Abstract
This study analyzed 300 news articles from the online version of the British daily tabloid The Mirror. Quantitative analysis showed that shocktainment elements are present in 150 news articles out of 300. The results showed that some shocktainment categories are either incompletely presented or lose to other categories. At the same time, the techniques of familiarity (800), absurdity (908), outrage (5,105), influence (4,200), and persuasion (1,101) are used much less frequently than others. The study proved that the authors of the articles actively use shocktainment techniques since they allow the authors to explain the linguocultural features of the country to the readers easily and understandably. The analysis also revealed the main topics that are disclosed in news articles with the use of shocktainment and trigger cognitive processes in readers. The study results can help to correct theoretical and empirical gaps in the research on news media discourse.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
References
Aleksandrova, I. B., & Slavkin, V. V. (2017). Modern media language: Categorical linguistic features. Russian Linguistic Bulletin, 1(9), 8–11. https://doi.org/10.18454/RULB.9.22
Alfter, B. (2019). Cross-border collaborative journalism: A step-by-step guide. Routledge.
Arbaoui, B., De Swert, K., & Van der Brug, W. (2020). Sensationalism in news coverage: A comparative study in 14 television systems. Communication Research, 47(2), 299–320. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650216663364
Baack, S. (2016). What big data leaks tell us about the future of journalism–and its past. Internet Policy Review, 12(23), 9–17.
Baack, S. (2018). Practically engaged: The entanglements between data journalism and civic tech. Digital Journalism, 6(6), 673–692. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2017.1375382
Barnard-Wills, D. (2011). UK news media discourses of surveillance. The Sociological Quarterly, 52(4), 548–567. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1533-8525.2011.01219.x
Bas, O., & Grabe, M. E. (2015). Emotion-provoking personalization of news: Informing citizens and closing the knowledge gap? Communication Research, 42(2), 159–185. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650213514602
Bennett, W. L., & Pfetsch, B. (2018). Rethinking political communication in a time of disrupted public spheres. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 243–253. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqx017
Brett, E. I., Stevens, E. M., Wagener, T. L., Leavens, E. L., Morgan, T. L., Cotton, W. D., & Hébert, E. T. (2019). A content analysis of JUUL discussions on social media: Using reddit to understand patterns and perceptions of JUUL use. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 194, 358–362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2018.10.014
Brogi, E., Ginsborg, L., Ostling, A., Parcu, P. L., & Šimunjak, M. (2016). Monitoring media pluralism in Europe: Testing and implementation of the media pluralism monitor 2015: Policy report. Project Report. European University Institute. https://doi.org/10.2870/374068
Budarick, J. (2018). Why the media are to blame for racialising Melbourne’s ‘African gang’ problem The Conversation. Retrieved October 23, 2022, from https://theconversation.com/why-the-media-are-to-blame-for-racialising-melbournes-african-gang-problem-100761
Burgers, C., & De Graaf, A. (2013). Language intensity as a sensationalistic news feature: The influence of style on sensationalism perceptions and effects. Communications-The European Journal of Communication Research, 38(2), 167–188. https://doi.org/10.1515/commun-2013-0010
Davis, S. (2021). Bullshit human rights: Breitbart news’ “Cartel Chronicles” and the militarized framing of humanitarian crisis on the US-Mexico border. Continuum, 36(3), 377–392. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2021.1985081
Deacon, D., & Wring, D. (2016). The UK Independence Party, populism and the british news media: Competition, collaboration or containment? European Journal of Communication, 31(2), 169–184. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323115612215
Dejk, T. V. (2013). Vlast’i diskurs: Reprezentaciyadominirovaniya v yazyke i kommunikacii. LIBROKOM.
Eichstaedt, J. C., Schwartz, H. A., Kern, M. L., Park, G., Labarthe, D. R., Merchant, R. M., Jha, S., Agrawal, M., Dziurzynski, L. A., Sap, M., Weeg, C., Larson, E. E., Ungar, L. H., & Seligman, M. E. (2015). Psychological language on Twitter predicts county-level heart disease mortality. Psychological Science, 26(2), 159–169. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614557867
Graves, D., & Shabbir, N. (2019). Gauging the global impacts of the ‘panama papers’ three years later Digital News Report. Retrieved October 23, 2022, from https://www.digitalnewsreport.org/publications/2019/gauging-global-impacts-panama-papers-three-years-later/
Harcup, T., & O’Neill, D. (2017). What is news? News values revisited (again). Journalism Studies, 18(12), 1470–1488. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2016.1150193
Hartmann, S. (2020). Identifying discourse patterns in social media comments on “politically correct” language. Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association, 8(1), 27–44. https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2020-0003
Hassan, A. (2018). Language, media, and ideology: Critical discourse analysis of pakistani news bulletin headlines and its impact on viewers. Sage Open, 8(3), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244018792612
Katermina, V., & Yachenko, E. (2020). Axiology of COVID-19 as a linguistic phenomenon in English mass media discourse. Advances in Journalism and Communication, 8(2), 59–67. https://doi.org/10.4236/ajc.2020.82005
Kern, M. L., Park, G., Eichstaedt, J. C., Schwartz, H. A., Sap, M., Smith, L. K., & Ungar, L. H. (2016). Gaining insights from social media language: Methodologies and challenges. Psychological Methods, 21(4), 507–525. https://doi.org/10.1037/met0000091
Kilgo, D. K., Harlow, S., García-Perdomo, V., & Salaverría, R. (2018). A new sensation? An international exploration of sensationalism and social media recommendations in online news publications. Journalism, 19(11), 1497–1516. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916683549
Konow-Lund, M. (2019). Negotiating roles and routines in collaborative investigative journalism. Media and Communication, 7(4), 103–111. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v7i4.2401
Kyriakidou, M. (2015). Media witnessing: Exploring the audience of distant suffering. Media Culture & Society, 37(2), 215–231. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443714557981
Lecheler, S., Bos, L., & Vliegenthart, R. (2015). The mediating role of emotions: News framing effects on opinions about immigration. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 92(4), 812–838. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699015596338
MacKay, K., Barbe, D., Van Winkle, C. M., & Halpenny, E. (2017). Social media activity in a festival context: Temporal and content analysis. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 29(2), 669–689. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJCHM-10-2015-0618
Maier, S. R., Slovic, P., & Mayorga, M. (2017). Reader reaction to news of mass suffering: Assessing the influence of story form and emotional response. Journalism, 18(8), 1011–1029. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884916663597
Majó-Vázquez, S., Cardenal, A. S., Segarra, O., & de Simón, P. C. (2020). Media roles in the online news domain: Authorities and emergent audience brokers. Media and Communication, 8(2), 98–111. https://doi.org/10.17645/mac.v8i2.2741
Ng, Y. L., & Zhao, X. (2020). The human alarm system for sensational news, online news headlines, and associated generic digital footprints: A uses and gratifications approach. Communication Research, 47(2), 251–275. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650218793739
Peterson-Salahuddin, C. (2021). Opening the gates: Defining a model of intersectional journalism. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 38(5), 391–407. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2021.1968014
Potts, A. (2015). Filtering the flood: Semantic tagging as a method of identifying salient discourse topics in a large corpus of Hurricane Katrina reportage. In Corpora and discourse studies (pp. 285–304). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431738_14
Rodrigues, U. (2017). Transnational news and multicultural Australia project: Cultural diversity and news in Australia. A6 Research report/technical paper. Deakin University.
Shkirman, V. S. (2018). Shocktainment as a topical technique of information broadcasting on modern russian television. Problems of mass communication: New approaches (pp. 135–136). Voronezh State University.
Sun, K. (2018). Approaching the double-nominal construction in Mandarin Chinese through the semantic‐cognitive interaction. Studia Linguistica, 72(3), 687–724.
Tejada, K. C. M. (2021). Ideological constructions in news discourse presented in Philippine broadsheets: Input to innovations in language education. In Proceedings of the Asia CALL International Conference-Atlantis Press (vol. 533, pp. 88–96). Atlantis Press. https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210226.011
Theng Ong, T., & McKenzie, R. M. (2019). The language of suffering: Media discourse and public attitudes towards the MH17 air tragedy in Malaysia and the UK. Discourse & Communication, 13(5), 562–580. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481319842455
Tyrawski, J., & DeAndrea, D. C. (2015). Pharmaceutical companies and their drugs on social media: A content analysis of drug information on popular social media sites. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 17(6), e4357. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.4357
Vliet, D. (2019). Defending Black Pete: Strategies of justification and the preservation of tradition in dutch news discourse. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 36(5), 452–465. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2019.1650947
Weng, E., & Mansouri, F. (2021). Swamped by Muslims’ and facing an ‘African gang’ problem: Racialized and religious media representations. in Australia Continuum, 35(3), 468–486. https://doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2021.1888881
Wennekers, A., & de Haan, J. (2017). Nederlanders en nieuws Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau. Retrieved October 23, 2022, from https://www.scp.nl/publicaties/publicaties/2017/06/22/nederlanders-en-nieuws
Yan, Y., & Bissell, K. (2018). The sky is falling: Predictors of news coverage of natural disasters worldwide. Communication Research, 45(6), 862–886. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650215573861
Acknowledgements
Not applicable.
Funding
No funding was received to assist with the preparation of this manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
statements.
All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Mariya Fedorova and Tatyana Shevyakova. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Mariya Fedorova and Tatyana Shevyakova. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing Interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.
Additional information
Publisher’s Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Fedorova, M., Shevyakova, T. Shocktainment Techniques in the Mirror, a British Daily Tabloid: Linguocultural Features of news and semantic-cognitive Analysis of Leading Concepts. J Psycholinguist Res 52, 1669–1683 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09971-2
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-023-09971-2