TV News Broadcasting and the Iraq War: a Preliminary Comparison of CBS and TG5

This essay represents a preliminary comparative, quantitative, and qualitative analysis of the language used in TV news reporting in Italy and in the US at the time of the 2003 Iraqi war. The analysis centers on March 21, 2003, which marked the second day of the 2003 Iraqi war. The two subcorpora analyzed are the American CBS Evening News and the Italian 8 o’clock TG5. These subcorpora are part of a larger TV news corpus made up of a whole month of TV news reports (the broader research project is the CorDis corpus of political and media discourse, relating to the 2003 conflict in Iraq, financed by MIUR 2004-2005). After a concise introductory section, including a definition of television news reporting as a genre, and outlining the advantages of the use of corpus linguistics methodology and of computer software, like WordSmith Tools 4 (Scott 1998), the essay describes the main war events of the day and the way they were dealt with by the two TV broadcasters. One of the most striking differences between the two TV news broadcasts, is that on TG5 there were three newsreaders in the studio together. Enrico Mentana stands out as the main newsreader supported by two other journalists, creating a ‘collaborative mode’ of news reporting. Whereas, in typical American TV news tradition, the CBS Evening News is conducted by a solo anchor, who in this case was the well-known journalist and Managing Director of CBS, Dan Rather. The main focus of the linguistic analysis is how the news of the massive bombing of Bagdad on the second day of the war was reported by journalists in the studio and by correspondents in the war zone. Recurrent word occurrences such as war, missiles, fire, bombs, Pentagon, etc. used in the CBS corpus, and words such as guerra, bombardamenti, fronte, attacco, soldati, etc. in the TG5 corpus are counted and analyzed with concordance lines and collocates. The main differences in the ‘preferred reading’ that emerges from the two TV news programs lies mainly in the distinct role held by the two main newsreaders in the presentation of the news. Dan Rather holds the role of a traditional newsreader, who provides his audience with a seemingly objective and reliable picture of the war; his main sources being the Pentagon, the White House correspondent, and the embedded journalists, with a focus on the US forces. On the other hand, Enrico Mentana plays the role of a commentator of the images and of the information provided by the reporters from the war zone. The main sources of information come from footage, war zone correspondents, and news agencies. Thus, the endeavor of TG5 is to provide an interpretation of the facts in a more rounded way, rather than to inform the audience objectively; this leads to a greater effort at audience involvement in the attempt to share information and make sense together of the war events. In conclusion, what clearly emerges is that both CBS and TG5 are culturally determined products and that linguistic analysis, and corpus linguistics in particular can prove to be useful tools in unveiling the ‘preferred reading’ behind TV news programs.