Page 92 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport and the Press • 81

the newspaper text as ‘a conversation between individuals who have a shared—and
therefore unchallenged—value system’.
The use of modal verbs (may, could, should, will, must) enables a writer to express
attitudes towards what is being reported. The use of modality can create a sense of
community between the newspaper and its audience since there is an assumption that
the opinion conveyed by the article is shared by the reader. For example, The Sun
headline ‘This Will Hurt Becks Like Hell No Matter How Much He Has in the Bank’
(Dillon 2008: 72) assumes agreement from the paper’s readership. Reah (1998) and
Richardson (2007) identify other textual features that assume shared knowledge on
the part of the newspaper and its readers. The use of change-of-state verbs or im-
plicative verbs (stop, begin or manage, forget) presupposes shared meanings. For
example, if an athlete is said to ‘have forgotten his duty to his fans’, there is an impli-
cation that an athlete’s duty to fans is well understood by everyone. Similarly, the use
of the defi nite article the presupposes that something exists. For example, an article
about the NFL team the New England Patriots in The Observer referred to ‘The Pa-
triot Way’ (Wetherell 2008: 19). Presupposition is also contained in journalists’ use
of wh- questions—for example, ‘when did it all start to go wrong?’ implies that it
has indeed gone wrong. These presuppositions direct the reader towards a particular
interpretation of the events reported (Reah 1998).
Bignell (1997) suggested that two sets of language codes are observable in the
British tabloid and so-called quality press. For Bignell (1997: 93), ‘ “popular tab-
loids” use an orally based, restricted set of vocabulary and sentence structures,
while “quality” newspapers use a more elaborated and complex set of codes which
have more in common with written communication than spoken communication.’
These codes map onto a class division in the respective readerships. Readership of
the quality press in Britain (Financial Times, The Times, Telegraph, Independent and
Guardian) is dominated by those employed in top managerial and professional oc-
cupations, while the tabloids are predominantly read by unskilled manual workers

or the unemployed (Richardson 2007). Orality in the tabloids is signified by vari-
ous rhetorical features such as deliberate misspellings, slang words, first names and

nicknames, puns, modality and short, incomplete sentences. Typography is also used
to convey speech, either by underlining or capitalisation or using dots and dashes
for hesitation. For example, a headline in The Sun (Knox 2008: 53) referenced the
striker Darius Henderson’s goal for Watford as ‘A Happy Hending’. The Daily Mir-
ror (1 February 2008) described the England manager Fabio Capello’s team selec-
tion as ‘It’s Fab New Look’ (Lipton 2008a: 71), and the rivalry between the two
London soccer teams Chelsea and Tottenham in the Carling Cup Final was described
as ‘Snarling Cup Final’ (Lipton 2008b: 75).
The style of the quality press, by contrast, uses fewer of these features and so
appears formal. Bignell (1997) argued that the authority associated with the quality
press is as much a mythic code as the familiarity of the tabloids, both being founded
on specific language styles. The quality press uses longer sentences and the codes