Thematic variation in English and Spanish newspaper genres 263
reflecting its “social and ideological objectives” (White 1997: 101). White has stud-
ied this newspaper genre in depth and provided a detailed characterisation of its
features and subtypes. In his study he distinguishes between two main types of
news reports: the ‘event story’ and the ‘issues report’. In this paper we are inter-
ested in the second type, which White defines as “grounded in a communicative
event – such as speeches, interviews and press releases”. Issues reports are classified
as communicatively-based rather than event-based, and should strive to remain
objective and use neutral language while presenting a diversity of opinions, voices,
and perspectives of the event, incident, or issue under discussion. In fact, media
training texts and guidelines of broadcasting services state that news reporting
must be ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’. This is reflected in the semantics and lexico-
grammar of news reporting, at least in the mainstream English-language press
(White 1997). With the exception of British tabloids, news reporters avoid – or
at least minimize – showing their interpersonal involvement in the text’s con-
struction. Thus, for example, they avoid including explicit value judgments about
the participants and the events in the news reports or confine contentious claims
about causes and effects to the quotations of external sources.
News commentaries, by contrast, are opinion articles with the important
communicative function of contributing to the formulation of certain ‘preferred’
viewpoints about the world. The function of news commentaries within the larger
context of newspaper coverage is “to offer newspaper readers a distinctive and
sometimes authoritative voice that speaks to the public directly about matters of
public importance” (Wang 2008a: 170). Usually written by academics, journal-
ists and other experienced native language writers (Wang 2007: 3), they exert an
important influence on political opinion, both on the everyday reader and on the
institutional and/or elite members of a society (van Dijk 1988).
Despite this clear difference between news reports as an interpersonally neu-
tral genre and the interpersonally charged register of commentaries, they do not
form a simple dichotomy, but rather a cline on which texts can be located on the
basis of the quantity and the type of explicit interpersonal features they exhibit.
In our study we focus on how certain clause-level and discourse-level thematic
features contribute to the generic and registerial characterisation of news reports
and commentaries in English and Spanish. In doing so, we hope to show that the
choice of these thematic features is not random but reflects the rhetorical and
communicative objectives that news reporters and commentators try to achieve
with these texts.