Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Readers’ objectivity and bias evaluations of news texts were investigated in order to better understand the process by which readers make these kinds of judgments and the evidence on which they base them. Readers were primed to evaluate news texts for objectivity and bias, and their selections and metacommentary were analyzed. Readers detected bias in passages with stance markers, and detected objectivity in those lacking stance markers. In their metacommentary, readers tended to characterize objective texts as lacking purpose, or having a merely descriptive or expository purpose, and biased texts as exhibiting explicit interpretive or argumentative purposes. Unlike studies that locate objectivity or bias in news texts, or test it by asking about the fidelity of texts to their sources, our study examined the evaluations of readers in their interactions with texts. It shows how objectivity and bias evaluations are a multiply determined part of a communication dynamic rather than a fixed quality of a text.

Keywords

stance metadiscourse topicality negativity media bias rhetoric of science

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Atkinson

(1999). Scientific discourse in sociohistorical context: The philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675-1975. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Bazerman

(1988). Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the experimental article in science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Bell

(1984). Language style as audience design. Language in Society, 13, 145-204.

Charney

(2003). Lone geniuses in popular science: The devaluation of scientific consensus. Written Communication, 20(3), 215-241.

Crismore

Kopple

W. J. V.

(1988). Readers’ learning from prose: The effects of hedges. Written Communication, 5(2), 184-202.

Fahnestock

(1986). Accommodating science: The rhetorical life of scientific facts. Written Communication, 3(3), 275-296.

Johnstone

(1996). The linguistic individual: Self-expression in language and linguistics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Kennamer

J. D.

(1988). News values and the vividness of information. Written Communication, 5(1), 108-123.

MacDonald

S. P.

(2005). The language of journalism in treatments of hormone replacement news. Written Communication, 22(3), 275-297.

10.

Martin

J. R.

White

P. R. R.

(2007). Language of evaluation: Appraisal in English. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

11.

Myers

(2003). Discourse studies of scientific popularization: Questioning the boundaries. Discourse Studies, 5(2), 265-279.

12.

Myhill

Jones

(2007). More than just error correction: Students’ perspectives on their revision processes during writing. Written Communication, 24(4), 323-343.

13.

Nelkin

(1995). Selling science: How the press covers science and technology. New York, NY: W. H. Freeman.

14.

Parents pay or extras axed. (2007, September 11). Richmond News, p. 5.

15.

Paul

Charney

Kendall

(2001). Moving beyond the moment reception studies in the rhetoric of science. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 15(3), 372-399.

16.

Rayson

(2012). WMatrix3. Lancaster, UK: UCREL. Retrieved from http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix3.html

17.

Reed

(2001). (Un-)professional discourse? Journalists’ and scientists’ stories about science in the media. Journalism, 2(3), 279-298.

18.

Schudson

(1978). Discovering the news: A social history of American newspapers. New York: Basic Books.

19.

Stratman

J. F.

(2000). Readers’ perception of bias in public education documents: The case of ballot booklets. Written Communication, 17(4), 520-578.

20.

Weisman

McKinnon

J. D.

(2009, October 31). Presidential visitor list is released. Wall Street Journal, p. 6.

21.

Zeleny

(2009, October 31). White House visitors log includes stars and C.E.O.’s. New York Times, p. 11.

Examining Readers’ Evaluations of Objectivity and Bias in News Discourse

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References