Comparison of the Emotional Impact of News Stories in Quality Papers and Popular Papers : Analysing Print Media

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Rostock, language: English, abstract: Many articles one reads in a newspaper have an emotional impact on the addressee. This impact can involve the public in general or only a limited part of the readership. For instance a headline like One of these players will be axed (from News of the World, September 4, 2005) will probably not effect the whole British readership but only a part of it, namely those who are interested in soccer. They might be sad that players of their favourite team will be dismissed. (Ungerer in Niemeyer/Dirven 1995: 307) But how is it possible for a news story to cause emotions in the reader? In my term paper I am going to describe the system which is responsible for the emotional impact of news stories. Afterwards I will go on to give a short overview of the different kinds of emotions which can be evoked. My next section will take us to the main concern of this paper: the comparison of quality and popular papers regarding their emotional impact. I will analyse a news story from The Guardian which is one of the British quality papers. Then I will have a detailed look at a news story from the British popular paper News of the World which deals with the same issue. I will try to find out which of both the papers arouses more or greater emotions in the reader and what means they use to achieve that. What are the different ways in which emotions are approached in the two kinds of newspapers? In my conclusion I will evaluate the comparison and make an effort to answer the question asked before.