Discursive Construction of News Values in the Headline

Pingyan Li, Mengxiao Chen, Jianxin Yang

OAI: oai:igi-global.com:222824 • DOI: 10.4018/IJTIAL.2019010102

The paper makes a discursive analysis of the news value construction in the headlines of new media news. The data chosen is 59 news headlines on coverage of Zimbabwe Crisis released in the apps of BBC from November 6th to November 18th 2017. The data indicates a chronological variance of the news values in the headlines. Specifically, eliteness and negativity are values constantly occurring in the headlines throughout the crisis report. The value of positivity appears only at the final stage of the news coverage. The value of timeliness emerges at the final four days of the news coverage. The value of suspense appears at the middle stage of the event. The value of proximity is employed when the detention just occurred. In terms of the linguistic realization of those news values, the study finds that the frequent use of some words contributed to the realization of news values. This study is important in that it reveals how language resources are used by newsmakers to construct news value in the headlines and how news values are realized in the context of communication.

Literacy and Language Studies Media and Communications Communications Theory