To trace the spotlighted, the backgrounded and the muted voices : a critical analysis of the social actors in the recontextualization of juvenile delinquency in the Guardian and the Telegraph

Abstract

Juvenile delinquency has long been an outstanding and intractable social problem in Britain society, as a welcomed topic for multifarious types of news outlets. However, from the view of Critical Linguistics, journalistic language could be a means to manipulate the agenda of public discussion through the practice of recontexualization, in which the media approaches the delinquent story through power allocation and stratification of social actors, resulting in seemingly partial reflection or deflection of reality. This study adopts Social Actor Approach (SAA) and conducts interdisciplinary analysis through integrating insights from Critical Linguistics, sociology and criminology, to examine the linguistic operationalization of the purported unbiased broadsheet newspaper’s representation of social actors that could shape the audiences’ perception of juvenile delinquency. Although a number of studies adopting SAA had well observed that some social actors are polarized, antagonized and (or) glorified against the other groups of actors, very few studies erect their criticalness based on a more rigorous, case-by-case comparison between the media belonging to the same culture. This study investigates the individualized recontextualization of juvenile delinquency by two British newspapers (the Guardian and the Telegraph) that are endorsed by distinct political parties and oriented to audiences of different classes. Results suggest a similar overall distribution of inclusion, activation and specification of a range of social actors between the two news outlets, but the two newspapers tend to vary their tones and voices via accumulative choices of the social actors that are more conducive to reshaping the knowledge and the implications of youth crime in line with their perspectives, values and ideology.