Researchers Inés Olza and Ruth Breeze, from the Public Discourse project of the Institute for Culture and Society, have published a book that analyzes and compares how to evaluate various communication media’s discourses. Peter Lang, the sixth best publishing house in the world according to the Scholarly Publishers Indicators (SPI), published the volume, which is entitled Evaluation in Media Discourse.

According to the authors, media discourse is not just made up of messages sent to readers, listeners or spectators, but rather is also a social phenomenon that affects the way people see the world. "The book aims to analyze the evaluation strategies present in the media (i.e., strategies related to the assessment or expression of subjectivity)," Olza explained.

The book includes contributions from several researchers from other Spanish and foreign centers and universities. The authors develop tools to address the evaluation and assessment found in media discourse, as well as to compare traditional and digital discourse.

Throughout eight chapters, they analyze media discourses in Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, Holland and Germany. They also study “unofficial” discourse, that is, that which is created by users and bloggers, or comments in newspapers that can have the same impact as the messages that the media releases.

According to Breeze and Olza in the introduction, they wanted to understand "the nature of the languages that the media uses ​​(formal, informal, group and non-group discourses)" and "the nature of what can really be described as media discourse (the discourses on social networks, “official” media, forums and multimodal communications).

Evaluation in Media Discourse is part of the FFI2012-3639 project funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (The project is entitled, “Metadiscurso y lenguaje evaluativo: perspectivas teóricas y de análisis en el discurso periodístico” [Metadiscourse and evaluative language: Theoretical perspectives and analysis in journalistic discourse]).

Chapters and authors

1. Introduction, Ruth Breeze and Inés Olza

2. Stancetaking and inter/subjectivity in journalistic discourse: The Engagement system revisited, Juana I. Marín-Arrese

3. Concession in evaluative argumentative discourse: The semantics, pragmatics and discourse functions of but and although, María de los Ángeles Gómez González

4. Evaluation in the headlines of tabloids and broadsheets: A comparative study, Laura Alba-Juez

5. Negotiating futures in socio-technical controversies in the media: strategies of opinion orientation, Paola Catenaccio

6. The banality of evil. A study about translating “los desaparecidos” in the German and English press, Frank J. Harslem

7. “A life well lived of a lady well loved”: The power of appraisal in the comments section, Isabel Corona

8. The evaluative potential of colonial metaphor scenarios in (written) media representations of Spain’s economic expansion. Spanish investors as forceful aggressors or audacious pioneers?, Jasper Vandenberghe

9. Re-articulating critical awareness about racism in public discourse: Changing one’s mind on the Black Pete debates in the Netherlands, Jan Zienkowski