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News Reports from Press Agency Sources: an insight on style

John E. Richardson Sheffield University,

Introduction In this article I analyse two examples of how different include the news reports sent by press agencies. Data was collected as part of a PhD research project analysing the representation of Islam and Muslims in British broadsheet newspapers, specifically the section of the thesis analysing the representation of Iraq. Articles reporting, commenting on or otherwise involving Iraq and/or Iraqi actors - henceforth referred to as the ‘Iraq articles’ - constituted 20.9 per cent (n= 531) of all sampled articles (n= 2540). This discussion piece will analyse four of these Iraq articles. The articles which are discussed and analysed below were originally written by working for ‘press agencies’ - companies such as , , Agence France Presse, and others, who sell ‘copy’ to subscribing newspapers, broadcasters and other interested parties. These subscribers then use the to write news reports in accordance with, amongst other things, the interests of their audiences. The manner in which the information contained in press agency releases is used by different news organisations is therefore particularly interesting for students of . On occasion, a report ‘wired’ from a press agency is included in the newspaper in a format so close to the original form that the press agency responsible is referenced - ‘by-lined’ - at the top of the article. Even on occasions such as these, the press agency release is rarely included verbatim, but is edited in accordance with the specific requirements of the newspaper - stylistic requirements, political requirements and simple ‘spatial’ requirements. These choices are all inevitably political however, since words are not benign but have a history and a politics (Cameron, 1996), particularly when applied to and upon the social world. Occasionally two different newspapers included edited versions of the same press agency release. There were four occasions in these Iraq articles (i.e. 8 reports) where different newspapers printed edited versions of the same press agency release on the same day. Each of these four press agency articles reported the same story: the Iraqi weapons inspections and UNSCOM ‘stand- off’. Recognising that on these four occasions the sampled newspapers used the same press releases, offers an opportunity to analyse how newspapers with different audiences, identities, political commitments and hence editorial policies, present the information they receive - in this case, the information contained in the reports wired to them by the press agencies. Table 1 below compares an instance where two newspapers printed an Iraq article which was based on the same Associated Press (AP) . Both articles were printed on the same day, 6 October 1997, in the ‘liberal’ British broadsheet newspapers the Guardian and the Independent. The articles are transcribed chronologically, with matching or corresponding paragraphs numbered and positioned next to each other for ease of reference. The following rules of transcription apply:

· text with no coloured highlight: identical text in both articles

· text highlighted in green: lexical, terminological or phrasiological stylistic differences in paragraphs of identical or comparable textual position

· text highlighted in yellow: textual elements not present in the opposite text

The headlines are excluded from this colour coding but are discussed in the analysis following Table 1:

Table 1: Newspaper utilisation of an AP press release:

Row: Independent, 6 October 1997, p.10 Guardian, 6 October 1997, p.12 1 UN anger as armed gang launches Gunmen attack Baghdad’s UN oil-for- grenade attack on oil-for-food HQ in food office Baghdad 2 Four gunmen hurled grenades and fired Four unidentified gunmen hurled bullets at an office of the UN oil-for-food grenades and fired bullets at an office of agency in the capital Baghdad, destroying the United Nations oil-for-food and damaging at least three vehicles in programme in Baghdad, damaging at the compound, officials said. least three vehicles in the compound, officials said yesterday. 3 No one was injured except one of the No one was injured except one of the attackers and taken into custody by the attackers, who was taken into custody by Iraqi army, said a UN statement sent to the Iraqi army, a UN statement said. The Cairo. The remaining three gunmen fled, other gunmen fled. it said. 4 The attack was on Saturday night at the The attack happened on Saturday night at World Health Organisation’s the World Health Organisation’s headquarters in Baghdad, which houses headquarters in Baghdad. It has an office an office for UN officials monitoring the for UN officials responsible for distributing oil-for-food programme. According to medicines in northern Iraq under the oil- preliminary reports the four men lobbed for-food programme. grenades and also opened fire at the WHO building. 5 Eric Falt, spokesman for the oil-for-food Eric Falt, spokesman for the oil-for-food programme, told the Associated Press in programme, said in Dubai that the Dubai that the attack came after office assailants threw three grenades and fired hours and only guards were present in at the building. the building. 6 The UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator in Baghdad, Denis Halliday, condemned the attack, the first ever at a UN building in Iraq, the statement said. “It is the Iraqi government’s responsibility to protect UN personnel and property against any harm and Mr Halliday has asked for an urgent meeting at the highest levels with the Iraqi leaders in order to express his concern,” said the statement. 7 No one claimed responsibility for the attack. 8 Iraq has been under UN sanctions Iraq has been banned from selling oil, banning the sale of oil, its economic under sanctions since its 1990 invasion mainstay, since its 1990 invasion of of Kuwait. A UN programme allows Iraq to Kuwait. But a special UN programme, put sell $1 billion of crude every 90 days to in place in December 1996, allows Iraq to buy food and medicine under UN sell $1 billion of crude every 90 days to supervision. buy needed food and medicine under UN supervision. 9 The WHO building is located in the al- Wahda district, where an Iranian opposition group in exile is based.

At the first glance of Table 1 above, the two articles wired from AP, and subsequently printed in the newspapers, appear remarkably similar. The ordering of the paragraphs in both articles for example, is for the most part identical. This, to some extent supports the models of news discourse suggested by van Dijk (1988) and Bell (1991), since the reports follow the standard schematic structure of lead, episode and , with the event being subdivided into setting, actors, action (physical and verbal) and background. It should be borne in mind that this adoption of a schematic structure was the choice of the press agency and not the newspapers. In addition, the ordering of clauses within the paragraphs are identical: differences between the two newspapers’ reports only exist in clauses which have been either added or deleted (it is unknown which process occurred since the original is unobtainable), or in clauses which have been altered to conform to stylistic or textual requirements. The congruity between the reports, indicated by the amount of identical, ‘un-coloured’ text in the transcriptions, reveals the extent to which press releases are included in toto by the newspapers. Indeed the only section of the reports which differ substantially, suggesting the authorial input of (at least one of) the newspapers, are the reports’ headlines. These similarities should not be that surprising however, given that both articles are by-lined to AP. It is in the differences between the two reports that the real analytic interest should therefore lie. The lexical and phrasiological differences in the two reports (green highlighted sections) provide interesting evidence regarding the stylistic and political preferences of the newspapers. On occasion these differences appear at first glance to be quite arbitrary. For example, the Independent refers to the “UN oil-for-food agency” in row 2, in contrast to the nominalisation “UN oil-for- food programme” in both row 2 of the Guardian’s report and indeed the remainder of the Independent article, where it is referred to as a “programme”. That the Independent only changed the “programme” to an “agency” in one clause suggests that the alteration did not occur due to the stylistic requirements of the paper. Similarly in their headline, the Independent refer to an “oil-for-food HQ” as opposed to the Guardian’s contrasting “oil-for-food office”. Lower down in the article the Independent switched back to referring to an “office” (see rows 2 & 4) in accordance with the Guardian article. That these anomalies in the Independent report occurred in the article’s leader (headline and first paragraph) suggests that the Independent wanted to open their article by foregrounding the ‘importance’ and ‘authority’ of UN activities in Baghdad and of the building which was attacked: an ‘agency’ not a ‘programme’; a ‘HQ’ not an ‘office’. These choices increase the ‘scale’ of the reported actions in the Independent’s report, which in turn increases the argumentative weight behind their reading of events in the headline: that the UN are ‘angry’. This importance is also indicated elsewhere in the article (row 8), where the Independent refer to “a special UN programme” whilst the Guardian simply refer to “a UN programme”. Other stylistic differences are the result of a number of textual features. First, syntactic variations, for example between active, passive and nominalised constructions. In row 3 the Independent opts for a nominalised construction “said a UN statement” in order to include the qualifying prepositional phrase “sent to Cairo”. The Guardian omits this prepositional phrase and uses the active construction “a UN statement said”. Second, and related to the above, stylistic differences appear to conceal elements of the action, or the background to the action being reported. In row 9 for example, the Independent states that the bombed UN office houses “UN officials monitoring the oil-for-food programme”, whilst in the Guardian account opposite, the same office houses “UN officials responsible for distributing medicine in northern Iraq under the oil-for-food programme”. Similarly, in row 5 the Independent states that Eric Falt “told the Associated Press in Dubai…” whilst the Guardian elides the agency’s role stating that Eric Falt “said in Dubai…”. Third, differences exist for reasons of economy: in row 3, the Independent writes “The remaining three gunmen” whilst the Guardian writes “The other gunmen”. And fourth, differences exist due to grammatical error: in row 4, the Independent writes “The attack was on Saturday night”, whilst the Guardian writes “The attack happened on Saturday night”. The fifth and largest form of stylistic difference between the articles occurs in row 5, where the two newspapers credit “Eric Falt, spokesman for the oil-for- food programme” with wildly divergent quotes. The words attributed to Falt are so different in fact that it was unclear whether they should still be coloured ‘green’ in the transcription. The Independent paraphrases him as saying “the attack came after hours and only guards were present in the building”, whilst the Guardian paraphrases him as saying “the assailants threw three grenades and fired at the building”. Here, Falt’s words are being used by the two newspapers to perform slightly different functions in their reports. Essentially in both cases the is being used to provide more information on the event being reported, which is why they are still coloured green, indicating differences rather than absences. The Guardian uses Mr Falt to provide more information on the action, specifically the form which the attack took. The Independent, which had already provided further information on the form of the attack in the previous paragraph (row 4), opts to use Mr Falt to provide more information on the setting, specifically the time of the attack. This suggests a hierarchy of action exists in the articles, whereby the form of violence (in this case a ‘grenade attack’) is thought more worthy of expansion than the context: i.e. the ‘what’ is considered more newsworthy than the ‘where’ and ‘when’. The yellow highlighted sections of the transcript indicate material missing from the paragraph in the opposite column. Such material is included by the newspaper for a number of reasons. First, it is included in order to provide additional contextualisation, such as in row 2 were the Independent writes “in the capital Baghdad” whilst the Guardian writes “in Baghdad”. Here the Guardian appears to assume a level of knowledge in their readers which the Independent does not, therefore space is saved by out the modifier “the capital”. Second, as suggested above, material is used by the Independent to further increase the ‘scale’ of the reported actions. In row 2 for example, the Independent describes the result of the attack as “destroying and damaging …vehicles” whilst the Guardian describes the grenades “damaging …vehicles”, and in row 8 the Independent describes oil as Iraq’s “economic mainstay”, which is sold in order “to buy needed food”. These three additions support the ‘amplification’ of the reported action, present across the Independent article. Row 6 represents the largest section of text printed by only one of the newspapers - in this case included by the Independent. It is the inclusion of this paragraph which provides the majority of support for the claim, made in the Independent’s headline, that the UN is angry. The paragraph suggests that “UN’s humanitarian co-ordinator in Baghdad, Denis Halliday condemned the attack”, without which the quoted words of his statement which followed would appear far less confrontational: this statement actually “asks for an urgent meeting at the highest levels with the Iraqi leaders in order to express …concern”. The Guardian’s headline on the other hand, foregrounds the event itself - “Gunmen attack Baghdad’s UN oil-for-food office” - as opposed to the (UN) reaction to the event, hence the response of Denis Halliday would appear a little incongruous. On one interesting occasion, the Guardian states in row 2 that the gunmen are ”unidentified”, enabling their article to dispense with the statement “No one claimed responsibility for the attack”, included in row 7 of the Independent’s report. At first this transformation appears to follow a simplification-generalisation rule (see van Dijk, 1988: 32), but it is in fact a little more complicated. Both sections of the articles quoted above are directed at fulfilling the ‘who’ criteria of journalism - ‘who was involved in the action?’ - a question which was, at that point, unknown. In the Guardian the burden of proof appears to rest with the AP and the newspaper, who were unable to identify the gunmen; in the Independent, the burden of proof appears to rest with the gunmen themselves, who have not identified themselves by claiming responsibility for the attack. What the Independent appear to be suggesting, is that the gunmen ought to have claimed responsibility and are somehow all the more deviant for not doing so. In addition, in the Independent article, by suggesting that the gunmen have not “claimed responsibility”, the possibility that the newspaper actually ‘know’ who carried out the attack is not ruled out. This enables the newspaper to ‘point the finger’ at possibly guilty parties, for example in row 9, where they claim: “The WHO building is located in the al-Wahda district, where an Iranian opposition group in exile is based”. The inclusion of this material implies its pertinence to the event being discussed, which, when combined with the ‘vacuum of agency’ left by the gunmen not claiming responsibility, acts to implicate the unnamed ‘Iranians’. This implication is unavailable to the Guardian, since they admit that they, like everybody else involved, have not or cannot identify the gunmen. Overall, and as stated at the onset of the analysis above, the articles appear remarkably similar. This is possibly a result of educational, political and ‘class’ similarities between the intended audiences of the two ‘liberal’ newspapers. The additions to the Independent article - particularly the Halliday paragraph - reframe the report to include the reaction of the UN to the event to a much greater extent than in the Guardian article. This was no doubt the primary reason for such differences in both the reports’ headlines and the ‘angle’ on the event presented by the two newspapers. The second example of an agency press release being printed by two of the sampled newspapers occurred on 24 November 1997. On this occasion the report was written by Reuters and printed in the newspapers the Financial Times and the Guardian. The transcriptions in Table 2 below, follow the same conventions used in the previous analysis: green indicating stylistic difference and yellow indicating absence:

Table 2: Newspaper utilisation of a Reuters press release:

Col: Financial Times, 24 November 1997, p.4 Guardian, 24 November 1997, p.14 1 US warns over Iraq site access US tells Saddam to open palaces to UN inspectors 2 The US yesterday demanded that UN The United States demanded monitors responsible for ridding Iraq of unobstructed access yesterday to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction be given President Saddam Hussein’s palaces unimpeded access to suspect sites, and other suspect sites so that United including President Saddam Hussein’s Nations’ inspectors could investigate palaces. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

3 Arguing for keeping all UN sanctions in Arguing for keeping all UN sanctions in place in the meantime, William Cohen, place, the defence secretary, William defence secretary, accused Iraq of Cohen, accused Iraq of illegally blocking illegally blocking access to 63 sites to access to 63 sites, including the palaces, conceal possible stashes of outlawed where biological and chemical weapons biological and chemical weapons. could be stored. 4 President Bill Clinton said the inspectors President Saddam had ruled 63 sites off had much to do before he considered the limits to the UN commission, responsible latest UN stand-off with Iraq over. for destroying biological, chemical and nuclear. Mr Cohen said. “Those cannot be of limits.” 5 Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraqi foreign He said that as soon as the inspectors minister, rejected Mr Cohen’s call for sought access to restricted sites they unrestricted access to presidential were “either delayed of simply obstructed property and other sensitive sites. “They and refused. That cannot continue.” [the inspectors] should avoid coming near sites which are part of Iraq’s sovereignty and national security,” he said in Baghdad. 6 He added that the crisis, which has led to a heavy US military build-up in the region over the past few weeks, was “not over by any means”. 7 The 70 to 80 UN inspectors flew back to Iraq from Bahrain on Friday after Russia brokered a deal that at least temporarily headed off possible US military action against Iraq.

In contrast to the articles transcribed in Table 1, the two articles in Table 2 above were very different. As a simple measure: 46.7 per cent (n= 224) of the 480 words in Table 1 are identical (non-coloured); in contrast, 16.2 per cent (n= 48) of the 296 words in Table 2 are identical, all of which occur in rows 2 and 3. Due to the wide divergence in the reports printed by the Guardian and the Financial Times the analysis of the articles will this time proceed chronologically, discussing each successive row in turn. The opening paragraphs of the reports (row 2) are very similar, despite the fact that only four words remained ‘uncoloured’. Three of these words provide a degree of information on the ‘what’ and ‘when’ being reported in the articles - a ‘demand’ for ‘access’, occurring ‘yesterday’ - but do not tell us anything about who (or what) demanded access to what and (perhaps most importantly) why. For these questions to be answered we need to look at the lexical and syntactic choices made by one or both of the newspapers in this first paragraph: the Guardian placed the “United States” in the active role of ‘demanding access’, whilst the Financial Times chose the abbreviated synonym “US”. The nominal used by the Guardian in this case perhaps sounds a little more authoritative than that used by the Financial Times. Both the paragraphs in row 2 contain presumptions regarding the present actions of Iraq and/or President Saddam Hussein: through reporting the demand for “unimpeded access”, the Financial Times imply that access was currently being ‘impeded’; whilst the Guardian, opting to report the demand for “unobstructed access” make the somewhat stronger implication that access was being ‘obstructed’. Both statements imply that such access is not at present available, an implication given full expression in row 3 (see below). Further, through the use of the verb ‘demand’, the reports suggest that such access is a required necessity. Remaining with row 2, the syntactic structuring of the reported US action - a demand - differs between the two newspapers, resulting in different impressions of what exactly the US is ‘demanding’. The Financial Times’ report suggests that the demands of the US are quite restricted, paraphrased here for ease of reference:

‘the US demanded unimpeded access for a specific group of UN monitors to suspect sites which include Saddam Hussein’s palaces’.

The Financial Times therefore suggests that it is only the “monitors responsible for ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction” that the US are demanding be granted access “to suspect sites”. The Guardian’s report, on the other hand (again paraphrased for ease of reference), suggests that the demands of the US are far more inclusive, not to mention presumptuous:

‘the US demanded unobstructed access to Saddam Hussein’s palaces, and other suspect sites, so UN inspectors can investigate Iraq’s WoMD’.

In the Guardian’s account, the ‘access’ being demanded by the US appears unspecified, almost ‘timeless’, and gives the impression that the US are demanding access at least initially for themselves, after which the “UN inspectors” would start their investigation. The Guardian cites the Presidential palaces first, with “other suspect sites” referred to as a rejoinder, suggesting that the palaces are especially or ‘most’ suspect. This, in turn, personalises the suspicion, pointing the finger at “President Saddam”. Lastly, the “weapons of mass destruction” are referred to a way which presumes their existence: the weapons are to be investigated, not the palaces with a view to establishing whether there are any weapons. The Guardian’s more open-ended presentation of US demands continues in the next paragraph (row 3), where an important qualifying clause - “in the meantime” - is omitted from the initial adverbial phrase. This phrase, printed in the Financial Times’ report opposite, reads: “Arguing for keeping all UN sanctions in place in the meantime, William Cohen …accused Iraq of illegally blocking access to 63 sites…” This omission is highly significant, since it essentially changes the whole function of William Cohen’s argument: from ‘keeping sanctions in place in the meantime’ to simply ‘keeping sanctions in place’. Up until this point therefore, the Guardian’s presentation of the Reuters report appears to encourage a reading of the event which is more critical of this US action than that offered by the Financial Times: The US are represented as demanding open-ended, unobstructed access to investigate, as opposed to confirm the existence of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, and are cited as arguing to keep all sanctions in place for an undisclosed period. The Guardian goes on to suggest that William Cohen accused Iraq of “illegally blocking access to 63 sites …where biological and chemical weapons could be stored”, which, as it stands, is quite a strong accusation: Iraq has allegedly not only ‘blocked’ access, but has so “illegally”, with all the retributivist consequences which that implies. The Financial Times paraphrases William Cohen going one step further however, accusing Iraq of an intended (malign) outcome to their obstructive actions: “illegally blocking access to 63 sites to conceal possible stashes of outlawed biological and chemical weapons”. Why the Guardian chose not to include this accusation of intent is unclear from the texts alone. Perhaps such an inclusion would have provided a clearer context for (US) military aggression against Iraq than the context which they suggest: that Iraq has blocked access to sites “where biological and chemical weapons could be stored”. The remaining 4 rows the articles diverge significantly, with all the remaining text of both reports being discrete and only included by one or other newspaper. The gist of the remaining information in each article does appear to be similar however, arguing that the inspection crisis in Iraq was not over. The Financial Times report appears to suggest that ‘both sides’ intend to continue the crisis whilst the Guardian only explicitly includes the intentions of the USA on the matter. First, the article paraphrased the US President Bill Clinton as saying that “the inspectors had much to do before he considered the latest stand-off with Iraq over”. Second, the article quoted the Iraqi foreign minister, who “rejected Mr Cohen’s call [actually a ‘demand’] for unrestricted access to presidential property and other sensitive sites” (my emphasis), thereby signalling Iraqi intent to continue their present (obstructive) stance. The Guardian also chose to argue that the crisis was not over, but, after two paragraphs (rows 4 and 5) where the background (President Saddam’s obstructing the UN) and US reaction (“Those [sites] cannot be off limits”) are restated, the paper foregrounds the US military presence (threat?) to a far greater extent than the Financial Times. The article almost goes as far as to suggest that the US intended to direct “military action” - the euphemism of choice throughout the 531 sampled Iraq articles - at Iraq. This is achieved in a very interesting way, which therefore merits further discussion. The article first states in row 6 that William Cohen said: “the crisis, which has led to a heavy military build-up in the region over the past few weeks, was ‘not over by any means’.” Cohen’s statement of intent is very similar to that attributed to Clinton in the Financial Times’ report, but when combined with a reference to “a heavy military build-up” the newspaper implies a rather threatening link between the continuation of the crisis and the military presence. Taking into account the left-liberal audience of the Guardian, this inclusion was perhaps intended to suggest a military intent on the part of the US: they planned to initiate “military action” and were therefore intentionally prolonging - or perhaps escalating - the crisis. Below in row 7, and building on this last inference, the article suggests that the agreement recently brokered by Russia had “at least temporarily headed off possible US military action against Iraq”. Such a statement is clearly intended to be elliptical, but the exact nature of the ellipsis is unclear and could have taken one of two forms. First:

“a deal that at least temporarily, and at most permanently headed off possible US military action against Iraq”

Or second:

“a deal that [at least] temporarily headed off possible US military action against Iraq, but it is only a temporary reprieve’

In this second example, “at least” is placed in parentheses in order to indicate that the phrase is being used colloquially, denoting the speaker’s relief in the temporary postponement of the US military action as opposed to a scalar or comparative ‘least-most’ reference. The operative word in the phrase is “temporarily” and this is illustrated more clearly by altering the position of the phrase:

‘at least a deal has temporarily headed off possible US military action against Iraq.’

To suggest that this second reading of the ellipsis was intended by the newspaper would be highly conjectural. What is clear in both of the readings of row 7 of the Guardian article discussed above, is that the newspaper is foregrounding the possibly temporary nature of the stay to US violence. In the first reading the newspaper chooses to state that the crisis diminution could be (is “at least”) temporary, as opposed to ‘could be permanent’. This is no doubt the result of the general scepticism verging on cynicism prevalent in journalism, but in this case such scepticism is directed at the likelihood of the US being able to permanently cancel their plans to direct “military action” at Iraq: i.e. they will probably be violent at some point in the future. In the second reading it is assumed rather than implied that the brokered deal only brings a temporary postponement, as opposed to cancellation of “US military action”. The only mitigation in this claim is that the violence is labelled the “possible US military action”, resulting in the complex claim: ‘the return to a situation in which US military action is possible, is inevitable’. Here the paper presumes that the crisis will continue, and in the future will return to a situation of threatened US military action, similar to that encountered before the Russian brokered deal. It is in these final two paragraphs of the Guardian article that the central, perhaps overpowering, presence of the US military in the Iraq crisis, is indicated. Such a presence is absent from the Financial Times’ article, which prefers to focus on the demands and intentions of statesmen and the position of the UN. In addition to this military presence, the first two paragraphs of the Guardian article present the ‘demands’ of the US as much more ‘open-ended’, almost implying that the US are being unreasonable in demanding such access. The Financial Times on the other hand, are much more measured in the presentation, suggesting that it is only “UN monitors responsible for ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction” whose access is being requested - the “demand” even being reframed in a lower paragraph as a “call for unrestricted access”. The impression from the Financial Times’ article is that the UN are almost doing Iraq a favour, “ridding” their country of such weapons, and therefore that it is Iraq who are acting unreasonably by ‘impeding’ their progress.

Concluding remarks What this brief discussion has hopefully shown is that newspapers can present significantly diverging accounts of the same reported action, even when provided with raw material from the same source - in this case an agency press release. It is often supposititious to speculate on the reasons for these differences, since, as (Lindlof, 1995:209) states, texts present the results of rule-based decisions but not necessarily the reasoning behind the decisions nor indeed the reasoning behind the rules. There are, however, traces of this reasoning left in the actual content of media texts. These traces are further illuminated when the results from two different sets of decision-based rules - in this case the reports of two newspapers - are compared. I therefore feel that this direct comparison of by-lined press agency reports presents a fruitful future direction in the sociology of journalism.

References

Bell, A. (1991) The Language of . Oxford, UK: Oxford. Cameron, D. (1996) Style policy and style politics: a neglected aspect of the language of the news, Media, and Society 18: 315-333. Lindloff, T. R. (1995) Qualitative research methods. London: Sage. van Dijk, T. A. (1988) News as Discourse. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Asso.

John E Richardson is a PhD research student in the Department of Sociological Studies at Sheffield University. His principle research interests include: the Sociology of Journalism; Power and Ideology; argumentation, rhetoric and pragmatics; and Critical Discourse Analysis, especially with regard to the representation and 'Othering' of minorities in print journalism. He teaches part time at the University and is also the Editor of the Department’s online journal, Sheffield Online Papers in Social Research.

© Sheffield Online Papers in Social Research (ShOP) ISSN: 1470-0689

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