A Sample Construction of Macrostructure

To illustrate how the macrostructure of a news report is constructed, this section takes the FTV News report on Ma’s special expenses indictment as an example⁷. The caption on the screen during the lead is taken as Headline, and those appearing in the

6 It must be noted that not all the categories, except Summary and Main Events, are elaborated in news stories, which tend to be simple and easy-to-consume in order to win the audience.

7 For the full content of the report, please refer to Appendix A.

following package as subheads. Headline, as well as the anchor’s Lead, comprises the Summary part, and the news package corresponds to the Story part. Story is sub-divided into Situation and Comments. Situation presents ‘the fact’, or at least the fact journalists want the audience to believe in, and Comments feature opinions toward ‘the fact’.

In addition to the Summary, the other central and obligatory category in the schema is Main Event of the Story. It makes explicit why an event is qualified as a news report, and what the audience should know from the report. Content of the Main Event echoes back what is presented in Headline and Lead.

Take the FTV News report about Ma’s second court hearing of special expenses on April 17, 2007 for example. The headline read that ‘Ma Ying-jeou’s Second Court Attendance: Ambush, Inducement, Offense and Defense’ and in the lead, the anchor gave a brief summary of what happened in court that day. Later in the report, the audience gradually learned that there was ‘offense and defense’ in court, in which Ma argued that the prosecution’s previous probe was ‘an ambush’ full of ‘inducement’.

An immediate effect caused by Main Events is categorized as Consequences. In the Ma news, after Ma’s attacks toward the prosecution in the Main Events, the Consequence is the prosecution’s justification that the investigation procedure was legitimate.

Just like a narrative needs an orientation, a news Episode also needs background information. In the schema, Background embraces a more comprehensive, social, and historical nature and Context denotes a more actual situation. Under Context, we have Circumstances, which deal with the immediate situation of Main Events, and also Previous Events, which provide us its causes. In the Ma news, right in the headline it was made clear that the Circumstances were Ma’s second court attendance. Later the report traced back to Hou’s first investigation, the Previous Event, which led to the

disputation in Main Events.

The connection between Previous Events, Main Events, and Consequences is a two-stage cause-effect relation. That is, Previous Events results in Main Events, which in turn results in Consequences. Thus in a sequence of reports, it can be found that yesterday’s Main Events becomes today’s Previous Events, and today’s Consequences becomes tomorrow’s Main Events.

The left category in Background is History. Like Previous Events, it tells stories that happened before. Yet the difference lies in that Previous Events have a direct causal relation with Main Events, while History does not.

Last, let’s turn to Comments, under which we find Verbal Reactions by news actors and Conclusion by reporters. Verbal Reactions, according to van Dijk, denotes

‘the opinions of major news actors about the main events’ (1991:120). However, in the observed TV news, opinions of major news actors are not Comments, but rather materials of Main Events and Consequences. That is, discursive events of major news actors are the news events by themselves. For example, the whole Ma report was constructed by Ma’s and the prosecutions’ argumentation against each other. Thus to differentiate Situation from Comments, Verbal Reactions are defined in the present as opinions made by bystanders about the Main Events. Thus in the Ma news, Ma’s and the prosecution’s statements are Main Events and Consequences separately, and the statements of outside-the-court legislators belong to Verbal Reactions.

Verbal Reactions allow journalists the freedom to present an ‘impersonal’ and

‘objective’ perspective without taking the responsibility, and in the end of a news report, Conclusions are drawn. Expectations suggest possible consequences of Main Events, and Evaluations, as the names suggest, are their evaluations of Main Events.

In sum, it is with the help of content analysis and critical discourse analysis that the underlying political stances of the four TV news stations in Taiwan can be

disclosed, and that the relations between language and ideology in the press can be explicated.

C

F

C

A

This chapter features a content analysis of the political news in four Taiwanese news stations, ETTV News, FTV News, SET News, and CTi News. Section 4.1 presents the weight of political news in their programs. Section 4.2 studies their arrangements of political news in terms of news item (Section 4.2.1), news duration (Section 4.2.2) and news appearing order (Section 4.2.3). Special attention is paid to the discrepancy between the DPP news and the KMT news. Section 4.3 summarizes the prominence of the DPP and the KMT assigned by the stations, and confirms the quantitative strategies employed by the stations in coverage bias manipulation.