Linguistic construction of news values in American news media coverage of a hate crime : a corpus-based discursive analysis

الملخص EN

The paper aims to explore how news values related to hate crime offender and victims have been linguistically constructed in the American news media, taking the New Zealand attack against Muslims in March 2019 as a case study.

To this end, the study adopts two analytical approaches: the discursive news values analysis (DNVA) of Bednarek and Caple (2012, 2017), and a corpus linguistic approach, using the AntConc software tools (Anthony, 2019).

The specialized corpus of the study is composed of 151 news reports, compiled from three American News organizations : CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, covering the period from March 15th, to 22nd 2019, while the reference corpus is the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), specifically the newspaper texts corpus.

The corpus-based analysis focused on the tools of key word list, clusters, concordance lines, and file view.

To reveal the linguistic resources that construct news values, an analytical framework is designed, based on Bednarek and Caple (2017) and Jeffries (2010).

Among the main findings of the study is that NEGATIVITY and SUPERLATIVENESS are the most frequently constructed news values when portraying both the offender and victims.

It is also found that the news value of IDEOLOGY tends to be exclusively established when representing the offender, while PERSONALIZATION and POSITIVITY are established with the victims.