Facts, opinions, assessment: Socially significant information, methods of its organization in the discourse of journalistic investigation

Abstract

The article, based on texts created within the framework of the discourse of journalistic investigation and which became the subject of legal proceedings, analyses the methods of organizing and processing socially significant information: facts, opinions, and value judgments. The article also considers the ability to withdraw media texts containing facts and opinions from the zone of legal risk. Emphasis is given to a particular type of information ‒ information of a generalizing type, often perceived by readers and experts as information about facts, but essentially representing a journalist’s final opinion that is formed on an analysis of the total data studied in a journalistic investigation on information concerning the typical activities of a person or organization. The article is based on the research of modern legal linguistics, media linguistics, and stylistics of a text. The status of generalizing information is substantiated and ways of transforming factual information into generalizing information are revealed. Based on a comprehensive stylistic analysis of newspaper texts in the genre of journalistic investigation, two methods of transforming socially significant information (various combinations of facts, opinions, and value judgments) are identified. The first method is the translation of factual information gathered by a journalist from various sources into generalizing information that is verbalized in the final text (transformation model: fact — author’s generalized opinion based on the facts studied). The second method allows for transforming information on facts and evaluative statements of a single informant into a hypothetical generalized opinion, which readers should form after familiarizing themselves with the publication (transformation model: fact — a generalizing opinion (assessment) of the author is absent in the text, but it is implied).