The Use of Passive Voice in News Reports for Political Purposes

Abstract

This study aims to identify the purposes of passive construction in political news reports. The study also examines how the use of passive voice affects readers' attitudes towards political issues. The use of passive voice can lead to ambiguity, affecting the clarity of meaning by hiding the identity of the doer of the action. However, being vague about the doer of the action is primarily deliberate in political news to serve particular purposes. To collect data, the researchers refer to three newspapers, namely The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Some articles discussing political issues were carefully chosen from those newspapers. The analysis of the results reveals that the passive voice is used in the selected political news reports to fulfill four main purposes; first, when the journalist emphasizes the action rather than the doer of the action, he omits by phrase, replacing it with marginal information. Second, when the subject of the sentence is the core of the discussion, the journalist ends the passive sentence with by phrase. Third, passive construction is used when political news writers avoid assigning responsibility to anybody. Fourth, the passive is used in political reports with modal auxiliaries when the writers want to express their opinion clearly about what is possible, necessary, or prohibited. The analysis of results also reveals that the use of passive voice can contribute actively to changing the attitudes and views of the recipients.