Reporting Conflict: Appraising Journalists’ Voice in Pakistani Newspaper Discourse

Abstract

This paper aims at evaluating journalist voice in the Pakistani print media discourse. Journalists are supposed to make valuefree reporting, but the analysis of newspaper texts shows that the journalists appraise and the news reports voice newspapers’ stance (Bednarek, 2006). Therefore, media discourses always present a particular left or rightwing stance loaded with subjective evaluations (White and Thompson, 2008). While previous studies have focused on reportage phenomena of different news genres and perspective comparisons with a primary focus on language in the context of politics for an ideology, this paper explores evaluative patterns - based on the appraisal framework (Martin and White, 2005) of discourse analysis developed within Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014) with a focus on appraisal domains of attitude, engagement and graduation - in Pakistani news reporting to find a reporter voice. The analysis shows that the said news reporting is not value free.

Keywords

• Reporter voice
• newspaper discourse
• appraisal analysis
• ideology