The British Press’ Coverage of Coronavirus Threat: A Comparative Analysis Based on Corpus Linguistics

The world is living one of the most difficult times at the moment since a pandemic has been declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO, henceforth). In this scenario, information is one of the most powerful tools, not only to just inform, but also to alarm people and create panic. The aim of this paper is to make a comparative linguistic analysis of headlines from serious and sensationalist journalism in the UK. The corpus consists of a compilation of headlines published over the period of one month (from 20th January to 20th February), which have been extracted from four broadsheets: The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times and The Telegraph; and four tabloids: The Sun, The Mirror, The Express and The Daily Mail. The corpus management tool Sketch Engine and the programming language R have been used since they allow the user to carry out both an automatic analysis of the text and basic statistics from Corpus Linguistics.

The British Press’ Coverage of Coronavirus Threat: A Comparative Analysis Based on Corpus Linguistics

The world is living one of the most difficult times at the moment since a pandemic has been declared by the World Health Organisation (WHO, henceforth). In this scenario, information is one of the most powerful tools, not only to just inform, but also to alarm people and create panic. The aim of this paper is to make a comparative linguistic analysis of headlines from serious and sensationalist journalism in the UK. The corpus consists of a compilation of headlines published over the period of one month (from 20th January to 20th February), which have been extracted from four broadsheets: The Guardian, The Independent, The Financial Times and The Telegraph; and four tabloids: The Sun, The Mirror, The Express and The Daily Mail. The corpus management tool Sketch Engine and the programming language R have been used since they allow the user to carry out both an automatic analysis of the text and basic statistics from Corpus Linguistics.

___

  • Alba-Juez, Laura. “Evaluation in the Headlines of Tabloids and Broadsheets: A Comparative Study.” Evaluation in Media Discourse: European Perspectives, no. November, 2017, pp. 81–119, doi:10.3726/b10531.
  • BBC News Mundo. Coronavirus:qué significan los términos que usamos con más frecuencia al hablar de la pandemia de covid-19, 2020. www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias-51969328. Accessed 29 March 2020.
  • Bakuuro, Justine. “Demystifying Halliday’s Metafunctions of Language.” International Journal of Language and Literature, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017, doi:10.15640/ijll.v5n2a21.
  • Bhatia, Vijay K., et al. “Advances in Discourse Studies.” Advances in Discourse Studies, vol. 9780203892, 2008, doi:10.4324/9780203892299.
  • “Bug.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bug. Accessed 17 Apr. 2020.
  • Conboy, Martin. “Parochializing the Global: Language and the British Tabloid Press.” New Media Language, 2004, pp. 45–54, doi:10.4324/9780203696965.
  • Desagulier, Guillaume. “Corpus Linguistics and Statistics with R:Introduction to Quantitative Methods in Linguistics.” Springer, 2017, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-64572-8.
  • Dor, Daniel. “On Newspaper Headlines as Relevance Optimizers.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 35, no. 5, 2003, pp. 695–721, doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(02)00134-0.
  • Fowler, Roger. “Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press.” Language in the News: Discourse and Ideology in the Press, 2013, doi:10.4324/9781315002057.
  • Fradejas Rueda, José Manuel. Cuentapalabras. Estilometría y Análisis de Textos Con R Para Filólogos. 2019, http://www.aic.uva.es/cuentapalabras.
  • Fuertes-Olivera, Pedro A., et al. “Persuasion and Advertising English: Metadiscourse in Slogans and Headlines.” Journal of Pragmatics, vol. 33, no. 8, 2001, pp. 1291–307, doi:10.1016/S0378-2166(01)80026-6.
  • Jones, Rodney H., et al. “Discourse and Digital Practices.” Discourse and Digital Practices, 2015, doi:10.4324/9781315726465.
  • Kilgarriff, Adam, et al. “The Sketch Engine: Ten Years On.” Lexicography, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 7–36, doi:10.1007/s40607-014-0009-9.
  • Kuiken, Jeffrey, et al. “Effective Headlines of Newspaper Articles in a Digital Environment.” Digital Journalism, vol. 5, no. 10, Routledge, 2017, pp. 1300–14, doi:10.1080/21670811.2017.1279978.
  • Lai, Linda, and Audun Farbrot. “What Makes You Click? The Effect of Question Headlines on Readership in Computer-Mediated Communication.” Social Influence, vol. 9, no. 4, Psychology Press Ltd, 2014, pp. 289–99, doi:10.1080/15534510.2013.847859.
  • Molek-Kozakowska, Katarzyna. “Towards a Pragma-Linguistic Framework for the Study of Sensationalism in News Headlines.” Discourse and Communication, vol. 7, no. 2, 2013, pp. 173–97, doi:10.1177/1750481312471668.
  • Montgomery, Martin. The discourse of broadcast news: A linguistic approach. Routledge, 2007.
  • Rogers, Tony. “Differences between Broadsheet and Tabloid Newspapers.” ThoughtCo. 2019. ThoughtCo. Web.
  • Smith, Richard D. “Responding to Global Infectious Disease Outbreaks: Lessons from SARS on the Role of Risk Perception, Communication and Management.” Social Science and Medicine, vol. 63, no. 12, 2006, pp. 3113–23, doi:10.1016/j.socscimed.2006.08.004.
  • “Tabloid.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/tabloid. Accessed 17 Apr. 2020.