The death of Lady Diana in the British press: The discursiveness of news values

Abstract

Diana Frances Spencer was the wife of Prince Charles, heir to the throne of Britain. Due to this marriage, the figure of Diana turned to be an important symbol in the country of Britain and also in the world. Diana became a mediatic character, very coveted by the media and persecuted by paparazzi constantly. Her death in 1997, caused by a car accident in Paris, triggered the alarms in the press worldwide. Newspapers reported her death in different and similar ways, but all of them had something in common: The event was newsworthy. Newsworthiness is the concept that will be developed in this dissertation: which are the news values that can we find in different newspapers, in the news reporting the death of Diana, that have made this accident so important for the press and how they were discursively constructed (Bednarek, 2009). One of the news values which will be largely studied is eliteness (among others such as negativity, superlativeness, etc), this concept has to do with the mention of famous or important characters, as Diana was, and how they are portrayed. In this case, Diana was more portrayed as a charismatical figure who was very close to the British people rather than a monarchical figure. Although the concept of “news values” is still not very studied, we could say that these are the criteria, qualities, or even preferences of the audience which make an event important for newspapers. In this work we will see how they are discursively constructed from a multimodal perspective (text and image) (Kress, G and T. van Leeuwen, 1998; Bednarek and Caple, 2017). We will carefully analyse which news values newspapers are selling and how they are constructively discoursed by comparing articles from newspapers with different political orientations (these newspapers will be determined later in the course of the work. Newspapers of right-wing and left-wing will be contrasted paying attention to their pro monarchical orientation or not, to see how the event is presented from these two different perspectives in order to provide a complete critical discourse analysis. (Fairclough, 2003)