The credibility of news media text: The experience of macrostructural analysis

Abstract

The problem of textual credibility is considered in line with the theory of reference from the standpoint of a text’s grammar. The referential semantics of a text is determined by the type of discourse in which the text is generated. Subsequently, the criteria for credibility are discursively conditioned. The article reveals the referential aspects of news media text as a “product” of news discourse with its accuracy and objectivity requirements to factually ascertain a message. To describe these characteristics, the concept of referential density of the text is introduced, which is revealed through macrostructural text analysis. The basic definitions of this analysis are provided, its methodology is described and its testing is carried out to explicate the degree of reference density of the text. The key terms of macrostructural analysis are the macro-textual position and the ways of filling it. The main macro-textual positions of the news media text are headline ↔ text, compositional-factual, compositional-logical, compositional-syntagmatic relations and stylistic perspective. The different ways of filling these positions reveal different degrees of factuality/interpretability, which can be located on the reference scale in a certain sequence. Scales for each macro-textual position are combined into a referential matrix of the text, graduated in the direction of decreasing reference density/increasing interpretability. Another way to visualize the results of macro-textual analysis is to construct a radar diagram, on which the referential focus of the text is especially evident. Using the example of three news reports of the Russian press, the analysis of the filling of macro-textual positions, of which reveals varying degrees of reference density, three types of referential focus of news media text are demonstrated: concentrated, shifted and diffused. The distinguished types reflect the corresponding referential types of news media text, the referential density of which is a “linguistic dimension” of its credibility.