Linguistic construction of news values in American news media coverage of a hate crime: A corpus-based discursive analysis

The paper aims to explore how news values related to hate crime 
offender and victims have been linguistically constructed in the American 
news media, taking the New Zealand attack against Muslims in March 
2019 as a case study. To this end, the study adopts two analytical 
approaches: the discursive news values analysis (DNVA) of Bednarek 
and Caple (2012, 2017), and a corpus linguistic approach, using the 
AntConc software tools (Anthony, 2019). The specialized corpus of the 
study is composed of 151 news reports, compiled from three American 
News organizations: CNN, New York Times and Washington Post, 
covering the period from March 15th, to 22nd 2019, while the reference 
corpus is the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), 
specifically the newspaper texts corpus. The corpus-based analysis 
focused on the tools of key word list, clusters, concordance lines, and file 
view. To reveal the linguistic resources that construct news values, an 
analytical framework is designed, based on Bednarek and Caple (2017) 
and Jeffries (2010). Among the main findings of the study is that 
NEGATIVITY and SUPERLATIVENESS are the most frequently 
constructed news values when portraying both the offender and victims. 
It is also found that the news value of IDEOLOGY tends to be exclusively 
established when representing the offender, while PERSONALIZATION 
and POSITIVITY are established with the victims.