Written Communication Jan 2015

Contested Science in the Media: Linguistic Traces of News Writers’ Framing Activity

Trine Dahl Norwegian School of Economics

Abstract

Science reporting in the media often involves contested issues, such as, for example, biotechnology, climate change, and, more recently, geoengineering. The reporter’s framing of the issue is likely to influence readers’ perception of it. The notion of framing is related to how individuals and groups perceive and communicate about the world. Framing is typically studied by means of content analysis, focusing primarily on the “stories” told about the issue. The current article, on the other hand, springs from an interest in writer behavior. I wish to investigate how news writers strategically exploit their rhetorical competence when reporting on contested issues, and I argue that text linguistics represents a fruitful approach to studying this process. It is suggested that genre features may serve as a basis for identifying key framing locations in the text, and that the notion of evaluation plays an important part in writers’ framing activity. I discuss these aspects through a case study involving six news reports on a geoengineering experiment.

Journal
Written Communication
Published
2015-01-01
DOI
10.1177/0741088314557623
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
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Citation context

Cited by in this index (4)

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  3. Szymanski (2016)
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  4. Vandendaele et al. (2015)
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