Focusing on a series of news reports produced immediately following the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, this study examines how journalists construct their authority to tell moralizing stories. By speaking as we, they asserted their right to serve as moral agents on two levels. As “institutional we,” the news narrators assumed the voice of authoritative professionals, socially sanctioned to determine the “facts,” while as “representative we,” they positioned themselves as “local folks” who speak with the voice of community. The use of We, then, can be seen as a discursive strategy to construct journalistic moral authority.
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Geoffrey Baym (2000) studied this question.
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