Page 233 - Communication Theory and Research

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218 Communication Theory & Research
The European press dramatizes events through the use of images that have
the effect of moving and inspiring pity in the reader. Sometimes the images
emphasize the news even if they are not coherent with the text.
Unlike the press during the Gulf War, journalists, in general, preferred not to
express explicitly their own personal opinions. In spite of this, they took up a
positive stance towards NATO’s decisions, by quoting others, like Il Corriere della
Sera. Even the newspapers that presented a balance of opinions, like The Times
and The Guardian, ended up by representing a very schematic reality and in gen-
eral presented a positive image of NATO.
This was made possible through the use of figures of speech and other per-
suasive techniques, and by giving articles a narrative scheme. The most fre-
quently used persuasive techniques were ‘name calling’, ‘transfer technique’,
‘cognitive dissonance’, ‘guilt technique’ and ‘factoids’. This supports the ‘info-
suasion’ hypothesis, which was found also in terms of the use of figures of
speech: the most commonly used were alliteration, typical of the two German
dailies, and metaphor and quotation, used frequently in the Italian daily Il
Corriere della Sera.
A narrative structure in which one of the NATO governments or politicians was
depicted as the hero and Milosevic as anti-hero also characterized dailies like ABC
and El Pais, which only rarely used persuasive techniques or figures of speech.
As a final point, there were no differences observed between liberal and
conservative newspapers.

Notes

The research reported in this article was carried out in collaboration with the Archivo Disarmo
of Rome. The author would like to thank Professor Luigi D’Ambra, who carried out the statis-
tical analysis.
1. Studies on persuasion have a long history, with roots in the rhetorical approach; however,
they were taken up again at the beginning of the 20th century to enable an examination of
political and military propaganda.
2. Text analysis belongs to contemporary linguistics.
3. Alliteration, calembour (punning), euphemism (e.g. using the expression ‘collateral’),
metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron, simile (e.g. Belgrade is like Dresden, Serbia = new
Vietnam, Milosevic = Saddam; this use of similes is part of the technique of ‘name calling’).
4. In this case the persuasive techniques most used are: ‘name calling’, ‘credibility of the
source’, ‘band wagon’ and ‘guilt technique’, which belong to both groups.
5. Classical methods of statistical elaboration, which use cross-referenced tables of variable
elements inserted into a questionnaire, enable one to only partially analyse the results of
an investigation of this type. Such an analytical approach considers only partially the variables,
generally two by two, where tables can sometimes foresee thousands. These methods con-
stitute approaches that, other than the difficulty in choosing variables, present difficulties in
the combination of information gathered from the tables, with the result that a lot of valuable
information on a subject is not used.
6. For a clearer idea of each individual newspaper see the following analysis of the groups.
7. Where one labels a person or an idea negatively without first examining the evidence.
8. ‘Transfer technique’ refers to the transfer of the subject’s opinion about an accepted situa-
tion to that which the propagandist is interested in promoting.
9. This technique is used to create incoherence between each of the reader’s cognitions.