Arguments for an appraisal linguistic discourse approach to the analysis of "objectivity" in "hard" news reports

Studies focusing on the ideal of "objectivity" in "hard" news reports are numerous, with most of them falling within journalistic studies and being theorised from diverse theoretical insights. This article departs from a journalistic to a linguistic discourse approach, presenting evidence that the linguistic discourse analytical framework of Appraisal Theory provides alternative ways of analysing "objectivity" and ideological bias in "hard" news reports. Couched in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), appraisal is a model that explains the way(s) in which language construes attitude, and enables writers and speakers to position themselves evaluatively with respect to the viewpoints of potential respondents and other speakers/writers (Thomson, White and Kitley 2008; White 2007). The article argues that the analysis of the construction of journalistic reality can also be adequately done from a linguistic perspective, specifically from analysing how lexical choices journalists make betray their ideological positioning both in terms of the content as well as the context of the news report. In discussing this, the article comparatively analyses two news reports in two Zimbabwean newspapers on the death of retired General, Solomon Mujuru.