Exploring the axiological workings of ‘reporter voice’ news stories—Attribution and attitudinal positioning

This paper seeks to contribute to the scholarship which is interested in the rhetorical, axiological workings of what are sometimes termed ‘hard news’ or ‘objective’ news stories—a style of news journalism typically associated with the ‘quality’ or ‘broadsheet’ news media and involving a regime of ‘strategic ‘impersonalisation’. It is interested in the communicative mechanisms by which such texts are often able to advance or favour particular value positions while employing a relatively impersonal style in which attitudinal evaluations and other potentially contentious meanings are largely confined to material attributed to quoted sources. It reviews previous research on the evaluative qualities of these texts, with special reference to the literature on attribution and so-called ‘evidentiality’ in news discourse. It is proposed that understandings of the axiological workings of these text can be enhanced by referencing some of the key insights emerging from what is termed the ‘Appraisal ‘framework’, an approach to the analysis of evaluative language developed within the Systemic Functional Linguistic paradigm of Michael Halliday and his associates. In particular it is proposed that understandings of the workings of these texts can be enhanced by referencing proposals in the Appraisal literature with respect to implicit or ‘invoked’ attitude and by reference to an account of attribution and so-called ‘evidentiality’ which is grounded in Bakhtinian notions of dialogism, rather than in notions of truth functionality and certainty-of-knowledge claims.

► The paper provides new insights into the axiological workings of news reports.
► Insights are offered into the workings of attribution and evidentials in news.
► A new model for the semantics of reporting verbs and evidentials is proposed.
► These meanings should be understood in dialogistic, not knowledge-status terms.
► A model is offered for the attitudinal functionality of reported speech in news.