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AbstractThe paper examines news agency journalists' stance on Affect, in view of the journalistic ideals of factuality and objectivity. News journalists resort to Affect values quite frequently; in hard news reports, however, journalists' own emotions have to be excluded. Recently, Peter White and other scholars have introduced the term 'observed' Affect as opposed to 'authorial' Affect, to distinguish between Affect which is attributed to some third party and Affect which is the journalist's. I find that term too broad, and suggest the following, more sophisticated taxonomy: Affect is first divided into two subtypes, attributed and non-attributed. Both attributed and non-attributed Affect have three subcategories: observed, interpreted and constructed. Attributed Affect includes a fourth subcategory: experienced Affect. To demonstrate how these new tools can be applied to the analysis of news discourse, examples from Associated Press and Reuters news agency dispatches are explored.KEYWORDS: AffectAppraisalattributionhard newsobjectivityfactuality Notes1. I am greatly indebted to John E. Richardson for helping me with the names of the new subcategories.Additional informationMaija Stenvall is a researcher at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts and Change in English, at the University of Helsinki in Finland. Her doctoral thesis, published in February 2011, explores objectivity and factuality in the discourse of two global news agencies, the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters. Currently, she is also interested in historical news (agency) discourse.
Maija Stenvall (Thu,) studied this question.