| A multi-method case study was conducted regarding how a major metropolitan and a nearby small-town newspaper covered the same newsworthy issues relating to an environmental controversy in the snuffer community. The controversy was mainly between supporters and opponents of a Swiss-owned hazardous-waste treatment incinerator, during its permitting, citing and construction phases. Research aims were both explanatory and exploratory. Analytical interest was directed at theory and method-building. The overarching attempt was to critique and extend social-structural media theory by means of primarily qualitative discourse analysis, and to develop a text-centered interpretive method sensitive to distinct rhetorical features of the news teal. At the explanatory level, the study sought to explain each newspaper's coverage of the Waste Technologies Industries (WTI) controversy within the structural-pluralism hypothesis of Tichenor, Donohue & Olien, wherein different social structures are said to produce markedly different kinds of newspaper content. The exploratory aim was to comparatively study the news articles through quantitative content analysis of textual patterns, and through discourse analysis of various rhetorical features; the latter included such elements as each paper's unique narratives, metaphors and imagery, as well as each one's use of distinct types of argumentative claim and counter-claims.;A sample of "same-day/same event" news items produced by both papers between 1991--1993 was analyzed, the intent being to generate an in-depth, one-to-one story comparison of a range of interrelated discursive structures. To understand the historical context within which the articles were produced, in-depth interviews were conducted with reporters. A heuristic model---the Rhetorical Framing Model---was developed to account for journalism's status as a distinct communicative genre (the 'objective rhetorical form'), which functions to ideologically filter and reproduce the partisan discourse of news sources, each of whom frame their own rhetorical positions based on respective institutional ('motivational') interests.;Study findings, via cross-analysis and interpretation of quantitative textual patterns and of discourse-specific rhetorical structures, suggest mixed support for Tichenor et al.'s structural-pluralism hypothesis as an explanatory framework for why metropolitan and small-town newspapers cover conflict differently. The larger newspaper did in some respects produce more sustained conflict-focused coverage of the environmental dispute---especially with regard to a more balanced mix of pro, con and neutral-source statements---compared to its small-town counterpart, as the theory would predict. On the other hand, the small-town paper featured many more opposition-linked sources and claims than any other type. Its coverage was therefore more unbalanced but also more conflict-centered in this respect than was the big-city paper's, thus contradicting in some respects the main thesis of the structural-pluralism hypothesis.;On the exploratory level, discourse analysis revealed that in any given news text, a complex network of rhetorical elements cohere to produce, to varying degrees, a relatively straightforward or a much more ideologically complex narrative about the 'real world.'... |
