The Shaping of the News

People seem to be well aware of the great power that the media has in influencing public opinion, that sort of manipulation of the addressee’s emotions which has been referred to as ‘emotion management’. But how does the media succeed in being so persuasive? This book provides a critical investigation of press news treatment of a particular event which quite recently upset the world - the H1N1 virus outbreak - as a significant evidence of the power of language in the construal of what Berger and Luckmann have termed ‘the social construction of reality.’ The language of the press coverage of the H1N1 virus in the UK tabloid The Sun is analysed, considering both the interactional and institutional aspects of knowledge distribution as well as strategies of legitimization achieved through language. In particular, referring to the Appraisal Framework analysis, this book intends to investigate how and to what extent the Sun’s use of ‘catastrophe-oriented’ lexical choices, code-switching statistics utilized as ‘special effects’, conversationalization and other linguistic strategies were all conducive to maximizing panic and spreading, what has proved to be, unjustified alarm about the H1N1 virus.