Grice's cooperative maxims as linguistic criteria for news selectivity

Abstract

The language of the news has been in the center of attention of both media researchers and linguists for decades and the criteria by which the news editors and journalists decide about newsworthiness of an event or story, widely known as news values, have been one interesting aspect of news production process especially for critical discourse analysts. In this paper, we review the wide range of news values lists proposed by media scholars and linguists since the publication of Galtung and Rouge's leading article (1965) and suggest Grice's cooperative maxims as linguistic set of news values. The purpose of this study is to show that news can be considered as a mutual conversational activity between the media and its audiences, as a result the maxims ruling the conversation process are respected in news production process too. In other words, in this article we show that an indispensible number of criteria or news values, pinned down by media researchers in recent decades are actually rewording of these maxims and journalists are actually aware of these pragmatic maxims while composing their news stories. we can trace the related evidence of respecting these four maxims(Quality, Quantity, Manner and Relevance) in the news in the way they are observable as hedges in conversational activities, showing that they have in- action linguistic equivalences. However, as Grice himself noticed, the maxims may be violated (flouted) in different situations and maxim flouting leads to implicature. © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland.