anger (Lewis Clark) and Disgust (Mindy Kaling) to run the show: in other words, Riley is now doomed to act like a completely normal 11-year-old girl. Joy and Sadness’s ensuing trek home takes them through strange corners of Riley’s mind such as Dream Production Studios, the theme-park-like Imagination Land and the grottoes of the subconscious. What these various stops on their journey means for Riley makes immediate and intuitive sense. Both worlds are dazzlingly, differently realised. San Francisco is all muted colours, grey sunlight and (mostly) low-key drama, whereas inside Riley’s mind, things look, sound and work like a 1950s Hollywood musical. In a thrillingly beautiful early sequence, Joy calls up an old memory of Riley skating on the frozen lake outside her old house, and as she watches her spin and glide across the ice, she dances too. It’s like seeing Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner whirling across the throne room in The King and I: two souls in perfect sync. Unexpectedly, the animation Inside Outcalls to mind the most isn’t Monsters, Inc, or any previous Pixar or Disney project, but Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning 2001 masterpiece Spirited Away: another film which mapped out an 11-year-old girl’s inner turmoil on a unique, fantastical canvas. Docter’s film is less ambiguous and strange than Miyazaki’s, although its conclusion is far from the proscriptive happy ending Joy has in mind. The bliss of childhood can’t last forever, but Inside Out reminds you that’s no bad thing.

92 Article B The Guardian 26 July 2015 By Jonathan Romney Inside Out review – an emotional rollercoaster Pixar returns to form with a dazzlingly imaginative adventure set inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl The new Pixar animation Inside Out could easily have been called Out There. It’s as bizarre, imaginative and authentically psychedelic as anything produced in mainstream animation. At this point in the fortunes of the once-infallible creative powerhouse, you wouldn’t have bet on Pixar coming up with anything very outré. Bought by Disney in 2006, the studio hadn’t produced anything truly inspired that wasn’t a sequel since Up in 2009. Given the humdrum quality of Cars 2 and Monsters University and 2012’s well-intentioned but forgettable Brave, it seemed as if the studio had lost its penchant for exotic risk. But Inside Out is in the top rank of Pixar productions with its combination of audacity, intelligence, wit and emotional reward. Directed and co-written by Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc and Up) and co-directed by Ronnie del Carmen, Inside Out starts from a boldly abstract premise: the narrative plays out within the psyche of a girl named Riley (voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) and the film’s characters are her feelings. At the start, one of those feelings, Joy (Amy Poehler), asks: “Do you ever look at someone and wonder what is going on inside their head?” The next questions that arise are: what might such psychic events actually look like? And how might they generate a story that can be sustained for 102 minutes? Inside Out meets these challenges with an inventiveness that’s appropriately mind-boggling. The film starts in a dark cavern, the Plato’s cave of the unformed self. As baby Riley is born, Joy spontaneously appears – a shimmering, big-eyed Tinkerbell-like pixie – and observes Riley’s view of the world on a glowing, cloud-like surveillance screen. Joy is soon joined by other emotions – Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger, the latter characterised as a squat red sponge that bursts into flame when provoked. These five monitor Riley’s life and produce her responses by operating a console of levers and buttons, something between the USS Enterprise and PlayStation 4. Inside Out explores much the same premise – little people busy working in your head – as the Beano’s

93 Numskulls strip, but it’s infinitely more sophisticated and distinctively female- skewed. The film’s real heroine is Joy, a pathologically upbeat micro-manager convinced that only positive feelings count – and Amy Poehler instils Joy with something of the obsessive girl guide eagerness of her Leslie Knope in the TV sitcom Parks and Recreation. Then crisis comes as Riley, now 11, moves with her parents (Diane Lane, Kyle MacLachlan) from Minnesota to scary San Francisco, where a new school fills her with anguish and where, worst of all, pizzas come topped with broccoli. The ensuing narrative is set in the far reaches of Riley’s psychic landscape – and it is a landscape. Her trauma triggers the seismic collapse of the “personality islands” – literally, floating landmasses – that define who she is, devoted to such themes as family, friendship and hockey. A control-room malfunction leaves Joy and Sadness wandering in a vast allegorical geography that includes such landmarks as imagination (a theme park) and the place where dreams are made: a movie studio, of course, where productions range from I’m Falling Down a Very Deep Pit to Fairy Dream Adventure Part 7. In the film’s wildest moment, the wanderers enter a zone of abstract thought, where they are zapped into a series of increasingly simplified geometric shapes, as they – and the film itself – dizzyingly self-deconstruct (“Oh no, we’re non-figurative!”). Formidably ingenious, Inside Out hits an elusive sweet spot in terms of appealing to children and adults alike. It makes extraordinary use of knowing cuteness, for example. Take Bing Bong, Riley’s long-lost imaginary friend from early childhood, a cat-elephant hybrid made out of candyfloss. Here, the film seems to stray perilously into Jar Jar Binks territory – but while smaller children will warm to Bing Bong as a cuddly oddity, adults and older kids will see something quite troubling in a figure that’s manifestly a primitive creation of the infant mind, poignantly fated to extinction. It’s in the way that the story depicts the fading of childhood’s mental furniture, and explores the mechanics of forgetting, that Inside Out achieves a universal significance. While specialists may bemoan the simplicity of the film’s mental model, inspired by the “psychoevolutionary” theory of Robert Plutchik, the eventual message – that sorrow is as valuable an emotion as happiness – is delivered with less piety than you might imagine. As for the visual style, it’s dazzling, flouting CGI’s tendency to photorealism in favour of overt cartoonishness in a 1950s retro vein, together with a refined exploration of light: the emotions are composed of fibrous bundles

94 of luminescence. The running gags are delicious (don’t miss the end credits), and in the best Pixar fashion, Inside Out expertly but uncynically tugs the heartstrings – and indeed, the film’s theme overtly shows you how it’s done. Don’t be afraid to come out of Inside Out wiping a tear from your eye: you can always say: “It was the little people in my head that did it.”

Article C The Guardian 3 November 2014 By John Kampfner The Churchill Factor review – Boris Johnson’s flawed but fascinating take on his hero The mayor of London’s paean to Churchill is self-serving but spirited Churchill was many things, but posh cheese? Only Boris Johnson could summon such a comparison. But only Boris Johnson could manage to turn our great war leader into something you pick up from a deli. And only he could infuse one of the darkest chapters in our history with slapstick. In the orgy of pre-publicity for this book, much has been made of Johnson’s not so subtle attempts to draw a parallel between himself and Winston Churchill. The reader is invited to see the two men as supreme orators, literary masters and slayers of spineless Conservatives and perfidious foreigners. There were many in the party, Johnson notes, who saw Churchill as unprincipled. Johnson uses the term opportunist – in this case with no self- reference. It bears reminding that after Chamberlain’s demise in 1940, most of the Tory leadership had wanted the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, to take over. They didn’t trust Churchill, a man who had bedhopped between the Tories and the Liberals. Had Halifax become prime minister, Britain might well have cut a deal with Hitler. In one of the many passages that combine bathos with humour and a welcome clarity of historical argument, Johnson notes that it wasn’t just dodgy royals and newspaper proprietors who appeased the Nazis. “In the 1930s your average toff was much more fearful of bolshevism, and communists’ alarming ideology of redistribution, than they were fearful of Hitler.” These limp-wristed Tories might have left Britain an outpost of the Third Reich, but horror upon horrors, a Third Reich in a United Europe. “There would have been no liberation of the continent. This country would not have

95 been a haven of resistance, but a gloomy client state of an infernal Nazi EU.” With more than an eye on the battle to succeed David Cameron, and to keep Nigel Farage at bay, Johnson equates the European Union, time and again, with the crushing of the British spirit. It was Churchill, and Churchill alone, who stood in the way of dictatorship. As soon as victory over the Germans had been secured, his many critics in the Conservative party sought to adopt him as their exclusive asset. Churchill has since become a global brand, a naming opportunity, not just in the UK and not just on the right. “The Tories are jealous of their relation with Churchill. It is a question of badging, of political ownership. They think of him as the people of Parma think of the formaggio parmigiano,” writes Johnson. The cheese metaphors don’t end there. Tory appeasers are exquisitely called “stilton-eating surrender monkeys”. Hidden behind the cheeky-chappie linguistic devices lurks a serious message to his own party: don’t go for the easy option. Fight the good fight. Is this a rebuke for the chillaxed Cameron? What might constitute courage in a Johnson-led government is left – as is the case with most of his politics – flexible. By his own admission, he has not sought to emulate some of the great historians of the second world war. At times the role of master of ceremonies grates. On several occasions, Johnson tees up the arguments for and against, so that from his pedestal he can adjudicate. “Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill is accused of being a spoilt, bullying, double-crossing, self-centred bore, and a bit of an all-round brute. Let’s now call the counsel for the defence – a role I am also happy, for the sake of argument, to play myself.” At times the descent into chatshow populism takes on absurd proportions, such as when he invokes Jeremy Clarkson as a potential judge of Churchill’s “sheer mental grunt”. Yet there is much to commend in this spirited, entertaining tale. Johnson deftly weaves his narrative between war, politics and personal life. He brings out the complexity of the relationship with his father, “the ghostly luminescence” of Randolph’s reputation, with Winston “straining and yearning in emulation”. He wonders out loud if Churchill had played away, while praising the sturdiness of his 56-year marriage to Clemmie. One of the most telling passages about the conduct of the war revolves around an incident that has been airbrushed out of official British accounts, but it is not forgotten in France, where it is prominent in school curricula. In July 1940, the British navy attacked and destroyed France’s most advanced warship,

96 the Bretagne, at Mers-el-Kébir in Algeria. Nearly 1,300 French seamen were killed in a bombardment that was justified at the time by fears that, having signed an armistice, Vichy France was about to be co-opted into the German military machine. Johnson deals with the incident headlong: “A massacre had taken place, and there were plenty who were willing to call it a war crime.” He also points out how the House of Commons absurdly praised Churchill for the attack. The author’s disdain for the vapidity and herd-instincts of many MPs is powerful – and not without justification. Drawing the strands together in the final chapters, Johnson seeks to strip down and reconstruct Churchill’s record. He recalls the many politically incorrect quotes attributed to him, some true, some apocryphal. The suggestion that making concessions to Gandhi was like “feeding cat’s meat to a tiger” was, the author comments, particularly inapposite, given that the Mahatma was a “devout veggie”. Yet Sidney and Beatrice Webb described Churchill as the most progressive politician of his age, Johnson writes, noting his support for nationalisation of the railways, a reduction in the pension age, a windfall tax on war profiteers and “his introduction to British industry of that favourite of bolshy 1970s shop stewards – the tea break”. Time and again Johnson returns to Europe. He tries hard but struggles to reconcile his own views with his research into his subject. By the end of the war Churchill had become a passionate advocate for a union, a Europe that was about to be divided into two, only to be sewn together again after the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of communism 25 years ago. That, thanks in no small part to Cameron, egged on by Johnson, many Conservatives and Ukip, is in danger of unravelling. What might Churchill be thinking of his party’s antics now?

Article D The Telegraph 24 October 2014 By Con Coughlin The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson, review: ‘a breathless romp’ For all his levity, Boris Johnson’s admiration for Winston Churchill is profound. But what is he saying about himself? Ever since Boris Johnson burst onto the political stage he has provided the nation with great entertainment. Whether it is the sight of the Mayor

97 of London dangling helplessly above the Olympic Stadium as his harness becomes caught on a safety wire, or his recent appearance at the Conservative Party conference brandishing a brick, the “Boris effect” always grips the nation’s attention. So we should not be surprised that Johnson’s latest literary endeavour, a characteristically breathless romp through the life and times of our greatest wartime leader, Winston Churchill, should be as high on entertainment as it is on providing an appraisal of the great man’s achievements. Johnson makes clear at the start of his book, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, that he is not attempting to emulate the work of distinguished Churchillian biographers such as Martin Gilbert and Roy Jenkins. Rather, Johnson believes that, with the soldiers of the Second World War gradually fading away, we are losing those who can remember the sound of his voice, and he argues there is a danger that we might forget the scale of Churchill’s achievements. Thus the stage is set for Johnson to present his own idiosyncratic take on Churchill’s broad and fascinating life, starting with the wartime prime minister’s less-than-satisfactory upbringing and concluding with a series of chapters about Churchill’s influence on the making of the modern world, from the creation of post-war Europe to his more problematic intervention in drawing the boundaries of the Middle East. Johnson’s distinctive writing style is unlike any other used in the countless books that have been written on Churchill (he estimates that there are 100 new works a year published on the subject). It reads at times like a mixture of Monty Python and the Horrible Histories. He describes the French generals during the Second World War as “white- haired dodderers in their Clouseau-like kepis” commanding “an origami army”. Hitler and Himmler are part of a “demented crew” with “deranged plans” for a new world capital called Germania. “At its heart was to be the Hall of the People – a demented granite version of the Pantheon of Agrippa.” Meanwhile, our great wartime leader, according to Johnson, spent the war dressed in “strange Victorian/Edwardian garb”, giving the appearance of “some burly and hung-over butler from the set of Downton Abbey”. At one point Johnson deliberately invokes one of Monty Python’s more iconic images as he ponders how British fortunes may have fared during the war without Churchill at the helm. “Let’s send down one of those giant Monty Python hands,” he postulates, “and pluck him [Churchill] from the

98 smoke-filled room. Let us suppose that he’d copped it as a young man, on one of those occasions when he had set out so boisterously to cheat death.” Nor is the author shy about placing himself centre stage in the narrative. He writes about visiting Chartwell, Churchill’s family home in Kent, in an attempt to better understand the “teeming brain that helped invent the tank and the seaplane and which foresaw the atom bomb”. Johnson’s novel conclusion is that the entire house has been constructed as “a gigantic engine for the generation of text”, enabling Churchill, who was to become the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953, to produce more words than Shakespeare and Dickens combined. In another classic Johnsonian diversion, he sets off on his bicycle in the rain along the Romford Road in east London to visit the grave of Churchill’s beloved nanny, Mrs Everest. “I am soaked. My blue suit is black and shiny with water and there is a sucking noise in my shoes as I get off my bike.” As with the many other visits Johnson undertakes in the course of the narrative, there is a more serious purpose underlying his humorous antics. The gravestone Churchill and his brother Jack erected to Mrs Everest’s memory is testimony to Churchill’s deep humanity. Indeed, as with so much Johnson does in his public endeavours, there is a profound point underscoring all the levity and bravura. As the title suggests, the book is an exploration of the many distinctive facets of Churchill’s character that made him the man he was, and provided him with the inner strength and spirit that enabled him to save the British nation in its darkest hour. While Johnson is clearly an admirer of Churchill, it can be difficult to see what new insights he brings to the study of the statesman. The obvious subtext, of course, is that Johnson is seeking to compare his own reputation as a political maverick with that of Churchill, which poses the question: what would Winston Churchill have made of Boris Johnson.

Questions for discussion 1. Compare two reviews of the film and two reviews of the book in relation to: a) text organization and style, b) authors’ focus on character development, setting and plot, c) opinion; d) tone. 2. If you saw the film and/or read the book, which of the reviews would reflect your opinion best and why? 3. If you did not see the film and/or read the book, which of the reviews would encourage you to do so and why?

99 PECULIARITIES OF 4 NEWSPAPER LANGUAGE One of the media languages – newspaper language – is a specific language that keeps in touch with the latest changes in the language itself, it is used to express various genres which require certain rhetorical strategies, appropriate lexis and syntax. Therefore, language of newspapers can be used as a sophisticated tool for language studies as newspapers, according to Bhatia (1993, 157–158), present “the use of language which is fresh, topical and current”; in addition, newspaper articles acquaint the learners with a wide variety of genres such as news stories, headlines, editorials, feature articles, sports reports, reviews, fashion columns and cover all imaginable topics. Of special importance is the awareness of newspaper articles’ language peculiarities, headlines’ features, and genres as the latter pursue different communicative goals, i. e. to inform, to persuade, to shape reader’s opinion, to add some colouring to the information presented. Consequently, the advantage of newspaper texts is their authenticity (as it was mentioned by Bhatia, 1993), and they are one of the effective and reliable means to raise students’ language awareness. However, due to the fact that different newspaper articles belong to different genres and use some specific language, their understanding might be hindered by certain factors, typical of newspaper language style and conventions. According to some scholars and language teaching experts (e.g. Roberts, 2014), students, while reading newspapers, face certain problems such as text organization and cohesion, headlines’ interpretation; they also have to identify what certain words refer to, idioms, puns, and so on. Thus, some of these issues, i.e. text cohesion, syntax and vocabulary of newspaper articles, headlines will be highlighted in the following sections.

4.1 Text Cohesion

To satisfy readers’ needs and attract a wider readership, newspaper articles have to be reader-friendly in many aspects, text cohesion and coherence included. Cohesion and coherence include, among other things, a smooth flow of thought which adds to a better and more comprehensive understanding of a newspaper article. Consider the following example:

100 The fatal explosion on the Deep-water Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico is a disaster in more ways than one, First, there are the lives lost: 11 workers are still missing. Second, there is the reputational blow dealt to BP and also to Transocean. Third, there is environmental damage from the underwater leak that has sent oil pouring out across the Gulf. (Financial Times, 28 April 2010)

As we can see, transition signals, or discourse markers, add to the fluency and cohesion of the above presented paragraph. One more example: Many east Europeans in the UK are over-qualified for their current jobs and may want to shift upwards.Others may be attracted to other, older EU states. Others still may want to stay home as central and east Europe grows more prosperous. (The Guardian, 27 March 2012) In this example, lexical and structural or grammatical repetition also makes the paragraph more reader-friendly. Therefore, it would be useful for students to have some awareness of the main cohesive devices used in newspaper articles and, of course, other texts.

4.1.1 Reference

Reference is one of the major types of text cohesion, and it is realized through a number of -phoric relations. Linguists (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, Brown & Yule, 1996, Paltridge, 2012) speak about these major patterns of reference: anaphoric, cataphoric, exophoric, and homophoric reference. Reference is realized through personal pronouns (he, she, it), possessives (his, her, its), demonstratives (this, that, these, here, there, then), the definite article, and comparative constructions (the same, similar, such, different, other, more, less, etc.). For practical purposes, only the first three types of phoric– relations are relevant, and they are presented below. • Anaphoric reference In the case of anaphoric reference, referential items, mainly pronouns and the definite article, refer back to another word or phrase used earlier in the text. E. g.: Tens of thousands of cancer patients die needlessly because they are diagnosed too late, a charity claims.

101 One in four are only told they have it after emergency admission to hospital, says Macmillan Cancer Support. They are twice as likely to die within a year than people referred early by their GP. (Daily Mirror, 2 May 2014)

• Cataphoric reference Cataphoric reference points to the antecedent to be found in the following text. Consider the following example: Something is wrong in America. In July Eric Garner, a 43-year-old man suspected of selling untaxed cigarettes was restrained by a policeman with a choke-hold around the neck, and died. His last words, repeated, were: “I can’t breathe”. (The Times, 17 July 2014) To sum up, anaphoric (which look back in the text for their interpretation) and cataphoric (which look forward in the text for their interpretation) relations are called endophoric relations and ensure cohesive ties within a text. However, the other two –phoric relations refer to the outside world, the situation, and peoples’ schemata. • Exophoric reference Exophoric reference does not add to textual cohesion; however, it is established when an item refers to a situation outside of the language, i.e. when we have to find the identity of the referent / antecedent on the basis of our cultural knowledge, our schemata, etc., and it is very important for newspaper headline interpretation. E. g.: We may be Charlie but our children are not. (The Times) In this headline as well as in the whole article reference is made to a slogan Je suis Charlie, adopted by supporters of free speech after the massacre on the premises of a satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris.

Task 1. In the text below, find referential cohesive devices and explain their use.

102 The Times 27 February 2014 Willkommen, Frau Merkel The German Chancellor’s visit celebrates a powerfully ally in the quest for EU reform. Now Britain must decide where it stands Not since Waterloo, when Field Marshal Blücher saved the skin of the Duke of Wellington, has so much expectations been piled on a German rescue. For all the seven hours that she is expected to be in the country, Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, will be feted and garlanded today by a British government desperate to keep on the right side of its most important ally in the European Union. The visit must, however, be about more than political expediency, about what the German leader can offer to help David Cameron win a future referendum. It has to be about whether Britain wants to fight for change within the EU, or stand outside. It has ultimately be about Britain’ place in the world as an open, innovative nation true to its internationalist traditions. Certainly, Ms Merkel wants Britain to stay inside the EU. Some of her more thoughtful speeches have been about freedom, its limits and chances. This why the visit is symbolically significant for this former member of the East German youth movement. As a young woman she lived in a state that repressed basic freedoms, that was steered by a flawed ideology and that eventually imploded. Addressing the joint Houses of Parliament and meeting a constitutional monarch who has ruled longer than she has been alive is thus a milestone even for a woman who has been dubbed the Queen of Europe. Her own life story convinces her that Britain’s continuing presence in the EU anchors its values and could help to prevent it from turning into little than multinational bureaucracy with no animating purpose. Ms Merkel can go some way towards influencing the referendum. She is sympathetic to Mr Cameron’s wish for more power to be granted to national parliaments. Her understanding of the welfare model is closer to the British than the French; she too is dismayed by benefit tourism. According to reports this week she would accept a mechanism to shield Britain and the nine non- euro members from being outvoted on single- market issues. The principle of non-discrimination could be written into a new treaty. The German leader might even support a British candidate as EU commissioner for the single market.

103 This is not all. Britain could in the German view benefit from modest opt-outs in the working time directive, though these would stop significantly short of a full repatriation of powers. These concessions are not enough although but do reassure on one central point. The German Chancellor rejects the false narrative that the EU is robust and Britain a self-seeking maverick. In fact, as she knows from the past years of managing the euro crisis, the EU is remarkably fragile and in need of an urgent overhaul. There is no need, therefore, for the European debate in Britain to be a council of despair. Good relations between Britain and Germany could be the herald of desirable change. To engage further though, Ms Merkel what Britain really wants: to be part of a reform axis inside the EU or to find a role outside. The German Chancellor, the toppling of the Ukrainian leadership last week was a pivotal challenge for the EU. Yet while the German, Polish and French foreign ministers flew into Kiev to negotiate the truce that led quickly to the collapse of Viktor Yanukovych, Britain once the chief champion of eastward enlargement, was not even on the negotiation team. The United Kingdom has been largely supernumerary throughout a crisis that is defining the boundaries of Europe. Ms Merkel’s concern is that Britain is in retreat from European responsibility. She wants to know something that runs deeper than the name of the European Commission president: What do the British want? The sooner the promised referendum arrives and these questions can be settles, the better.

4.1.2 Lexical Cohesion

Next to referencing, lexical cohesion is also prominent in newspaper articles. Lexical cohesion includes simple repetition, synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, and collocation.

• Repetition refers to words that are repeated in a text which may be in- flected for tense or number. E. g.: In the latest university admissions figures a depressing failure forwomen hides behind an impressive success for girls. For the seventh straight year

104 girls have outperformed boys in the overall number winning university places, but they have failed to break the overwhelming male dominance of key science subjects. This hobbles an economy whose future depends on excellence in science and technology, and it deprives young women of some of the best opportunities the world of work can offer. The failure to draw more women into “stem” subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) starts when girls choose A-level subjects. It is compounded at the transitions to higher education and employment. As a result Britain has fewer women engineers per capita than China, India and any other European country, and a shortfall of 40,000 engineering graduates a year. (The Times, 8 October 2016)

• Synonymy refers to words similar in meaning such as article and news story. Study the following example: David Cameron has agreed to throw open the records of Conservatives whips’ office and Tory central office to let investigators hunt for evidence of historic child abuse, The Telegraph can disclose. The Tory leader and Prime Minister has personally written to Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to make clear that both the whips and Tory headquarters had to “co-operate fully” with the Home Office’s inquiry into child sexual abuse, which is still seeking a chairman. (The Daily Telegraph, 14 January 2015) • Antonymy describes opposite or contrastive meanings such as a killer and victims. Study the following example: Eric Garner was black and Mr Pantaleo is white. The grand jury’s decision followed another celebrated case in Ferguson, Missouri, where another grand jury decided that another white policeman should face no charges for the fatal shooting of Michael Brown, also black, and 18 years old. The similarities here are not coincidental. When a white police officer causes the death of a black citizen, as America has begun to realise, such acquittals are not the exception but the norm. (The Times, 8 December 2014)

• Hyponymy refers to classes of lexical items where the relationship between them is that of “general-specific” such asmass media and newspapers, radio, television. E. g.:

105 Our report today on the fear that employees in animal research feel shows that blind adherence to an absolutist stance can give people an alibi for immoral acts. […]. Breeding a monkey, or a dog – or even a humble mouse – for the purpose of experimentation is no one’s idea of utopia. (The Times, 15 March 2014)

• Meronymy is where lexical items are in a “whole to part” relationship with each other such as news story and headline, intro, body. E. g.: Despite apparently creating the potential for a conflict of interests, it is not illegal for councilors to work as paid consultants. Councils are expected to face an increase in applications for building when new planning laws take effect at the end of this month. (The Daily Telegraph, 11 March 2013)

• Collocation presents associations between vocabulary items which have a tendency to co-occur such as newspapers and readership or circulation. E. g.: Meet Sorcha, a teenager laid down by mental illness. When she started self- harming and showing other symptoms of acute anxiety as a 13-year-old the first GP she saw agreed she needed urgent help. After three months she was offered“family therapy” but any benefit was temporary. She had to wait three years for the cognitive behavioural therapy she needed. Looking back, her mother believes the endless waiting and frustration of being considered not quite ill enough for intensive treatment only made her daughter’s symptoms worse. (The Times, 12 March 2015)

Task 2. Find lexical cohesive devices in each paragraph and discuss their use in pairs.

The Times 22 January 2015 By Jenni Russell Don’t blame the host for her guests’ rudeness The woman who billed the parents of a child who failed to turn up at her son’s party is right Jeering, outrage, ridicule. That’s been the public response to Julie Lawrence, the mother who invoiced the parents of a boy who didn’t turn up to her son’s

106 birthday party. She was mocked for expecting that an invitation that had been accepted would be honoured. New York magazine labelled her an obnoxious parent, while the BBC ran an implicitly critical piece from its legal correspondent on why attempting to enforce the bill in the small claims court could never succeed. Gleeful commentators speculated about her character, her charm as a hostess, her mothering skills. In an online poll by the Plymouth Herald, the paper that broke the story, 87 per cent of respondents backed the no-show parents and only 13 per cent agreed that the invoice should be paid. Meanwhile, Derek Nash, the father of Alex Nash, who didn’t turn up, became more self-righteous by the day. Well, my sympathies lie with the mother. Not with sending the invoice for £15.95 — that was a ridiculous demand, which had no hope of success — but with what it expressed: hope, hurt and, eventually, anger. By throwing a party at a ski centre Mrs Lawrence was being generous to make her son and his friends happy. By not bothering to turn up, or to let her know in advance, or to apologise in the weeks that followed, the Nashes were demonstrating that they were completely indifferent to her and her son’s feelings. The invoice was a cry of dismay at being ignored, an attempt to make the Nashes feel as jolted as she had. It hasn’t worked. The Nashes embody a public mood that says the only feelings that need trouble us are our own. Derek Nash expressed this splendidly when he appeared on Radio 4’sWorld At One. He was thoroughly aggrieved at Mrs Lawrence’s action and outraged by the idea that he had any responsibility for what happened. He explained that the important actor in all of this was his son. “He’s a five-year-old boy. He decided on the day where he wanted to be. Am I liable for the decision my five-year-old makes?” The only sane response to that rhetorical question is: yes, you damn well are. Unless you’re raising Kim Jong Un, it’s a parent’s job to teach five-year-olds that the world can’t be organised around their passing whims. Our natural egotism has to be tempered by the realisation that other people matter too. We might not want to go to a party, play with a friend or visit a relative but we can be made to imagine how sad we would be if no one made the effort to do the same for us. Life becomes a much more anxious and difficult business if we can’t count on people to be either responsible or kind. That, though, seems to be the current trend. The stresses on the NHS are made substantially worse by the numbers of people who don’t turn up for their GP or hospital appointments, currently

107 running at between 9 and 10 per cent. Some restaurateurs, despairing of a growing no-show rate of up to 20 per cent in an industry with low profit margins, are trying to introduce cancellation charges. They say the problem has been made worse by the impersonality of online booking, so that the prospective diner feels far removed from the reality of the proprietor catering for them. Even among people who might claim to be mindful of others — those booking for Buddhist retreats — thoughtlessness is increasing. One Buddhist centre, Gaia House in Devon, has just upped its cancellation fee from £40 to £100 after 24 of its 52 booked places were cancelled at the last minute. A woman who paid to take 40 friends away for a 40thbirthday party in a country house was devastated when two of them simply didn’t turn up. A bride had 120 acceptances for her wedding but nine empty seats, without explanation, on the day. Neither felt that it was acceptable to say how unhappy they felt. Teenagers and twentysomethings say that among the Facebook generation the sense of social obligation is evaporating because social media offers so many opportunities to make choices at the last minute. Facebook invitations are routinely accepted, even if there is no intention of going, because it would appear rude to the hosts to publicly decline their event. Admitting that we expect anything of others, or placing restrictions on ourselves, is unfashionable. Our culture urges us to put ourselves first, and it’s not cool to be seen as vulnerable or to care. It looks like freedom but it’s a cruel self-deception. Manners evolved because mutual consideration makes us happier. Julie Lawrence deserves her apology and Derek Nash and his supporters should wonder what’s so desirable about raising a generation of selfish brats.

Task 3. Discuss the following comments which followed this article; express your own opinion on these issues. • Manners evolved because mutual consideration makes us happier. • Good manners are important – they are founded in respect for other people’s views and feelings. • Courtesy is a learned behaviour, I don’t have much hope for his son. • A kids’ party coming in at 16 pounds per head. What is the World coming to? • I remain utterly bewildered as to how, this insignificant tale of insignificant people, made the National news and that we are STILL talking about it. • Failure by the Nash’s to apologize was rude and inconsiderate. They richly deserved to get the bill.

108 4.2 Syntax

Sentence length. As noted by many researchers (e. g. Bradley, 2000), sentences and words of broadsheets are longer than in articles from popular press. Compare: Martin Wheatley, UK regulator, will announce the shake–up in a bold attempt to restore faith in the London interbank offered rate after a manipulation scandal that has engulfed more than a dozen financial institutions on three continents. (Financial Times, 13 April 2015) The 15-year-old boy was removed from class and taken to a youth custody where he was quizzed on conspiracy to commit murder. He was later released without charge. (The Daily Mirror, September 2015)

The above presented texts are one paragraph texts. The paragraph from the broadsheet is longer and consists of one sentence while the latter one, from the tabloid, is shorter and consists of two sentences. However, compact or mid-range newspapers (tabloid versions of former broadsheet newspapers) also tend to use shorter sentences as it can be seen in the following paragraph: A year after the West African ebola outbreak was first reported it is clear that the death toll could have been worse. It is also clear that the international response could have been far quicker and more effective. The World Health Organization (WHO), which is the only body with the authority to declare an international health emergency, should have done so at least two months earlier than it did. It should have sent more experienced medical staff and been more willing to countermand regional governments when they sought to save reputations rather than lives. (The Times, April 2015) On the other hand, broadsheets and compacts in editorials employ short sentences, next to the long ones, to attract readers’ attention, to persuade them, to encourage them to take certain actions thus expressing the newspaper’s position / stance. E. g.: As protests swell, Barack Obama’s relative silence is inexplicable. Deep in his second term, he has no need to worry about re-election and could be at his bold. His greatest asset has always been his ability to define a fragmented nation in unifying terms. “The problem is not just a Ferguson problem,” was

109 the best he could manage last month. “It’s an American problem.” He should know it is more than that. It is an American shame. (The Times, May 2015)

Speaking about sentence complexity, it should be noted that both types of newspapers employ complex sentences with a developed system of clauses and verbal (infinitive, participle, gerundial) constructions for the sake of language economy. E. g.: Under the changes, local authorities without a plan for development in their area will be expected to approve any application which can be said to be a “sustainable”, a term that has alarmed conservationists because it is open to wide interpretation. (The Daily Telegraph, January 2013) Now when I viewed this footage several weeks later I realized that in one of the mumbled versions, if you listen very carefully with the sound turned right up, it did appear that that I’d actually used the word I was trying to obscure. (The Daily Mirror, March 2015)

However, tabloids use more compound sentences than complex ones to satisfy the needs of less sophisticated readers. Though the sentences are compound, they usually consist of two short independent sentences thus making the text more reader-friendly as in the following example: Ordinarily I don’t respond to newspaper allegations, but on this occasion I feel I must make an exception. (The Daily Mirror, 5 June 2014)

Quotes. Many newspaper genres (especially news reporting), except editorials, use a considerable amount of quotes, which sometimes take up the whole paragraph. News reporters employ quotes for the sake of objectivity, to save their ‘face’. “When a little girl is sold by her impoverished family, or girls my daughters’ age run away from home and are lured – that’s slavery,” Obama said in an address to the Clinton Global Initiative. “It’s barbaric, it’s evil, and it has no place in a civilized world.” (USA Today, September 2012)

110 4. 3 Vocabulary

As Richardson (2007, 47) claims, “The analysis of particular words used in a newspaper text is almost always the first stage of any text or discourse analysis. Words convey the imprint of society and of value judgement in particular – they convey connoted as well as denoted meanings’’. Newspaper articles, particularly tabloids, employ short words, e. g. row = argument, aid = assistance, raid = robbery. In addition, they employ loaded words, i.e. words that carry particular strong connotations, an emotional loading beyond their literal meaning. The emotional tone is typical of the popular press. Very often emphasis is placed on the idea of force, and this leads to the further conclusion that the intention is to appeal to the reader on an emotional level and to satisfy a desire for sensationalism. Consider the following example:

The Sun 26 April 2016 Gruesome CCTV footage shows Paris attacks bomber blow himself to pieces inside packed French restaurant Brahim Abdeslam detonates suicide belt inside venue on night of horror that killed 130 HORRIFIC new CCTV footage of an ISIS terrorist blowing himself up in French restaurant Comptoir Voltaire has surfaced for the first time since the Paris attacks. Disturbing images depicting extremist Brahim Abdeslam’s violent death were caught on camera on November 13 last year, when an ISIS cell wreaked havoc on the French capital city, murdering 130 people across a number of arrondissements. The footage sees French passport holder Brahim Abdeslam, 31, walk into the restaurant at 9:40pm on the Friday evening. Clearly nervous, the now-notorious terrorist walks through the door after being dropped off by a car outside the venue. He proceeds to walk to an empty table where he lowers his head, covers it with his left hand, and detonates his suicide belt seemingly without warning. After a burst of white smoke, Abdeslam’s upper body can be witnessed gruesomely separating from his lower half.

111 The jihadi is killed immediately, though others sitting nearby miraculously escape the horrific blast with minor injuries. There was reportedly so little left to Abdeslam’s body that officials were forced to rely on a sliver of a fingerprint to identify him. France’s M6 channel decided to air the footage on Sunday on its ‘Zone Interdite’ programme, which is French for the Forbidden Zone. The clip was then released to French media organisations, accompanied by a warning that it was not suitable for viewing by children. It spread quickly, appearing on various news and social media websites within hours. French daily newspaper Le Figaro shared the shocking footage under the headline: “The shocking images of M6 showing Brahim Abdeslam blowing himself up.” Brahim Abdeslam had been brother to Salah, 26, who fled Paris after he neglected to detonate his suicide belt at the Stade de France during a football match between France and Germany on the same fateful night. The jihadist was caught in Brussels just last month after four months on the run, days before accomplices slaughtered 32 innocent civilians when the ISIS extremists hit the Belgian capital. On March 22, three coordinated bombings were carried out by jihadists in Belgium, two at Brussels Airport and Maalbeek metro station. Salah was caught just after Brahim’s last known remains were sealed in a coffin and put in the ground after a ceremony in the Belgian district of Schaerbeek. The extremist is now to be extradited to Paris, where he will stand trial for mass murder as well as terrorist crimes.

Task 4. In the preceding text, find emotionally loaded words with strong connotations. Comment their use and functions in the text. On the other hand, some newspaper genres, e.g. news stories or editorials, in broadsheets, use more abstract, formal vocabulary. The implication is that that the writer considers his reader to be the sort of a person who tends to think in a more abstract way, e.g.: A prolonged embargo and isolation of Cuba by the United States was imposed in 1961: yesterday, the policy was at last suspended. The Obama administration announced that it would re-establish diplomatic relations an ease restrictions on engagement with Cuba. That is the right course,

112 done for right reasons. The communist venture has failed; so has the US response to it. (The Times, 15 May 2016) Terms are also a characteristic feature of newspaper articles. Depending upon the topic of an article, they can be political, economic, legal, medical, educational, etc.

Task 5. Find the terms in the paragraphs below, define the sphere they belong to and the type of a newspaper in which they appeared. In the latest university admission figures a depressing failure for women hides behind an impressive success for girls. For the seventh straight year girls have outperformed boys in the overall number winning university places, but they have failed to break the overwhelming male dominance of key science subjects. This hobbles an economy whose future depends on excellence in science and technology, and it deprives young women of some of the best opportunities the world of work can offer. Cancer patients treated on the NHS are dying too soon because they are refused surgery, radiotherapy, and breakthrough drugs, according to a report. The chief executive of Lloyds Banking group hit out at fraudulent claims for payment protection insurance compensation on Tuesday as the bailed out bank increased its provision for mis-selling the controversial product by 12% to £3.2bn. Antonio Horta-Osorio said the £375 additional provision was a “minor adjustment” when asked if it would require the bank to pursue any additional clawback of bonuses from former current directors. Some £1.5m was clawed back following the £3.2bn provision taken last year. For more than a decade the Central Bank of Iran has supported the national currency, the rial, through a managed float system that helped it maintain a single exchange rate against hard currencies. But currency volatility over the past year has widened the gap between the official and open market exchange rates, leading to the near-collapse of the single-tier system. The scale of the crisis that is engulfing children’s mental health is revealed today with official data showing that a record number of youngsters are

113 being admitted to hospital for self-harm eating disorders, depression and other psychological disorders. Emergency admission for psychiatric conditions soared to 17,278 last year, double the number four years ago. There were 15,668 admissions of young women aged 15 to 19 for cutting, burning or harming themselves, compared with 9,255 admissions in 2004. A total of 2,965 children were treated on wards for anorexia and other eating disorders, a 12 per cent jump in one year and double the number treated a decade ago. Tens of thousands more children are attending failing secondary schools after previous improvements in comprehensive schools have stalled, the head of Ofsted will say today. The proportion of secondary rated inadequate by inspectors has risen, with 50 more schools in special measures than a year ago, Sir Michael Wilson will disclose.

Clichés. A cliché is a phrase or expression that has been used so often that it is no longer original or effective, ceased to be meaningful and become trite and tiresome, e. g., a brutal murder, bullet-ridden body, survival rates, vital issue, pressing problem, informed sources, pillars of society, welfare state, affluent society. Generally, clichés are considered to be a defect of style. Nevertheless, clichés are indispensable in newspaper style; they prompt the necessary associations and prevent ambiguity and misunderstanding (Galperin, 1977, 298). Abbreviations. News reports, editorials and other newspaper genres abound in abbreviations of various kinds; usually abbreviated are names of organizations, public and state bodies, political associations, industrial and other companies, various offices, e. g.,NHL (the National Health Service), NGO (non-governmental organization), WHO (the World Health Organization), BP (British Petroleum), OBE (Oder of the British Empire; an honour given to someone as a title, to thank them or show respect for the work they have done in various fields), ABI (the Association of British Insurers), AA (Alcoholics Anonymous), and many others. Neologisms. A neologism is a newly coined term, word or phrase that is in the process of entering common use but that has not yet been accepted into the mainstream language. They are very common in newspaper vocabulary because newspapers are very quick to react to any new developments in the life of society, in science and technology. Consider the following examples: staycation – a vacation at home or near home, usually due to financial

114 constraints preventing a holiday abroad, returnadore – refers to the History of Spain and Latin America. It is derived from conquistadores, i.e. Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru who later settled in Latin America and now, because of poor financial conditions go to live in rustic Spain. Hedges. Hedges are considered as a means to tone down statements, to reduce the riskness of what one says, to mitigate what otherwise might seem too forceful, to be polite or show deference to strangers or superiors. They are used in newspaper texts to avoid responsibility and commitment, especially in editorials and news stories. According to Salager-Meyer (1997, 100-110), the quality of hedging is attributed to such word groups and expressions as modals (e.g. may, might, could, would, should), modal lexical verbs (to seem, to appear, to assume to suggest, etc.), modal adjuncts (e. g. possibly, perhaps, probably), modal nouns (e. g. possibility), approximators of degree, quantity, frequency and time (e. g. approximately, roughly, occasionally, somewhat, somehow, sort of, quite), if clauses (e. g. if true, if anything), compound hedges (phrases made of several hedges, e. g. It would appear, it would be reasonable to assume, etc. Consider some examples: Perhaps it is a mere bravado. Using the hedge, the article writer takes care to avoid explicit responsibility for his assertions, to self-protect himself. At the end of last year the government introduced regulations that appear to ban the worst kind of zero-hours contract, where the employer can demand availability without guaranteering any work at all. (The Observer) The death squads are thought to be connected to Shiite militias. It is quite obvious that the reporter avoids taking responsibility for what he is claiming about, wants to be objective. Compare this sentence to the one without a hedge: The death squads are connected to Shiite militias. Some critics have carped that this was made to look better than it was – but even if that is true there can be no doubt that what was promised was significant. This statement is double hedged; the first hedge expresses uncertainty or skepticism about preposition, the second one decreases the author’s presence in the text.

Task 6. In the articles that follow, look for the language features characteristic of newspaper articles.

115 Article A The Times 21 January 2015 Father supplied daughter with fatal Ecstasy A man who gave his 17-year-old daughter Ecstasy that killed her and failed to get medical help when she fell ill at the end of a two-day drugs binge has been jailed Jason Wilkes, 45, told his daughter Chloe during the week she died that he felt “like getting on it” and that she agreed, so he spent about £160 on drugs during the weekend, a court was told. When his daughter began feeling unwell at their home in Ashford, Kent, instead of taking her to a hospital which was less than three miles away, he drove her to a wood and then to an industrial estate where he worked, in an attempt to cool her down, the jury at Maidstone crown was told yesterday. If he had sought help as soon as he saw she was unwell, doctors might have been able to save her. Wilkes, who was crying in the dock, had been due to stand trial over his daughter’s death but pleaded guilty yesterday to Chloe’s manslaughter by causing her to take a noxious substance. At a previous hearing he admitted supplying her with MDMA, commonly known as Ecstasy. Sentencing Wilkes to five years and four months, Judge Philip Statman said: “Over and above whatever sentence I impose upon you today, you will lead the rest of your life knowing your conduct led to the death of your daughter who, in my judgment, you loved. “That is an enormous burden for you to have to carry with you. It is not just your burden, it is the fact she is lost to her mother and brother and extended family, a life tragically cut short. This case highlights the very grave dangers associated with Ecstasy.” Wilkes and his daughter had taken drugs together at least three times before but text messages between them showed that it was a regular occurrence, James Mulholland, QC, for the prosecution, said. Wilkes would buy and split the drugs with his daughter, who was unemployed. On the evening of July 25 last year, Wilkes and Chloe took a gram of cocaine and a gram of MDMA between them, staying up all night. The next day, Wilkes bought another gram of MDMA and each wrapped

116 half a gram of the drug up in a cigarette paper and swallowed it with water, “a method of ingestion called bombing”, Mr Mulholland said. By 1am the next morning, Chloe was agitated and disorientated, Mr Mulholland added. Wilkes took her into the back garden of their home before loading her into the back of his car and driving her to a wooded area, where she began talking incoherently. Then, rather than taking her to William Harvey hospital in Ashford, he drove her to RK Resources on the Henwood Industrial Estate, where he worked, and used a fan to cool her down. He dialled 999 at 2.01am, telling the operator that Chloe was not breathing and did not have a pulse. Six medical staff managed to restart Chloe’s heart and she was taken to hospital where they tried for hours to save her but she died later that day, the court was told.

Article B The Times 8 October 2015 Cameron crackdown on ‘anti-British’ Muslims British Muslims who hold “intolerant ideas” and create a climate for extre mism will become the target of a new clampdown to be announced by David Cameron today. In a landmark speech the prime minister will say that a failure of integration has meant that there are people born and raised in this country who do not identify with Britain. Outlining a five-year strategy to combat extremism, he will attack those who hold ideas “hostile to basic liberal values” and who promote “discrimination, sectarianism and segregation”. Mr Cameron will single out Muslim conspiracy theorists who believe that “Jews exercise malevolent power”, that 9/11 was inspired by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and that Britain allowed 7/7 because it wanted an anti-Muslim backlash. “When you look in detail at the backgrounds of those convicted of terrorist offences, it is clear that many of them were first influenced by what some would call non-violent extremists,” he will say. “It may begin with hearing about the so-called Jewish conspiracy and then develop into hostility to the West and

117 fundamental liberal values, before finally becoming a cultish attachment to death.” In his most important intervention on extremism to date, Mr Cameron is expected to announce new moves to rein in those who condone it but do not currently break the law. He will tell an audience in Birmingham that those who justify extremism because of historic injustices, recent wars or poverty must be challenged. “When people say it’s because of the involvement in the Iraq War that people are attacking the West we should remind them: 9/11, the biggest loss of life of British citizens in a terrorist attack, happened before the Iraq war. “When they say that these are wronged Muslims getting revenge on western wrongdoing, let’s remind them: from Kosovo to Somalia, countries like Britain have stepped in to save Muslim people from massacres. It’s groups like Isil, al- Qaeda and Boko Haram that are the ones murdering Muslims. “Others might say it’s because terrorists are driven to their actions by poverty. But that ignores the fact that many of these terrorists have had the full advantages of prosperous families and a western university education.” The prime minister will also acknowledge Britain’s failure to integrate some members of minority ethnic communities. “For all our successes as a multiracial, multifaith democracy, we have to confront a tragic truth that there are people born and raised in this country who don’t really identify with Britain and feel little or no attachment to other people here.” He will announce that Louise Casey, the civil servant heading the government’s troubled families programme, will lead a comprehensive review into opportunities for and the integration of Britain’s poorest and most isolated communities.

Article C The Times 15 June 2015 Worker who was sacked for eating cake sues Harrods for £1m Chocolate-glazed and layered with coffee cream, the slice of devil’s dog cake on sale at the Harrods café sounds irresistible. So it may have proved for the restaurant’s manager, who was dismissed for eating a £7.50 slice that was sent back by a customer for being too dry.

118 The manager is now suing the department store for £1 million. Juan Mackenzie, 35, was dismissed on October 9 last year from the store’s Godiva Chocolate Café. He said that he was tasting the slice of cake to make sure that it was moist enough. Mr Mackenzie, who alleges unfair dismissal, told the central London employment tribunal that he was discriminated against by colleagues at the café between April and September last year because of his race, age and gender. Originally from Chile, Mr Mackenzie was earning £24,000 a year as the restaurant’s manager. He said that he was bullied by his colleagues for being South American and that female staff were given preferential treatment. He said that he felt like a “broken man” after his dismissal. Caroline Andrew, an employee relations specialist at Harrods, told the hearing: “By continuing to consume the cake after an initial tasting without the chef or another member of staff being present, as the claimant admits he did, the claimant was effectively stealing an item.” Ms Andrew said that Mr Mackenzie had also been involved in another incident at the store. She said he allegedly had sold a crêpe for a reduced price, despite not being authorised to do so. One of Mr Mackenzie’s former colleagues, Inga Guobyte, denied that he had been bullied. She said: “I found it unfair that, as a supervisor, he was eating in the kitchen against company policy while the rest of the team were busy working at the end of the day.” The hearing continues. Harrods worker –‘sacked for eating a customer’s unwanted cake’ - £1MILLION unfair dismissal claim A Harrods worker is claiming £1million after he was sacked for eating cake a customer sent back. Restaurant supervisor Juan Mackenzie, 35, said he tried it only to confirm whether the £7.50 slice was too dry. He then tasted a slice from a fresh cake to make sure it was moist enough, an employment tribunal heard. Mr Mackenzie, who earned £2,000 per month at Harrods, said he was left a “broken” man by his dismissal. He alleges unfair dismissal from Godiva Cafe and sex, race and age discrimination. Ed Capewell, for Harrods, told the Central London Employment Tribunal, his story was “inconsistent”.

119 He added: “It was not the case that the chef supported your account.” “Two other witnesses said that you had eaten the cake rather than tasted it - which was misconduct.” The hearing continues. (The Daily Mirror, 21 July 2015)

120

5 HEADLINES 5.1 Headline Functions

Headlines, according to Reah (1998), are a unique type of text; in the attempt to attract a reader to a story and convey in a few attractive words the essence of an article, they may be ambiguous or confusing. In addition, headlines may be treated as opinion manipulators as they have to attract as many readers as possible. Also, a headline must summarize the news of the story, i.e. give important information in a nutshell. It facilitates a comprehensive, quick and fast reading for its readers. Therefore, the headline writer uses a number of devices such as alliteration, loaded language, word play. Saxena (2006, 24- 32) notes the following major functions performed by headlines: 1) index the news (they guide readers to stories of their interest, help them to save time as they skim through different pages etc.); 2) establish news value (they help the reader to judge the relative importance of a news story); 3) depict the mood of the story (they reflect various emotions by using emotionally coloured diction); 4) set the tone of the newspaper (they are the first indicators of a newspaper’s policy); 5) give identity (readers get accustomed to the typeface and the size of headlines used in their daily newspapers). However, it should be noted that in addition to the above-mentioned functions, headlines fulfil intertextual function as well. In this paper headlines are treated as texts interacting either with the text of an article (intertextual connection) or people, objects, phenomena etc in the surrounding world (intratextual connection). Consider some examples: The Mona Liza kitsch (The Independent, 17 March 2013) The headline refers exophorically to the painting of a woman with a mysterious smile. This painting has been acclaimed as the best known, the most visited, the most parodied, etc. works of art in the world. The collocation of Mona Liza and kitsch evokes the reader’s interest and motivates him / her to at least skim through the article; in addition, it adds irony to the headline. The article, actually, presents the painting by V. Tretchikoff The Chinese Girl and gives a historical background of both the painter and the painting. The idea behind this is that even though the painting was never a masterpiece, even burglars passed it by, its cheap copies became best-selling prints of all time,

121 and at present it is supposed to fetch three or four thousand pounds at auction. Thus, the intertextual link to Mona Liza allows the reader to infer that some second-rate, kitschy painting might become popular as well. The Emperors New Clothes (The Independent, 17 March 2013) First of all, it should be noted that the omission of an apostrophe in the headline is not a matter of negligence; it is deliberately omitted by the journalist, and the article, ironically, comments on the recent trends of an inappropriate use, or no use at all, of this punctuation mark in the English language. The irony through the better part of the comment is underpinned by complete omission of apostrophes, e. g. Im. The headline makes an intertextual link to Hans Christian Andersen’s tale about a vain Emperor; it is highly ambiguous and hardly interpretable without the knowledge of the previous text. In addition, it should be mentioned that the tale itself is also an example of intertextuality. It is based on a story from the medieval Spanish collection; however, Andersen read the tale in a German translation. Intertextuality, thus, makes the headline ironic, ambiguous and eye-catching. As Vengalienė noted (2006, 151), “Irony can be found everywhere: the mass media simply abounds in irony. Television, newspapers and radio reports are particularly ironic and make wide use of this linguistic technique”. Some of the presented headlines below are also very ironic. Returnadores: a new life in the old world (The Guardian, 22 February 2003) The neologism returnadores refers to the history of Spain and Latin America. It is derived from conquistadores, i.e. Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru who later settled in Latin America and now, because of poor financial conditions, mainly unemployment, go to live in rustic Spain. Intertextual ties returnadores and the old world, in their exophoric reference, trigger corresponding schemas in the reader’s mind. A white dove, a torch called Hope: the odyssey begins (The Guardian, 11 May 2012) The headline sounds optimistic because of intertextual links a white dove, Hope, odyssey which function both exophorically and cataphorically. The article covers the episode of the lighting of the Olympic flame in Greece, and in the article the flame is compared to a white dove. A white dove stands out in our minds as a symbol of love and, especially, peace; this symbolism goes back

122 to Paganism, Judaism and Christianity. Odyssey, which in one of its meaning, means a long journey with a lot of adventures or difficulties has its roots in an ancient Greek epic poem which concentrates on Odyssey’s ten-year journey home. This link emphasizes that the carrying the Olympic flame is a long journey made by many sportsmen. In addition, local people said that it would be female and called Elpida (hope). Bumi is the canary in the City’s coalmine (The Independent, 20 February 1913) The article focuses on the mining ventures, consequent financial disagreements, losses and gains etc by two mining companies; in the end of the article, one of the company’s, i. e. Bumi’s fate was compared “to a canary in the coalmine”. This comparison is reflected in the headline and makes it highly intertextual. “A canary in a coalmine” is an allusion to canaries that miners carried down into the mine tunnels. Canaries are especially sensitive to some gasses; therefore, if gasses leaked into the mine, canaries were the first to die, and this was a warning for the miners to leave tunnels immediately. This phrase, via intertextuality, was transferred to other spheres (business, politics etc). Another intertextual link, the City, defines the field of its application and implies that the fate of the above mentioned company may, in one or another way, affect the City’s business. Jamie’s carrots are all very well but we lazy lot need a stick (The Sunday Times, 24 February 2003) Intertextuality is established, first of all, through an idiomatic expression a carrot and stick approach that refers to a policy of offering a combination of rewards and punishment to influence a person’s behaviour. Originally it referred to a cart driver carrying a carrot in front of a mule and holding a stick behind it. Later this idiom became applicable to many other fields. In this case, its first part refers to the problem of the obesity of the British people, their rejection of “Jamie’s carrots” and consumption of junk food; the other part “a stick” implies, ironically, that punitive measures should be implemented such as restriction and taxation of junk food and drink or prohibiting fat people to use lifts. The other link Jamie’s carrots points exophorically to a well-known culinary specialist who strives to improve unhealthy diets and fights against processed foods in schools.

123 Task 7. In pairs, discuss the following headlines and their intertextuality. 1. India trip becomes audition for role as ‘new Diana’ (The Times, 27 January 2014) 2. Going Dutch (The Times, 28 January 2014) 3. Don’t ask what am I owed but what can I give? (The Daily Express, 12 May 2010) 4. A streetcar named mood-wing (The Independent, 17 March 2013) 5. Now media gets the papal charm offensive The( Independent, 17 March 2013)

Task 8. Find two headlines in the English newspapers which function intertex- tually, explain them and report the gist of the content of the articles to the class.

5.2 Headline Language

To catch the reader’s attention, headlines have to be simple, reader-friendly, sometimes provocative, and have to follow the standards, established by a certain newspaper. They also have to reveal the main idea of an article and take into consideration reader’s expectations, i. e. the kind of reader associated with the paper. The structure is often described as telegraphic. Though the headline might frequently be vague, a strapline might make things clearer. E.g.: Animal Rights and Wrongs The harsh truth is that vivisection is often the lesser of two evils (The Times, March 15, 2014). Switzerland’s Self-Defeat Curbing EU migration will damage the economy and hurt enterprise (The Times, February 11, 2014).

Headlines are characterized by the following features: Short words. Headlines often use very short words to make an impact on the reader, g. A man in a hurry. The article (editorial) deals with Barack Obama’s efforts to introduce certain changes in America’s political and administrative spheres as soon as he arrived at the White House. Sometimes violent words are used, e.g.: Paedophile who stashed 4,000 harrowing child sex images killed himself day before facing jail. Tabloids make a greater use of shorter and more sensational words.

124 Omitted words. The words omitted are usually function words i. e. words that do not carry essential meaning (articles, prepositions, auxiliaries). Sometimes verbs are omitted as in the example above or in the example below. Very often such headlines are accompanied by straplines which clarify the central idea of an article. E. g.: Intellect Betrayed Why turn the blunderbuss of humiliation on a gentle giant of science? Ambiguity. Headlines are often ambiguous making the reader look deeper in the article itself. Ambiguity is created by words which have several meanings or function as different parts of speech. Ambiguity is created by word play or pun. Consider the following example: Benty’s plazma tears. At first sight it may seem that Benty’s tears were unnatural; the reader may presume that the article will be about something from the sphere of fantasy. However, the article is about a woman who lost her new plazma TV; she was so distressed that she did not want to live without her new plazma TV. “Take me, Lord” she screamed. Pun is play on words in which a humorous effect is produced by using a word that suggests two or more meanings. Humorous effects created by puns depend on the ambiguities words entail. The ambiguities arise mostly in homophones i.e. words which sound alike but are written differently and often have different meanings and homonyms i.e. words which are written in the same way and sound alike but which have different meanings, for example: Police found drunk in the street. Drunk functions as an adjective and noun; thus, this headline may be interpreted in two ways: either police found a man who was drunk or somebody found not sober police. Alliteration is the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighbouring words or syllables, e.g. Gang attack outside McDonald’s caught on camera as 10 men leave victims for dead. Noun strings. It is also common to have a row of nouns in a headline, e.g. Mob rule, El Chapo’s prison escape, Celebrity sightings, Honiley Hall, former residence Robert Dudley, on market. Loaded words. Loaded words are words that carry particular strong connotations i.e. carry an emotional loading beyond their literal meaning, for example: Cocaine, booze, seedy games with hookers and furious punch-up with Wayne Rooney.

125 Quotations. Quotations are widely used in headlines According to Saxena (2006, 89-92), it is important to identify the person who has made a statement. It sparks reader’s interest and adds value to a headline. If the subject is missing, reader might question the truthfulness of the information. Thus, a headline needs attribution to know who has made the statement at first sight; consequently, a headline cataphorically refers to article text where the activities and remarks of an official, ordinary person, or some organization are presented in a more detailed way. For example: “I would like to see a church that is poor and for the poor”, declares Pope Francis Some papers, especially tabloids, are famous for their shock headlines.

Task 9. Match these headline words to their meanings and then use them to complete the headlines below. 1. Bid a) unpleasant experience, usually lasting some time 2. Boost b) argument 3. Dash c) attempt 4. Ordeal d) inquiry 5. Plea e) questioning by police or at inquiry 6. Pledge f) fast journey, often with an uncertain outcome 7. Probe g) emotional request 8. Quiz h)a period of waiting, perhaps by an ill person’s bedside 9. Row i) promise 10. Vigil j) increase in numbers or in confidence, morale 1. ____ 2. ____ 3. ____ 4. ____ 5. ____ 6. ____ 7. ____ 8. ____ 9. ____ 10. ____

Glenda Keeps ______at Injured Son’s Bedside Actress Glenda Jackson left hospital last night after spending the day at her son’s bedside, and spoke of her relief that he was still alive. Liverpool’s Euro ______. Liverpool last night received a European lift when UEFA confirmed that Welsh international Ian Rush will no longer be classified as a foreign player. Man faces ______on wife death Detectives were waiting by the hospital bedsides of a man to question him about the death of his wife.

126 Nigel’s ______. World champion Nigel Mansell took a lingering look across the Portuguese Grand Prix track which has caused him heartache and joy yesterday before declaring: ‘I will never come back here again – I’m finished forever with Formula One. Olympic boss in bribe ______. The head of the Olympics is threatening legal action over a TV documentary alleging his officials are corrupt. Pilot in British plane ______. A British airliner has made an emergency landing in southern England after a cockpit window shattered and the pilot was almost sucked out. ______to ‘divorce’ bid girl. The mother of a teenager who has taken court action to ‘divorce’ her parents pleaded last night for her to come home. Private health price fixers facing ______. Fees charged for private medical treatment are to be investigated by monopoly watchdogs. Sri Lanka peace ______. A Sri Lankan government negotiator is expected to try to reopen talks with the Tamil Tigers today in an attempt to end the outbreak of fighting between Tigers and the Army. Teenage pair killed in ______across M-way. A teenage judo champion and a girl pal were killed in front of friends as they took a short cut across a motorway. (Collins Cobuild, 1997, 18–19)

Task 10. Provide definitions for the words which are common in headlines.

Acquit (v), alert (v), axe (v), besiege (v), blast (n, v), breakthrough (n), curb (n, v), deploy (v), detain (v), envoy (n), haul (n), imminent (adj), launch (n, v), loom (v), probe (n, v), rout (n), sleuth (n), standoff (n), strife (n), stun (v).

Task 11. Write your own headlines to the given articles; then discuss them and choose the best ones. In addition, define the type / genre of the article.

127 Article A

Scientists have found that ditching bad habits is much easier when you are doing it side by side with your partner Couples are more likely to tackle bad habits and get healthy if they do it together, a study has found. Whether you want to shed some pounds, visit the gym more often or quit smoking, doing it with your partner will boost your chances of success. Experts studied 3,722 couples who were either married or living together who had enrolled into the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Scientists discovered that those taking part had a better chance at ditching bad habits if their partners made the change as well. Lead researcher Dr Sarah Jackson, from University College London, said: “Now is the time to make New Year’s resolutions to quit smoking, take exercise, or lose weight. And doing it with your partner increases your chances of success.” In the study, among women who smoked, half managed to quit if their partner gave up at the same time, while trying to quit on their own proved much more difficult. While 17% of those whose partners were already non-smokers succeeded, and just 8% of those whose partners were unreformed regular smokers. Dr Julie Sharp, Cancer Research UK’s head of health information, said: “Making lifestyle changes can make a big difference to our health and cancer risk. And this study shows that when couples make those changes together, they are more likely to succeed. Getting some support can help people take up good habits. For example, if you want to lose weight and have a friend or colleague who’s trying to do the same thing, you could encourage each other by joining up for a run or a swim at lunchtime or after work. And local support such as stop smoking services are very effective at helping people to quit. Keeping healthy by not smoking, maintaining a healthy body weight and being active can all lower the risk of cancer, and the more people can help and encourage each other, the better.” The study, published in the journal Jama Internal Medicine, was funded by Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, and the US National Institute on Aging.

128 Article B

A quarter of British parents do not help their children with homework, a survey has found, as experts say they are put off for fear of embarrassment. A poll of over 27,000 parents in 29 different countries found that just over one in 10 UK mothers and fathers spend the equivalent of at least an hour a day assisting their children with their school work. Meanwhile, parents from India, Vietnam, Colombia and Malaysia were the most likely to spend seven hours a week helping their children with homework, according to a survey published by the Varkey Foundation, a global education charity. On average, British parents spend 3.6 hours a week helping their youngsters, the poll calculates. Chris McGovern, chairman of Campaign for Real Education, said that while middle class parents might hire private tutors to guide their children through the homework, deprived families may lack the wherewithal to do the same. “It is a tragic situation where children are not getting the right support,” he said. “Children who suffer the most are ones whose parents can’t help them. We need an adult literacy and numeracy programme. “Some parents are not able to help their children even if they want to, they are ashamed and embarrassed that they can’t read.” A 2013 study by the publisher Pearson found that more than half lacked the confidence to help children with simple sums in the home. Just one in 20 respondents could correctly answer a full list of questions suitable for pupils aged 11 and under. The study found that 30 per cent of parents “don’t feel confident enough in their own maths skills to help their children with their primary school maths homework”. Meanwhile, some 53 per cent insisted they struggled to understand the new maths teaching methods used in modern classrooms.

129 GUIDELINES FOR A NEWSPAPER 6 ARTICLE ANALYSIS While analysing a newspaper article, you can take the following steps:

1. Give a general idea of what kind of newspaper it is (e.g. British / American, quality / tabloid, local / national / international, etc.). 2. Characterize / describe the page your article is on (briefly summarize the pictures, ads etc., then focus on the article you have to analyze). 3. Identify the genre of an article (e.g. news story, editorial, feature etc.). 4. Comment on the headline / strapline of the article. 5. Identify the central idea of the article. 6. Analyse the structure of the article (e.g. lead(s), “inverted pyramid” structure). What do you see in the body parts (e.g. analysis of the events, description of persons, recent events, references to concrete people, statistics, etc.)? 7. Speak of the syntax and vocabulary of the article. 8. What stylistic means are employed and what role do they play? 9. What is the tone of an article (e.g. humorous, critical, alarming, solemn, playful, ironic, angry, intimate)? 10. What is the topic of an article (What issues are dealt with in the text)? 11. Put the text into perspective by considering: • Topicality (of current interest vs outdated). • Relevance (for whom the text / topic is relevant?). • Reliability (reliable / questionable?). • Relation to other texts (how do you evaluate the text in relation to other texts on similar topic (s)? 12. Share your opinion of the text / topic (What is your personal reaction to the text? Did you enjoy the text? What mood did the text put you in? From your point of view, what is good and bad about the text?)

130 REFERENCES

Bell, A. (1998). The discourse structure of news stories. In A. Bell and P. Garrett (Eds). Approaches to Media Discourse. Oxford, UK and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 64–104. Bell, A. and Garrett, P. (Eds). (1998). Approaches to Media Discourse. Oxford, UK and Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Setting. London & New York: Longman. Brown, G. &G. Yule. (1996). Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: CUP. Collins Cobuild. (1997). Key Words in the Media. Harter Collins Publishers. Galperin, I. R. (1977). Stylistics. Moscow:“Higher school”. Halliday, M. A. K. & R. Hasan. (1976). Cohesion in English. London & New York: Longman. Keeble, R. (2006). The Newspaper Handbook.London & New York: Routledge. Paltridge, B. (2012). Discourse Analysis. Continuum. Reah, D. (1998). The Language of Newspapers.Routledge. Richardson, J. E. (2007). Analysing Newspapers. An Approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Palgrave: Macmillan. Salager-Meyer, F. (1997). I Think That Perhaps You Should: A Study of Hedges in Written Scientific Discourse. In Miller T. (Ed.)Functional Approaches To Written Texts: Classroom Applications. Washington: United States Information Agency, 105-118. Roberts, R. How to Use Newspaper Articles in Language Class, accessed 15 October, 2014, available from http://blog.britishcouncil.org/2014/03/10/ how-to-use-newspaper-articles-in-language-class/ Saxena, S. (2006). Headline Writing. SAGE Publications: New Delhi, London. Vengalienė, D. (2006). Irony in the Headlines. Kalbotyra, 56(3), 150-155.

131 GLOSSARY1 ad – abbreviation for advertisement advance – statement/speech issued in advance to the media advertorial – where distinction between editorial and advertising becomes blurred agony aunt – woman offering advice to people who write to newspapers with personal or emotional problems. Agony uncle is the male equivalent, but there are not many of these around alternative press – loose term incorporating wide variety of non-mainstream newspapers. Can include leftist, religious, municipal, trade union publications angle – main point stressed in story usually in intro. Also known as hook. US: peg artwork – all illustrations, maps, charts or cartoons that accompany copy backgrounder – feature exploring the background to main story in the news banner – front-page headline extending across full page brief – short item of news often of just one par but occasionally with up to four or five parts. Other names: snip/nib/bright/filler broadsheet– large-size newspaper such as Daily Telegraph, Financial Times. A number of national newspapers previously broadsheet, such as the Independent and the Times, have recently turned tabloid, though calling themselves the more respectable compacts caption – words accompanying any picture or artwork. A caption amounting to a small story is a caption story catchline – usually single word identifying story which is typed in right-hand corner of every page. Subeditor will tend to use this word to identify story on layout. US: slug celebrity / glitterati / beautiful people / jet set – famous people centre spread – copy and pictures running over two pages in centre of newspaper circulation – average number of copies of a newspaper or magazine that are usually sold each day, week etc classified ads – small ads classified according to subject area and carrying no illustrations

1 Glossary was compiled following Collins Cobuild, 1997; Keeble, 2006; Saxena, 2006.

132 column – vertical section of article appearing on page. Also known as leg columnist – someone who writes regular articles, usually on a particular topic, for a newspaper or magazine compact – tabloid version of former broadsheet newspaper e.g. the Independent, the Times correspondent – usually refers to journalist working in special area: defence, transport; or abroad e.g. Cairo correspondent cover story – main story that appears with a picture on the front cover of a newspaper or magazine crosshead / subhead – small heading usually of one or two words within body of text of larger type size than body text sometimes with underline. Used for design purposes to break up grey area of text. Word is usually drawn from text following but carries no great news value. Written by subeditor and not reporter diary column – gossip column; also a day-to-day personal account display ads – large advertisements usually containing illustrations and appearing on editorial pages. editor – person in overall charge of the editorial content of the newspaper editorial – all non-advertising copy; also a column in which newspaper expresses its views on issues (sometimes known as leaders) eye-witness reporting – presence of reporter at news event can provide unique opportunities for descriptive writing e-zine – electronic magazine fourth Estate – press supposedly occupying the position of fourth most powerful institution after Lords Spiritual, Lords temporal and Commons freelance – journalist contributing to several media outlets and not on permanent staff of any organization; see also stringer. US: freelancer gag the press – to stop or restrain from exercising free speech: censorship laws aimed at gagging the press. hard news – news focusing on who, what, where, when, why based on factual detail and quotes and containing little description, journalist comment or analysis; cf. soft news heavies – ‘serious’ papers such as Guardian, The Times, Financial Times human interest story – story focusing on success, failures, tragedies, emotional/sexual histories of people, eliminating or marginalizing more abstract and deeper cultural, economic, political, class-based factors in-depth reporting – detailed coverage

133 index – front page (or sometimes elsewhere) listing of stories in rest of paper, to ease reading and ‘sell’ or ’flag’ the contents in prominent place intro – opening of news or feature story usually containing main angle. Not necessarily just single par. Also known as lead. US: nose invasion / breach of privacy – situation in which someone tries to find out details about another person’s private affairs in a way that is upsetting and often illegal inverted pyramid – traditional representation of news stories (with main point at start and declining in news value thereafter and ending with short background). Tends to oversimplify structure of news story. Better to imagine series of inverted pyramids with an overall large pyramid gutter press – newspapers that print shocking stories about people’s personal lives. Used to show disapproval journalese – journalists’ jargon lead – main story on page. On front page otherwise known as splash lead-ins – a lead-in is a short phrase, usually five words or less, that starts off a photo caption in a newspaper. Lead-ins are used to catch the reader’s attention and “lead in” to the main caption. listicle – a published article structured in the form of a list, typically having some additional content relating to each item. masthead – top of front page carrying the name of the paper middle-market – newspapers such as Mail and Express which lie (in overall style and appearance) between heavies and the red-tops nibs – short news stories obit – abbreviation of obituary, an account and appreciation of someone’s life op-ed – abbreviation of opposite editorial, being the page opposite one on which editorial or leader comments falls. Usually contains important features and commentary by prestigious columnists opinion piece – article in which journalist expresses overt opinion paparazzi – photographers who follow famous people in order to take photographs they can sell to newspapers par – abbreviation for paragraph. Also para pops / populars – mass-selling national tabloids; now known as red-tops because their mastheads are in red PC – political correctness (Dutch treat, Dutch courage, French letters, mankind) PR – abbreviation for public relations punchline – main point of story. Thus ‘punchy’ means story has a strong news angle

134 qualities – broadsheets readership – number of people who read paper as opposed to the number of copies sold red-tops – tabloid newspapers such as the Mirror, the Sun and the People, so- called because their mastheads are red round-up – gathering together of various strands of story either under the heading (otherwise known as umbrella story) or under variety of headings running story – story which runs or develops over number of editions or days scoop – exclusive section – separately folded part of the paper sister paper – when company owns more than one paper each is described as sister. Thus The Times is the Sun’s sister since both are owned by Rupert Murdoch soft news– light news story that can be more colourful, witty and commenty than hard news soundbite – short, pithy quote used by journalists. First coined by US radio and television journalists in the late 1960s splash – lead news story on front page strapline – a headline written beneath the main headline. It is written in a point size that is smaller than the point size used to write the main headline, and is generally used to highlight a new point. It can also be used to amplify the main headline. It is an American term. tabloid – newspaper whose pages are roughly half the size of broadsheets. All pops or popular papers are tabloids as are the sections of some of the heavies. Serious tabloids exist on the Continent (Le Monde in France, for instance) and in the US (Los Angeles Times). Here in the UK The Timesand Independent have turned tabloid (though they call themselves compacts) tabloidization – claim that media in general are following tabloid values prioritising entertainment, sensationalism and scandal above ‘hard facts’ think piece – analytical article tip-off – information supplied to newspaper by member of public top – story at the top of a page whistleblower – person revealing newsworthy and previously secret information to media widow – short line at top of column

135 ISBN 978-609-471-130-5 (internetinis)

Janinos Buitkienės, Jūratės Marchertaitės ir Daivos Verikaitės-Gaigalienės mokomoji knyga „The Language of Media“ yra skirta anglų filologijos bakalauro studijų progra- mos studentams, siekiantiems įgyti žinių apie žiniasklaidos diskurso ypatumus ir no- rintiems patobulinti anglų kalbos įgūdžius – tuo tikslu analizuojami laikraščių straips- niai ir aptariami jų žanriniai bei kalbiniai ypatumai. Šios mokomosios knygos autorės remdamosi moksline literatūra siekia aiškiai ir glaustai apibrėžti pagrindinius teorinius žiniasklaidos diskurso principus bei atskleisti, kaip šie principai veikia realiame žinių pateikimo kontekste, t. y. per praktinį jų taikymą.

Redagavo Daiva Verikaitė-Gaigalienė Maketavo Silva Jankauskaitė

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