Research Question
Language of the modern political and military news: to what extent is it sensationalist? This research question was chosen because the effect of sensationalism that the media uses to attract the audience’s attention is created through language. Sensationalism was prevalent in the media in the past and remains relevant today; however, the audience often does not realize they are drawn to certain news because it is presented in a specific way.
Politics is the most recurring theme in the media at present and the one that attracts the most attention, so investigating the language of related content would be especially relevant. Thus, the purpose of this research is to examine the extent to which news media language is sensationalist nowadays.
News and Related Articles
As the language being investigated is a specific type used in the media, it was necessary to collect materials from the news media. These would include news articles or other relevant content related to the topic. CNN and BBC news were chosen as sources for this kind of material.
The most appropriate sources in this case would include internationally recognized news sites, such as CNN and BBC. The audience of these media is the widest, and the materials from these sources are completely accessible. In this way, they differ from sources that are limited to a specific type of audience, such as The New York Times, for example, which is ready to pay for subscription services. Thus, when investigating the language used in a widely accessible source versus a less accessible one, the results could differ. For this research, widely accessible media is the most suitable choice.
Corpus
As the purpose was to see the extent of sensationalism in the media at the present moment, outdated news and articles were not taken into consideration. The collected news and articles were chosen from those that appeared on the opening pages of the media sites, as these are usually the most common. The preference was to choose news and articles from the last 2-3 months, but most of the collected materials are from the recent weeks.
The suitable materials were manually copied into a Word document. In total, around 20 news articles were chosen from both CNN and BBC. Their content was compiled into a single document containing approximately 20,000 words. The titles were not removed and were also included in the document, as they are among the most essential parts of the language specific to the media.
Corpus Investigation
After the Word file was converted to a text file, it was uploaded to AntConc, where the first step was to create a word list from the collected materials. After that, the word list was converted to an Excel file. It is apparent that the most frequent words were grammatical ones, so at this point, the next step would be to mark the most relevant lexical words. The lexical words that were deemed the most appropriate and suitable for further linguistic investigation were highlighted in yellow. In total, 66 most frequent words relevant to the topic were chosen.
Then, some of these words (either the most frequent or the most relevant ones) were chosen to investigate what the cases of their usage were in the collected materials, how exactly they were used, and in what types of collocations. Examining the concordance of these lexical units was helpful. Subsequently, some of the concordance lists were saved as separate Excel files and included in the database alongside the word list.
Findings
Proper Names
Even though most news and articles were not specifically selected to depict a single topic, but rather chosen from materials that appear on the opening page or among the most recent and relevant content, it is clear that specific proper names recur the most. Among the most frequent proper names are Russia, Russian, Ukraine, Ukrainian, China, Beijing, and the names of presidents (Putin and Zelensky). Most people who are interested in the news will pay attention to titles containing specific words, and even those unfamiliar with politics will focus on them, as most of the audience has a specific emotional response to these words.
Focus on a Personality
Another finding is a significant focus on a single personality: the name Putin certainly evokes different emotions among the majority of the audience, and it is one of the most frequently mentioned words in the list. By including a name that most readers are familiar with and have a particular association with, the emotional response is more easily elicited, and the reader’s eyes are naturally drawn to this information.
Military-Themed Language
The most frequently repeated words throughout the corpus are those with a military theme. Vocabulary related to war, especially when emotionally loaded, always evokes strong emotions in readers and keeps their eyes on the text. These are some of the most frequently used military-themed words in the selected materials, along with their frequencies. We can see that words such as ‘nuclear’ are pretty frequent, and in this case, ‘nuclear’ appears to hook the reader.
Conclusions
Some conclusions that can be drawn from this research are that certain features of sensationalist language are indeed present in modern media political news. These are features such as using certain vocabulary that will hook a reader and appeal to the vocabulary that inevitably evokes an emotional response.