Depiction of Mob Attack on Capitol Hill: A Linguistics-Stylistic Analysis of US Newspaper Headlines

Abstract

Newspaper editorials are a vital part of media discourse, which is an extremely important field of research in stylistics and rhetoric analysis. Particularly, some features of editorial headlines and their important role in catching readers’ attention have made the interface between the linguistic analysis of newspaper editorial headlines and stylistic significance of the headline language. Recent Capitol Hill episode of public attack on US parliament building got heavy coverage of US print media. Through conducting a contrastive textual analysis of selected headlines, picked from the editorials of the English newspaper, Washington Post (WP), New York Times (NYT) and The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) the present study aimed at exploring the kind of textual and rhetorical strategies the three newspapers used for propagating their preferred ideologies. The results of the study indicated that headlines in the three papers presented an e attitude of the writers (newspapers) toward the topic. However, based on the analysis of the data, it became clear that there were certain differences between the three sets of headlines in terms of presupposition, and certain rhetorical devices.