Diction (the words chosen by a writer or author) can be positive or negative, depending on how a word is applied.
Unethical news reporters use deception to create impressions or appearances different from reality. ‘Depiction is a canon of visual rhetoric widely manipulated by the media’—falsehoods refer to acts or statements that mislead, hide the truth, and promote a belief or idea that is not true.
The media abuse emotive words to play on the audience’s feelings, sometimes deliberately to give gravitas to an allegation or a story. They use this technique to fool the audience and manipulate them into believing their story, especially when unsure of their facts.
Stephen Ward of the Center of Journalism Ethics wrote that emotion in reporting raises ‘ethical questions about the shape of coverage’. In the article Emotion in Reporting: Use and Abuse, he warned that emotions in journalism can be overused and manipulated. He added, ‘In a media era when networks and other outlets are struggling to survive, we should be wary of journalists using emotion-based reporting to secure audiences.’
Emotive language plays on the audience’s feelings — it evokes an emotional response and can make an issue appear more significant than it is. A word expressing negative emotion similarly impacts the audience’s minds.
THE CASE OF KWASIZABANTU MISSION – THE NEWS24 REPORTAGE
Evidence shows that it was a regular tactic in the News24/KwaSizabantu coverage in EXODUS. Similarly, emotive words were overused to negatively position the founder and his mission.The language used in the News24/KwaSizabantu coverage was designed to persuade the audience to feel shocked and pessimistic about the mission.There is no balance in the reporting. In the insightful article by Dr Siebörger, The language telling the KwaSizabantu story, he highlighted that News24 used emotive and evaluative words in their KwaSizabantu coverage and provided clear examples of these evaluations:
“The tendency that has caught my eye most often in News24’s KwaSizabantu reporting is the use of a list of ‘cover terms’ for the allegations against KwaSizabantu in the headlines and first few paragraphs of the stories. Because of the journalistic convention that a story is summarised in the first paragraphs of an article, these paragraphs tend to distil actions into brief expressions that are extremely dense with meaning, and in this case, plenty of emotive meaning.
“Without the word [allegations], the sentence assumes that all these cover terms are immediately applicable to KwaSizabantu, without allowing room for alternative views.
READ ABOUT MEDIA ETHICS IN DEVOTED FROM ISSUE 38, AND ONWARDS
