Appraisal theory and the analysis of point of view in news and views journalism – unpacking journalistic “persuasiveness”

Abstract

This paper offers a demonstration of Appraisal Theory as an analytical framework for dealing with point of view in journalistic discourse. It takes journalistic “persuasiveness” as its central theme and thereby offers novel insights into a key, much scrutinised property of news journalism – its potential for influencing public understandings and expectations of the way the world is and ought to be. In operating with this notion of “persuasiveness”, the paper outlines lines of inquiry for dealing with news journalism texts which are often treated as distinct, both with respect to their stylistic properties and their communicative effects. Specifically, the concern is with the communicative functionality of both news “reporting” and journalistic “commentary”, or with what are here termed “news journalism” and “views journalism”. Appraisal Theory offers an account of the resources for conveying evaluative meanings and the framework is demonstrated through a comparison of a news report and a commentary piece concerned with the same subject matter – a decision by an education scholarship provider to include in its application form optional questions about candidates' sexuality. Specifically the paper demonstrates how similarities and differences in the two pieces’ “persuasiveness” can be discovered through an analysis which attends to four points of interest: (1) tendencies in the different types of attitudinal assessment by which the reader is positioned to adopt negative or positive views, (2) whether attitudinal assessments are conveyed explicitly or implicitly, (3) whether the attitudes being conveyed are authorial or are attributed to external sources and (4) the nature of the entities or phenomena which the reader is being positioned to view positively or negatively.