It is commonly believed that news, as a genre variety of media text, is not inherently interpretative, or this interpretation is optional, not affecting the impartial overall reflection of reality in the news.
Affecting the overall impartial reflection of reality in the news. Meanwhile, both in the practice of news journalism and in academic literature, the attributes of information that are “responsible” for its regulatory impact on the reader, guiding the process of making sense of reality in a certain way, cannot fail to be reflected.
In the opening lines of a recently published handbook for journalists, the requirements for news are formulated as follows “News must be current, credible and objective; it must contain all the information needed to assess the importance and impact of the event being described and it must be understandable, with a clear focus on the essentials. 1 It is obvious that “assessing the importance and consequences” and “focusing attention on the main thing” presuppose not simply a “reflection” of the event, but also a certain interpretation of it, not to mention the fact that the very relation of the fact of reality (ontological) with the fact reported (gnoseological) is interpretative in nature. Moreover, the contemporary demands of the of a competitive media environment and especially the competition between new electronic and traditional print media actually “erode” the usual standards of depersonalization of information, giving rise to new forms of news presentation and “dialogization” of of the communicative relationship with the reader4. This introduces a significant element of evaluation into traditionally “conservative” media genres, which include news.
All this allows us to speak of the interpretative nature of the news media text, which is inherent in it to no less no less than the text of analytical and journalistic genres. Considering interpretation as one of the properties of discursive speech-textual activity, in this paper. We will try to reveal the specifics of interpretative techniques, functioning on the level of of print news text composition.
It should be noted that in foreign media linguistics the opinion that news is “valueless” has long ceased to be predominant and widespread, which was greatly facilitated by the works of T.A. van Dijk and the critical analysis of discourse laid in them6. The works of N. Fairclough, R. Fowler, A. Bell and many other foreign authors reveal, among other things, the mechanisms of interpretativeness in the news, mainly at the level of vocabulary, narrative structures and in the sphere of “sociology of news”. In domestic media linguistics the news media discourse has become a subject of special study relatively recently, but even here there is already a clear tendency to comprehend the news text in the aspect of evaluativity and interpretativity.
Interpretativity at the level of text composition
We have already written about the interpretative and evaluative potential of such phenomena in news text, such as language play, intertextuality, and headline relations.
Here we would like to turn to the compositional level of the news text, which has been little studied so far in the aspect of the interpretation of reality. The compositional structure of news is considered to be the most clichéd and “standardized” level, whose function is to organize the text internally (text formation) and to emphasize the main information by placing it in a strong text position (pragmatic function). Below we will try to show that the interpretative potential of composition is not limited only to the pragmatic amplification of significant information through strong positions, but also lies in other ways of composing a news text. In order to unlock this potential, we will turn to
one of the most “small-scale” news genres, the memo,11 since it is in this basic, prototypical genre contains, in our opinion, all the structures and mechanisms of this type of media media texts. We propose to consider the manifestations of interpretativity in the composition of a news article within the framework of three types of compositional relations of macrotextual structure – compositional-factual, compositional-logical and compositional-syntagmatic.
The direct subject of our study is those ways of realization of the indicated compositional relations, which potentially, and consequently, in the real
empirical filling carry an interpretative and evaluative load.
