{"title":"Reported speech and gender in the news: Who is quoted, how are they quoted, and why it matters.","authors":"Maite Taboada","doi":"10.1177/17504813241281713","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>News stories have a well-defined generic structure, consisting of components such as headline, lede, and body, with reported speech a prominent feature, especially in hard news stories. Reported speech serves multiple purposes, from providing evidentiality and intertextuality to contributing to the construction of newsworthiness and to the context creation of news. It is also a site of potential bias in who is cited and how, including with respect to the gender of sources. Using a large corpus of English-language news stories for all of 2023 from the main five mainstream news outlets in Canada (over 370,000 articles from news websites), I examine the gender distribution of those quoted, the syntactic variation in the structure of quotes, and the types of reporting verbs. The study provides a comprehensive overview of the extend of gender bias in contemporary Canadian news, at the same time offering insights into the nature of reported speech in modern news and how it endures and evolves, including in news meant for digital-only publication.</p>","PeriodicalId":46726,"journal":{"name":"Discourse & Communication","volume":"19 1","pages":"93-113"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1000,"publicationDate":"2025-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11863382/pdf/","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Discourse & Communication","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17504813241281713","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"2024/9/29 0:00:00","PubModel":"Epub","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"COMMUNICATION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
News stories have a well-defined generic structure, consisting of components such as headline, lede, and body, with reported speech a prominent feature, especially in hard news stories. Reported speech serves multiple purposes, from providing evidentiality and intertextuality to contributing to the construction of newsworthiness and to the context creation of news. It is also a site of potential bias in who is cited and how, including with respect to the gender of sources. Using a large corpus of English-language news stories for all of 2023 from the main five mainstream news outlets in Canada (over 370,000 articles from news websites), I examine the gender distribution of those quoted, the syntactic variation in the structure of quotes, and the types of reporting verbs. The study provides a comprehensive overview of the extend of gender bias in contemporary Canadian news, at the same time offering insights into the nature of reported speech in modern news and how it endures and evolves, including in news meant for digital-only publication.
期刊介绍：
Discourse & Communication is an international, peer-reviewed journal that publishes articles that pay specific attention to the qualitative, discourse analytical approach to issues in communication research. Besides the classical social scientific methods in communication research, such as content analysis and frame analysis, a more explicit study of the structures of discourse (text, talk, images or multimedia messages) allows unprecedented empirical insights into the many phenomena of communication. Since contemporary discourse study is not limited to the account of "texts" or "conversation" alone, but has extended its field to the study of the cognitive, interactional, social, cultural.
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