This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event. While the traditions of dialectic and rhetoric have focused on the prescriptive aim of training participants to resolve...

This book presents a constitutive approach to controversy based on a discourse analysis of news texts, focusing on the role of journalists as participants who shape public controversy for readers. Drawing data from the Reuters Corpus, the project identifies formulas that journalists use in reporting controversy and draws conclusions about how these serve professional and textual functions and how they shape public controversy as a natural, historical, and pragmatic event. While the traditions of dialectic and rhetoric have focused on the prescriptive aim of training participants to resolve...