(Un)Patriotic nuances? evaluating the nature of the ‘Reporter Voice’ in hard news reports on the renewal of ‘sanctions’ in Zimbabwe

Abstract

On the eve of the heavily contested 2002 harmonised Zimbabwean Presidential and Parliamentary elections, the United States of America (USA) and the European Union (EU) imposed ‘sanctions’ on Zimbabwe. In the course of time, subsequent annual renewals of the ‘sanctions’ were effected by the same imposers. This article analyses the discourse linguistic notion of ‘objectivity’ in ‘hard’ news reports on the renewal of these USA and EU imposed ‘sanctions’ in Zimbabwean newspapers. The article compare the textuality of ‘hard’ news reports from two English language Zimbabwean daily newspapers, The Herald1 2 and NewsDay1, by analysing how language and linguistic resources are used evaluatively in manners that betray authorial attitudes and ideological stance. Specifically, the analyses focus on the way(s) in which the news reports uphold or flout the ‘objectivity’ ideal as explicated through the ‘reporter voice’3 configuration of Appraisal Theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL).This is done through the analysis of how the linguistic choices made by the reporter(s) at lexical, lexicogrammatical, syntactic and syntagmatic levels betray conscious subjective evaluative uses of language and in the process further some assumed ideological position/stance.