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Based on Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, Lakoff's definition and Prince et al.'s classification of hedges, this paper takes New York Times and China Daily from January 23rd to April 8th, 2020 as corpus sources, randomly selects 39 COVID-19 reports, and makes a contrastive study of hedges among them, aiming at exploring the similarities and differences in the use of hedges in COVID-19 reports selected from Chinese and American mainstream newspapers and further revealing their influencing factors.

Notes that relative to traditional newspapers, Internet-based papers provide fewer cues about news story importance and give readers more control over story selection. Finds that online student readers of the "New York Times" appear to have read fewer national, international, and political news stories and were less likely to recognize and recall events that occurred during the exposure period. (SC)

Scout Rally at Birmingham and Imperial Scout Exhibition organised in July of 1913 by the Boy Scouts Association constituted educational propaganda of the British Empire. The term "imperial", which was used in the British press, reflects the ideological meaning of this outsized event which gathered scouts from the United Kingdom and its dominions, and much smaller groups of scouts from Europe, including quite numerous groups from Poland. In the eyes of Poles, British "imperialism" or "patriotism" confronted as an ideal compared to Russian and German rule, and their attitudes were enthusiastically Anglomaniacal. This is the psychological key to understand the attractiveness of performing on the British arena for the representation of the young generation of Poles who were invited. For Polish scouts, the Scout Rally in Birmingham was an opportunity to demonstrate not only their skills but also patriotism as a function of political presence. This is how the Polish press understood these things, and which after the British -- what needs to be emphasised -- paid the most attention to the events in Birmingham. The most important Polish dailies publishing in Cracow, Warsaw, Poznan, and Lvov (now Lviv) closely followed the course of the rally, which was given the rank of success by a two-sentence "depeche" from London and a lengthy letter published in the "Czas" daily paper. The object of interest for the author of the article is the book written by the founder of Polish scouting, Andrzej Malkowski, which constitutes a noteworthy record of observations made by him during the Scout Rally as well as those made by other organisers of the Polish delegation's trip and of letters from journalists who accompanied this delegation and sent their correspondence to the Polish press from Birmingham, London, and Paris. Only one journalist broke out from apologetic opinions about the excellent performance of Polish scouts, who noticed shortcomings in performance and wrote about them. The article introduces the content of these letters and interprets and compares them. The opinion about the triumphant rally in Birmingham rooted firmly in Polish public opinion, constituting an important element of the founding myth of Polish scouting, which in the history of this movement is worth noting.

Concludes that the morning lifestyle habits and media use habits of audiences are useful predictors of receptivity to morning newspapers in a market area. (FL)

This paper examines the discursive structures employed in legitimizing the event of U.S. forces withdrawal from Iraq and identifies them in relation to linguistic features. It attempts to describe the relation between language use and legitimation discursive structures in depicting political events. The paper focuses on the political event of U.S. forces' withdrawal from Iraq in the English newspaper issued in Iraq. The study shows the way in which journalists express their values and attitudes concerning this critical event. Consequently, this requires a critical discourse analysis (henceforth, CDA) to analyse news articles in the Iraqi English newspaper: The "Kurdish Globe" (henceforth, KG) newspaper. Accordingly, the study presents a qualitative content analysis of newspaper articles to identify the legitimation discursive structures and their linguistic features. It is found that the main discursive structures of legitimation employed in the KG newspaper are: authorization, rationalization, and moral evaluation. Besides, there were five verb processes used to represent this legitimation, including material, verbal, relational, mental, and existential.

Based on a survey of 122 journalists from four Spanish newspapers carried out from 2015 to 2016, this paper analyses to what extent these professionals perceive a disconnection --a gap-- between their role conception and their perceived role enactment, that is between their professional ideals and their journalistic practice, and which are the most "conflicting" roles in a Polarized Pluralist media system. According to the perceptions of the professionals surveyed, journalists in Spain hold a role conflict when they work in a newspaper. The findings show significant differences between the role conception and the perceived role enactment in six of the seven professional roles. The biggest divergences are located in the watchdog, civic and disseminator roles. The conflict between the professional ideals and their implementation in the news is always resolved in favor of the media organizations. Our results are consistent and support the previous studies that have defined the Polarized Pluralist media system as a media ecosystem where journalists accumulate little power compared to the media organizations, which are in financial debt and dependent on political and economic powers. Results are discussed according to the literature review as well as the context in which the study was developed.

The Internet convulsed journalism and created new press models based on budgets radically different from those that traditionally shaped the performance of the profession. Although at first the newspapers created different work structures for paper and web media, the final decision of the journalistic companies was to create a single newsroom for paper and web media. This article investigates if from the theory of Communication, and especially from the works of McLuhan, this decision is or is not justified in a correct way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the investigation of frequency and distribution of the active, passive sentences and nominalized structures in new reports about "the terrorist attack in Ankara on October 10th" (2015) across British and American newspapers. In the light of this purpose, the following research questions are addressed: 1. How is the news about the terrorist attack in Ankara reported in British and American newspapers as far as active, passive sentences and nominalized structures are concerned? 2. What are the frequencies and distributions of active, passive sentences and nominalized structures in news reports across British and American newspapers? The data of the study are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively by finding out the frequencies and distributions of the structures, and by explaining examples from the document analysis process respectively. American newspapers were found to present the agent more frequently compared to British newspapers. The results of the study show that there are instances of passivization in mitigating a claim about the agent, or attenuating to present the details of the events. The journalists use active voice in describing the actions and events whereas they prefer passive voice in presenting the actions in which the agent is unknown or irrelevant. As the newspapers examined within the domain of this study are the most circulating and leading newspapers, the choice of these structures and their potential role in conveying ideology have crucial role in presentation of the image of Turkey in external media (i.e. the news reported abroad about Turkey). [This research study was presented at the Corpora and Discourse International Conference (June 30-July 2, 2016) Siena University, Italy.]

This paper is on semantics of words and expressions of various grammatical constructions that make reference to violence as reported in the Nigerian media, particularly, the newspaper where such words and sentences about violence are prominent. Twenty-four (24) headlines/captions on violence were randomly selected from Nigeria dailies for data analysis. Semantic roles were used to analyse the different words and expressions that made up the headlines/captions. Halliday's Scale and Category theory showing how text boundaries can be split have been employed to facilitate the analysis. The items (instruments) used for violence are meant to cause damage, havoc and loss of lives. The events (eventive) of violence are devastating and can enhance more restiveness in any society. The analysis of the data, show that semantic implications for the media, journalists and the Nigerian State is that most of the citizens in the Nigerian state become afraid or worried at the sight of newspaper captions/headlines carrying violent expressions. Also, other people in other countries who read Nigerian dailies carrying violent expressions/words are discouraged to visit Nigeria because of safety concerns. Lastly, certain locations in Nigeria which are prone to violent activities are avoided by both Nigerians and visitors to Nigeria.

Schudson, Dan Schiller, Donald L. Shaw, and John J. Pauly discuss John C. Nerone's article (this issue) and suggest other approaches to the study of the penny press. (JK)