A pragmatic study of misrepresentation in British and American news reports

الملخص EN

This study is concerned with investigating misrepresentation in British and American news reports from a pragmatic perspective.

To the best of the researcher’s knowledge, this topic has not been given sufficient investigation, particularly pragmatically.

As such, this study attempts to fill in this gap in this arena, particularly in the genre of news reports.

Hence, the study aims to achieve the following: finding out the types of misrepresentation that are used by British and American news reporters, revealing which pragmatic strategies are employed by British and American news reporters in their attempt to misrepresent facts and events in news reports, determining what is the difference, if there is any, between British and American news reports as far as the exploitation of the pragmatic strategies of misrepresentation is concerned, pinpointing which pragmatic strategy has prevalence over other strategies in British and American news reports , and showing if there are any differences between British and American news reports as far as the stages those reports consist of.

The study hypothesizes that: British and American news reporters use fraudulent misrepresentation in an attempt to misrepresent news reports, British and American news reporters make use of speech acts and fallacies as pragmatic strategies in their attempt to misrepresent facts and events, there is no difference between British and American news reports as far as the exploitation of the pragmatic strategies of misrepresentation is concerned, speech act strategy has prevalence over other strategies in British and American news reports, and there is no difference between British and American news reports as far as the stages those reports consist of.

The study adopts the following producers in order to fulfill its aims and test the validity of its hypotheses: providing a literature review about misrepresentation from a pragmatic perspective, collecting a sample of news reports from different British and American news sites and newspapers to be the data of the study, using the adopted model to pragmatically analyze the data under scrutiny and a suitable statistical mean to analyze the data quantitatively, and discussing the results of the analysis to come up with certain conclusions