| Historically, this study analyzes newspaper discourse in articles written about African Americans in Huntington, West Virginia for the years 1872-74 and 1972. Three purposes guided this research: (1) to identify language characterizing African Americans in the European American newspapers of 1872-74 and 1972; (2) to interpret the results of the linguistic practices and choices; (3) to reflect on the significance of the language findings as they related to the Huntington, WV community and the wider population of the United States, since over a third of the articles come from associated press releases. My findings illustrate how specific linguistic constructions delineate a stock public persona for African Americans. The European American reporting voice construes for itself a contrasting linguistic persona, one which represents a broad consensus of the general society.;Over the 100 years between these newspapers, rhetorical emphasis combines with other journalistic practices to construct a mythopoeism which undergirds an ideology of social acceptance and class status within the United States. This ideology is built with overt racial identification, cemented with semantic associations, and consistently structured and restructured daily in newspapers as well as in related interdependent media. Analysis into discourse strategies--such as repetition, omission, recurrence, selective silence, and ambiguity--explain how racial images become reified in negative or positive associations. Consistent recurrences of linguistic portrayals over a hundred years fostered the mythopoeic function of newspaper discourse. The myth explains why things are as they are between the races in the United States, and it justifies attempts to conserve the status quo.;My conclusion suggests a means of dismantling the linguistically constructed racial myth inherent in the traditional practices of newspaper journalism. It indicates the extraordinary commitment (that must be made) in order to restructure and to revise the mythicized-linguistic-personae. And while these practices are cited for journalism, newspapers particularly, they have significance for all public media, because knowledge sources in this society are intra-dependent as well as interdependent. |
