I hereby accept the challenge and will try to imitate the very liberal thinking of Zuzana, a colleague from StuNoMe, who, like me, used Allan Bell’s method to look at a recent report by the ČTK news agency about the latest attacks in the perpetual conflict between Israel and Palestine. The purpose is as follows: if two people look, following a precise method, at a report that presents itself as purely factual, will we find differences?
At first glance my colleague’s analysis seems brief. On closer reading, however, it is clear that it contains everything the assignment asked for; the diction of the text is precise and to the point.
More interesting is her comment on the headline of the article:
“In my opinion, the headline is not a faithful representation of the body of the report. It reduces the report to its violent part only, but without the context it can come across as manipulative and leave readers with a distorted impression of, and distorted information about, the situation.”
I entirely agree with the observation that the headline lacks the important context in which the latest acts of violence took place. Only halfway through the original ČTK report do we learn that the knife attacks on Israeli armed forces and the subsequent deaths of Palestinians must be seen precisely in the context of the disputes over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. On the other hand, how much can and should a headline include?
One of the requirements of a good headline is certainly brevity, and also capturing the main core of the report. In this case I venture to claim that the headline does point to the newest, most relevant information. It is a pity that my colleague, besides identifying the problem, does not try to come up with a possible solution. I would be curious how she would deal with the headline as an author. If we wanted to move the mention of the context as high up in the article as possible, the solution I would propose would be not to alter the headline, but to mention the disputes over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount in the standfirst.
In my own analysis, however, I do not raise any problems with the headline or the standfirst. I can imagine that the (anonymous) author of the ČTK report left the mention of the wider context until after the main core of the report had been given, that is, the important and latest first. Moreover, the context is discussed sufficiently in the middle part of the ČTK report.
Even so, the dispute over the Temple Mount forms the central point of my criticism of ČTK. Let me recall that in my analysis I uncovered the emotionally coloured word “rumours”, which, in my opinion, has no place in a factual report that objectively informs about both sides of the conflict. The quoting of the two sides of the conflict is in itself unbalanced and unclear (when ČTK quotes Israel as having said something, whom exactly does it mean? why does ČTK not give statements by official Palestinian institutions?), but in all likelihood the choice of the word “rumours” is the act of the ČTK author, who thereby, of course, voluntarily gives up objective reporting. If “rumours” did after all come from the pen of a third party, my colleague Zuzana’s comment would perhaps be accurate:
“The report contains no comments or assessments of the situation. Nor does it offer possible solutions to the situation. It is an assembly of ‘facts’ into an article without any further reach.”
We know from linguistics that emotionally coloured words are not neutral; on the vertical (paradigmatic) axis of possible word choices, the author chose from n possibilities precisely “rumours”. One cannot speak here of a mere assembly of facts.
Those tricky “rumours” are thus, understandably, the point where my colleague and I part ways in our analyses. And although Zuzana closes her reading of my analysis by saying that potential differences contribute to a plurality of opinions, I believe that the truth is far too tempting for us to give up the search. And so, instead of “nobody knows”, I prefer the exclamation: “someone knows, but alas the silence is dolorous!”.