Language Use in Print Media War Reports

Aspects of Stylistic Analysis

Abstract

This study examines language use and communicative strategies employed by
journalists in war reports in newspapers and magazines. Using Leech and Shorts
(1995) model of concept of linguistic stylistics as its theoretical framework, this
study analyses language use in the news reports on the Israel-Lebanon war of
2006 and the Libyan civil war of 2011. Two newspapers: THISDAY and the New
York Times and two magazines: TIME and Newswatch were selected as sources
of data. Sample extracts of headlines, editorials and features from the newspapers
were subjected to different levels of stylistic analysis. Findings showed that the
use of the simple present tense in the headlines, compound and conjoined words,
cohesive devices as well as reported speech forms and morphological features,
(acronyms/abbreviations) are significant communicative strategies employed by
journalists to achieve meaning in the war news reports being studied. Based on
the findings the paper recommends that journalists should consider the
deployment of stylistic features often at the syntactic and lexical levels as they are
found to be central in revealing different linguistic choices in news reporting,
particularly war reporting.