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Style and Its Essence

A Comparative Study on Adjective Diction of NYTimes and ChinaDaily

Abstract

Style is widely regarded as an influencing factor of a respectable newspaper. And the diction plays one of the most important roles among the variety of styles. I plan to discuss about how dictions tell the implicit opinions, and how these implications affect the readers. The remarkable NYTimes and ChinaDaily are chosen to be my cases. And I will try to find more backgrounds in the terms of political and economic facts that lie behind.

Media Case: The F1 Racing

Fortunately, we have a good event to start our study. On 3rd Oct 2004, the first-ever F1 racing ended with Ferrari's championship. With global attention and praise, Shanghai as the brand new Grand Pix host city promoted its new metropolis image successfully. ChinaDaily, the biggest English newspaper in China, gave its most ardent words without any elaborating. Rather, NYTimes, the greatest English newspaper in the world, stood by the "pretty special roadway" with neutral financial analysis.

ChinaDaily's greatest hit was titled "Formula One Roars into Shanghai", which was published in ChinaDaily Business Weekly 09/28/2004, Page 12. In the opening, the journalist commented "The race is China's first F1 event, and the object of massive civic pride in the country's biggest city." In the following part, the highlighted event was made close connection with "economic success”, "fast-growing car market" and "the image of the city". ChinaDaily was not at all canny while using the accentuating words such as "frenetic" to applaud the host city, but paid limited words on the financial balance, as is said by its own: "few appear to be questioning the price tag, though." ChinaDaily adopted an optimistically descriptive style reporting this event, with few opposite voices concerning about economic factors.

NYTimes took a normative style to remark this auto racing. The important news outlet tried to cover the event in a "should-do" way rather than that of "as-a-matter-of-fact". But the two ways, which seem to be disagreeable, appear simultaneously. And more precisely, NYTimes persuaded the host city to calculate the revenues and costs calmly by the means of clarifying facts, figures and all kinds of voices. Therefore, the NYTimes reportage "With a Raceway, China Motors Toward the Modern Age" was started with a long question, in which the author regarded Shanghai as a modern city with "the world's fastest train, some of Asia's most spectacular buildings, best-dressed people in China". And the term "fastest train" leads to a doubt about China's economic potential: “Another maglev?”, a quotation from Internet by the author, actually meant "how much can China afford?" In the end, the author worried about the basic living standards for most Chinese, in contrast to the extravagant "grand entertainment".

Table 1 shows the statistic results of diction used in the two articles mentioned above.

Table 1: The Dictions of General Subjects

It is not complex to derive from the table that:

NYTimes provided far more mass opinions than ChinaDaily did. And NYTimes' selection is from various aspects. (In fact, the one who was said to be "proud but not interested" is a computer programmer, while the other comments were from a 28-year-old migrant worker from Anhui Province. Obviously, they are in two different strata)

ChinaDaily carried with more emotion in the description of the host city and its infrastructures than NYTimes did. The latter was telling the simple facts "technically".

ChinaDaily figured the organizers better. NYTimes only gave a superficial snapshot.

The Essence of Style: Information Sources

Neutrality depends badly on information sources. The newspaper editors must have different voices and ideas balance the reportage. I used to write in another article that the NYTimes always have both sides speak in one place. The NYTimes reportages are usually connected with sharp transitions like the F1 u-turns. Nevertheless, the NYTimes editors still manage to invert noisy quarrel into rational discussion. In the report on F1 event, NYTimes adopted 8 direct quotations and even more indirect ones. Based on the diversity of information sources, the world-top newspaper finds its unique critically neutral style. As for the F1 case, we can read those various precise adjective dictions.

ChinaDaily would rather give up its right to observe, at least on the surface. The whole report is telling some sort of excitement and self-esteem, which lacks necessarily positive proof. And it refused to listen to different voices that represent different strata. Therefore, the newspaper played a monologue to the mass, in which the organizers and their advertisers, the government officials and the businessmen around them, the racing athletes and their crazy fans were combined into one sound that they were the beneficiaries. The media banquet was so crowding and appealing, that there was no standing room for the average majority. As is shown in Table 1, the adjectives are mostly optimistic.

The dialogue style and the monologue one directly measure the distance between the two news outlets. We can see that NYTimes operated with far more information sources than ChinaDaily did. The leading media is aggregating every detail from every corner around the world every minute, while its China's counterpart is simply reporting to meet the political demands and "the image of the city". The distance might necessarily go with arguments about the role of media played in the democratic political process, as China is widely criticized for its party-oppressed press freedom. ChinaDaily might have more info-sources than NYTimes, but they were hardly permitted to publish, with a consideration of propaganda coherency.

What You See Is What You Get

"What you see" is another saying of our keyword "style", while "what you get" is supposed to represent "essence". "What you see is what you get" is a feature of Microsoft Office, and Microsoft has convinced its users successfully. And it is also right in the terms of news writing.

Style is somewhat literal and easy to acquire. But its essence, which we have argued before, is proved to be more confusing. MIT Media Lab graduate student Cameron Marlow has done wonders with Perl (a network program language) to create a tool to help Internet users analyze transcripts of the presidential debates. The simple software merely counted the appearances of a certain keyword (such as “war on terror” and “tax cuts”), but has gained interesting results. And an anonymous language analyst even did research on the length of sentences of the Bush-Kerry debate. Nevertheless, the linguistic experiments have gained the nearly right results about some basic facts. That is to say: we can derive directly from the language style to perceive its essence, and this is the best, if not the only, way.

Therefore, we can conclude that the “dialogue” style featured by NYTimes was definitely the consequence of its multi-source, and that ChinaDaily had some partitions to connect to its information sources (or the access was banned) so that the reportage turned out to be monotony.

Political Economics of News Reporting

In the journal “Media and Democracy”, Leo Bogart argued:

“They (the mass media) are indispensable to a democratic society because they make information available at all social levels and in all its geographic corners. They are essential as critics of government, as investigators of wrongdoing, as for discussion and debate. They create and define the separate constituencies whose compromises make democracy work.”

And an essay by Xiguang Lee said:

“We are taught to write reports with objective and neutral terms, but the media prefer the words of ardor, which are overloading the press, and prejudice.”

As a matter of fact, the absolute neutrality is something impossible. But a good journalist still attempts to approach to relative neutrality, in a way of providing diversity of views. Democracy is somewhat a process of social fairness, which sacrifices social productivity to balance the allocation of benefit. The diversity of views does nothing other than to enable everyone to speak. The volume of voices equals, though social positions doesn’t.

The forgotten discipline of “see ourselves as others see us” has to be rediscovered by our media. ChinaDaily was too excited to “report” the event rather than “advertise” it. China lacks the media power corresponding to its “economic success”. The volume of voices was severely imbalanced, so that the Anhui worker had to tell his complaints to NYTimes.

Graphical Summary

Graph 1: the relationship between style and its essence

References

ChinaDaily, Issue 09/28/04, “Formula One Roars into Shanghai”

Jane Perrone, 2004, “Language Matters”

Leo Bogart, 1998, “Media and Democracy”, Transaction Publishers

NYTimes, Issue 09/26/04, "With a Raceway, China Motors Toward the Modern Age"

Xiguang Lee, 2004, “The Conflicts between Good Journalists and News Classroom”

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