Appraising political legitimacy: reporting the news as communicative action

Abstract

This paper uses techniques from CDA and SFL and theoretical models from cognitive linguistics and evolutionary psychology to investigate how different news sources from the US and HK with different political ideologies represent social actors and engage with their audience through the legitimizing genre of the news report in the context of political protests in the two territories in 2019 and 2020. Cognitive linguistics is used to develop empirically based models for textual interpretation and texts are analyzed for the potential image schemas they may induce readers to represent. It is found that the conventions of the news report genre allow news discourse producers to legitimizing their authorial voice by appearing more objective and neutral while also performing the positive aspects of their professional journalistic ideology. Based on evolutionary psychology, two mutually exclusive legitimizing strategies are conceptualized: the logico-rhetorical module and the detected alliance module. The use of these modules is analyzed at the final CDA stage of text explanation and insights are gained in terms of how different sources may construe their audience. It is hypothesized that news sources which anticipate an audience of co-partisans are less constrained ideologically due to their reduced reliance on evidentiality and the use of the logico-rhetorical module when producing texts.