The aim of this thesis is to study what means are used in newspaper leaders (editorials) to influence public opinion. In order to obtain a wide range of such means, I have chosen material that has a clear timeframe and illustrates strong political antagonism, concerning the 1971 conflict between the Saco and SR unions and the Swedish state. Leaders from eight different newspapers with different party affiliations are analysed – six morning and two evening newspapers. What type of message leaders convey is examined mainly at the sentence level. Writers report what happened, assess the situation and analyse the causes and explanations for there being a labour conflict. They express criticism of those involved in various ways and exhort them to take recommended courses of action to resolve the conflict. Paragraphs can also be categorised in this way. How criticism is expressed is studied in detail because the material is rich in critical utterances of different types. Various theories about text types and speech act theory provide a theoretical background that is applied to the material. A number of different theories about what defines a genre are presented and tested on the leaders. The results of the investigation indicate that a large number of leaders from the morning newspapers are structured in a similar way, with the paragraph as the unit. They reveal a pattern, the normal pattern, where information is presented in a given order in the majority of morning leaders and the greatest number of message types is used. There is also a pattern of analysis/criticism, with critical and analytical paragraphs alternating and the analysis substantiating the criticism, as a rule. The few leaders in the morning newspapers that do not form a pattern may be strongly critical or almost solely analytical. One of the morning newspapers has many critical leaders that argue or incite. No analysis is made of evening newspaper leaders at the paragraph level since the paragraphs are short; instead, they are analysed as a whole, as are the argumentative leaders. The analysis shows that many leaders are structured in a similar way while at the same time there is considerable variation in the material, which is attributable to there being different types of editorials.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-58884 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Hellström, Gunilla |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Institutionen för nordiska språk, Stockholm |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf, application/epub+zip |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess, info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Stockholm studies in Scandinavian philology, 0562-1097 ; N.S., 55 |
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