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Style and Its Essence

A Comparative Study on Adjective Diction of NYTimes and ChinaDaily

Neo Cheung

College of Economics, PKU

Abstract

Style is well regarded as a significant factor of an influential newspaper. As we can see, among various styles, the diction plays one of the most important parts. I plan to argue about what the essence of the style is, and how dictions (style) tell the implicit opinions. NYTimes and ChinaDaily are chosen to be my cases. And I will try to find more backgrounds in terms of political and economic facts that lie behind.

Method: 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 to say: “Style Is Essence”.

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. An anonymous language analyst even did research on the length of sentences of the Bush-Kerry debate. Nevertheless, the linguistic experiments have gained nearly the right results about some basic facts. That is to say: we can derive its essence directly from the language style itself, and this is the best, if not the single, way.

Therefore, it has been proved that we can perceive the essence through study on dictions (style).

Media Case: The F1 Racing

Fortunately, we have a good event to start with. 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, has promoted its new metropolis image successfully. ChinaDaily, the most popular 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 closely related to "economic success”, "fast-growing car market" and "the image of the city". ChinaDaily was pouring 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 optimistic descriptive style reporting this event, with few opposite voices concerning about economic factors.

NYTimes took a prescriptive style to remark this auto racing. The giant news outlet tried to cover the event in a "should-do" way rather than that of "as-a-matter-of-fact". But the two styles, which seem to be disagreeable, were combined into one definition. More precisely, NYTimes attempted to persuade the host city to estimate 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" started with a long question, in which Shanghai was regarded as a modern city with "the world's fastest train, some of Asia's most spectacular buildings, best-dressed people in China". But the term "fastest train" leads to a doubt, rather than an expectancy, about China's economic potential: “Another maglev?”, a quotation from Internet by the author, actually meant "how much can China afford?" After that, the author expressed his worry about the basic living standards for most Chinese in the end, 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 conclude that:

1.            NYTimes provided far more mass opinions than ChinaDaily did. And NYTimes selected information sources 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)

2.            ChinaDaily described the host city and its infrastructures with more emotional factors than NYTimes did. The latter was telling the simple facts "technically".

The Essence of Style: Information Sources

Neutrality depends badly on information sources. The newspaper editors must balance the reportage with different voices and ideas. As I have argued in another article, NYTimes always have different voices speak in one place, with sharp transitions to connect them. That makes a dialogue. Nevertheless, the NYTimes editors still manage to invert noisy quarrel into rational discussion. In the report on F1 event, NYTimes adopted eight direct quotations and even more indirect ones. Based on the diversity of information sources, the world-top newspaper finds its unique style with a critically neutral eye. As for the F1 case, we can read those various precise adjective dictions.

ChinaDaily would rather give up its right to observe soberly, at least on the surface. The whole report is telling some sort of excitement and national self-esteem, which lacks necessary positive proof. Moreover, it refused to listen to different voices that represent different social strata. Therefore, the newspaper played a “monologue” to the mass, in which different roles were combined into one sound that they were the beneficiaries, no matter the organizers and their advertisers, the government officials and the businessmen, the racing athletes and their crazy fans. The media banquet was so crowding and appealing, that there was even 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 for "the image of the city" and to meet the political demands. The distance might necessarily go in accordance 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.

More Checkouts

For both newspapers, “Taiwan” is invariably a hot term. And I listed the most frequently used dictions that related to this issue.

NYTimes: most dangerous (flashpoint), self-ruled, self-governing, renegade, jittery

ChinaDaily: solemn, serious, dangerous, firm, harmful

Obviously, the dictions vary significantly. ChinaDaily stands in a serious diplomatic position strongly backed by Xinhua news agency and the party-state. NYTimes, which employs numbers of reports from various news agencies, holds on neutrality.

As for the reportage of Jacque Chirac’s visit to China, NYTimes and ChinaDaily insisted on their styles. ChinaDaily titled its report “Chirac: Co-operative partnership beneficial”, but talked about “freedom, equality and humanism” with such adjectives as “peaceful”,” stable” and ”well-off”. Meanwhile, NYTimes focused on “Chirac, in Beijing, Signs Accords to Increase French Investment”, which is more concerned about “accords” and “investment”. The Reuters report mentioned four involved companies including the world-famous “Airbus”, and even gave a series of substantial data, which showed how many info-sources NYTimes was holding.

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.

Summary

The essence of style is information, or information source. This variable relies on the political atmosphere. The “dialogue” style featured by NYTimes was definitely the consequence of its multi-source, and that ChinaDaily had some barricades to get access to its information sources so that the reportages turned out monotonic. Unless radical reform of news blackout is put in force, it is not predictably possible to read a relative neutral report on ChinaDaily.

References

ChinaDaily, 09/28/2004, “Formula One Roars into Shanghai”

ChinaDaily, 10/12/2004, “Chirac: Co-operative partnership beneficial”

Jane Perrone, 2004, “Language Matters”

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

NYTimes, 09/26/2004, "With a Raceway, China Motors Toward the Modern Age"

NYTimes, 10/10/2004, “Chirac, in Beijing, Signs Accords to Increase French Investment”

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

and other materials from NYTimes and ChinaDaily

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