Chapter 4. Challenging the concept of pure objectivity in British and Spanish hard news reports

This article provides a linguistic analysis of facts and viewpoints in a British-Peninsular Spanish sample of newspaper reports written about the Second Lebanon war (2006). Almeida’s (1992) category system for the analysis of factuality and nonfactuality, and Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal framework were used to analyze journalistic ideological subjectivities underlying all factual statements in the news reports. Results show differences in how writers align their readers based on the political ideology of the newspaper, confirming Patterson and Donsbach’s (1996, 466) conclusion that “partisanship can and does intrude on news decisions, even among journalists who are conscientiously committed to a code of strict neutrality.” Thus, the results of this study are of interest to discourse analysts and media researchers.

• Affiliations: 1: Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus, Spain; 2: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain