The grammar of race: Syntax and subliminal stereotype in the 'New York Times' and 'Los Angeles Times'

This dissertation examines and quantifies how a race-based grammar permeates elite U.S. news coverage of white and non-white Americans. A weighted random sampling of one year's coverage of Latinos, African Americans and Native Americans by The New York Times and Los Angeles Times was conducted, with 121 articles gathered. Subsequent analysis of all verbs and clauses within sentences containing racioethnic referents [e.g. Mexican(s), black(s), Indian(s), white(s), Sioux] employed systemic functional (Hallidayan) linguistics and focused on verb transitivity and the passive voice.; The results indicate that U.S. racioethnic minorities were systematically portrayed as far more passive, and dominant-group members were portrayed as possessing more initiative and energy. (The New York Times, by several measures, ascribed less agency to people of color than did the Los Angeles Times.) Also characteristic of this coverage was what can only be described as a strong aversion to acknowledging either Native American nations or their sovereignty, and a virtual absence of coverage of African Americans in business spheres.; Across all corpora, the privilege of implicit actorship (non-agentive passive voice) was reserved for dominant-group members and was most commonly employed when journalists described activities of dominant-group government. Since many of these governmental activities could be judged as socially "negative," the non-agentive passive often functioned to shield government actors from explicit accusations.; Subsequent qualitative explorations of the coverage about each group produced descriptions of a narrative frame for African American coverage; patterns of interracial interaction via verb choices for Latinos and Anglos; and a consideration of journalistic choices between available collective referents to describe Native Americans.; This dissertation offers broad, statistically based evidence to support case studies by critical theorists studying race and power in Western journalism, and especially for work that has identified transitivity and the non-agentive passive voice as ideologically responsive syntactic elements. The results may prove useful in newsrooms interested in raising sensitivity among copyeditors and writers to the subtle semantic power of agency in sentence structures, thus enabling them consciously to create more representative views of American society.