Signs Codes
4 An overview of the full data set
This chapter has a scene-setting function for the three detailed analysis chapters to follow. In subsequent chapters I make use of the qualitative and semi-quantitative analysis of a
restricted set of texts to explore language use over three time points. In this chapter I will review the full data set, using quantitative analysis supported by some qualitative illustration.
My aim in this overview section is to set out some fundamental issues of context: to give not only an idea of how the BP-related data progresses and changes on a number of measures, but also an indication of some of the content, in preparation for the depth analysis of later
chapters. The fact that this overview deals with the complete data set is important, in my view, from a research perspective. As I argue in Chapter 3, using a quantitative approach at this stage of the analysis is one way of warranting that the patterns I will claim are
substantiated across a sample that is complete rather than restricted.
As outlined in the Methodology chapter, my data sets for analysis comprise a full set of all the items derived from the Nexis UK database for each of the three dates analysed, as well as a systematic random sampled twenty texts for each of the three dates. The larger set is intended to be more or less exhaustive for the dates in question – subject to the limitations outlined in section 3.2.3, p75 – while the smaller set allows for more detailed analysis. The larger set of items comprises 169 texts for April 27th 2010, 94 texts for April 27th 2011 and 31 texts for April 27th 2012, and it is these texts to which I now turn for an overview of my data.
The analysis in this section covers the geographical origin of the texts, the Nexis publication types, a breakdown of the texts by news media genre and an analysis of the salience of the BP story within data items.
4.1 Number of texts
Table 4.1 shows the number of texts in English mentioning the BP events on the three researched dates, with close duplicates and irrelevant texts removed (full details of the selection process can be found in Section 3.2, p74).
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The number of texts in each year set reduces significantly as time progresses, from 169 texts in 2010 to 31 in 2012. As we would expect, the 'newsworthiness' of the events, as indicated by coverage, reduces over time. As the average analysed text lengths are different for each year, it will be appropriate for some of the analyses that follow, that findings are shown per 000 words, rather than as actual values across the data set. A fuller discussion of the implications of the analysed text lengths can be found in Section 3.2, p74, on data selection, and below in Section 4.5 on the salience of the BP story within texts.
4.2 Country of origin
Table 4.2 shows a broad breakdown of the country of origin of the full set of texts that mention the BP oil spill. Note that only texts in English were included in the sample.
27th April 2010 27th April 2011 27th April 2012
No of texts % No of texts % No of texts %
UK 27 16 11 12 4 13
US 76 45 56 60 19 61
Rest of world 56 33 11 12 3 10
Unable to determine (www.) 10 6 16 17 5 16
Total 169 100 94 100 31 100*
Table 4.2: Geographical source of items mentioning BP events 2010-12
* note that low numbers make percentages indicative rather than firm findings Nexis UK texts containing
‘BP’ AND ‘crisis’ OR ‘oil spill’
OR ‘disaster’
Sample for depth analysis
Average word length of the 20 analysed
texts
April 27th 2010 169 20 455
April 27th 2011 94 20 350
April 27th 2012 31 20 356
Table 4.1: Number of Nexis UK items mentioning BP events 2010-12
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The site of the BP oil spill – the United States – begins and remains the main country of origin for English-speaking media coverage, and this reflects not just the direct interest in the events, but also the size of the US and the number of local and regional newspapers operating there.
However, the fact that the events are perceived to be of global rather than just national interest is reflected in the fact that half the English-speaking coverage in 2010 is outside the US, primarily from the UK. The UK has a specific interest in events, given that BP, while a global company, is British in origin. At the time of the crisis, President Barack Obama positioned BP firmly as a British (rather than global) company (Burt, 2012) and by extension directed the blame and responsibility in the direction of the UK. By 2012, the US represents an even greater proportion of coverage at 61% than it did in the first days of the disaster, with both the UK (at 13% on a low base) and the rest of the world showing decreased coverage as a proportion in 2011 and 2012. This picture suggests that concerns with the physical effects of the spill in the US, both real and potential, are of greater ongoing interest than concerns with moral and financial culpability in the UK. That said, the other area of increase over the years by percentage is the geographically indeterminate category, which consists mainly of internet and blog coverage. This rises from 6% in 2010 to 16% in 2012, which implies a continuing interest in the story at a more general, societal level. This aspect of the data will be explored in later sections that discuss the implications of genre in the texts (5.1, 6.1 and 7.1).
The other issue of relevance to the geographical origin of texts is that linguistic analysis is situated temporally and culturally – that is, when country of origin changes, then style and social practice change. This principle is central to a social semiotic view of communication (Bignell, 2002; van Leeuwen, 2005) and is a critical component of the study of language choices – any story of linguistic representation is also the story of the situated style and social practice from which it arises. It will be important at times in the analysis to indicate that the writer is not just a journalist, but a British or US journalist; that the newspaper is national or local; and that it originates in one of the affected Gulf States, rather than an unaffected US state.
4.3 Nexis publication type
Table 4.3 shows the types of media in which the texts were found, using the Nexis-generated categories. The term 'publication' is one used by Nexis UK to include a number of channels, including print, web publications, and transcripts of interviews and news programmes. While
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these categorisations are generally clear, there appears to be some overlap at the edges of categories, for example between newsletters and web-based publications.
27th April 2010 27th April 2011 27th April 2012
No of texts % No of texts % No of texts %
Newswires 68 40 29 31 8 26
Newspapers 48 28 16 17 12 39
Web-based
publications 24 14 15 16 0 0
Web blogs 16 9 14 15 7 23
News transcripts
(from spoken) 10 6 4 4 1 3
Newsletters 2 1 10 11 1 3
Magazines, journals,
trade press 1 1 6 6 2 6
Total 169 100 94 100 31 100*
Table 4.3: Media source of items mentioning BP events 2010-12
* note that low numbers make percentages indicative rather than firm findings The coverage of the BP events is dominated in the Nexis database by newspapers and newswires. Although entirely duplicated texts have been removed from the data set, the practice of embedding newswire copy in the stories of other publications accounts for the repetition of certain direct quotations by contributors, as well as repeated words and phrases.
For example, the quotation from 2010: 'We've never seen anything like this magnitude' by George Crozier, 'oceanographer and executive director at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama', appears six times in the total dataset: twice in newswires, twice in web publications and twice in newspapers. The high proportion of coverage of the BP events by newswires reduces over time. News agencies are far more likely to focus on 'new news', as media outlets often need to supplement their own resources to achieve in-depth and rapid coverage of unfolding events. By contrast, editorials and opinion pieces are kept in-house because they reflect the stance of the individual newspaper; and features also tend to be kept in-house as they are less time-bound than news reports.
There appears to be no obvious reason why the proportion of newspaper items drops in 2011, but the point made above about in-house coverage is likely to explain the rise in newspaper
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articles to nearly 40% of all texts in 2012. As the internet, alongside television and radio, is becoming the source for instantaneous news consumption, so newspapers try to fight for their niche with a deeper and more reflective news coverage (Burt, 2012). While newspapers are inclined to manage news stories to fit their daily news cycle (Fowler, 1991), they still appear from the findings to be more likely to address ongoing elements of the story than are
newswires or internet publications – the presence of the latter dropping to zero in 2012. It is the role of the inside pages of newspapers that is relevant in 2012. News reports do appear – directly related in terms of a ruling on the compensation settlement (2012, Text 13/31), and indirectly in the context of an oil book in North Dakota (2012, Text 4/31) and a protest march at the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford-upon-Avon (2012, Text 8/31) – but otherwise it is the review pages (books, movies), the travel pages (New Orleans) and the letters pages that continue to refer to the BP oil spill story.
This move from news reports to other types of text is evident in two more categories. The first is magazines, journals and trade press. These are small in number (moving from 1% of texts in 2010 to 6% in 2011 and 2012) but start to develop the story as an illustration of crisis
management or brand building through behaviour. One article in 2011 (Text 94/94) and one in 2012 (Text 1/31) use the BP oil spill story to sell consultancy products and services with the message that 'We live in an era of tremendous brand risk when a full-blown crisis can start with a tweet of 140 characters', and that preparation and prediction are the key to the swiftest return to business as usual.
The second category that increases in terms of proportion of texts is the web blog. 'Citizen journalism' (Burt, 2012:101) is an increasingly significant feature of how we make sense of social phenomena, and by 2012, web blogs are roughly as important a proportion of
commentary on BP as newspapers and newswires. Twitter communication (usually gathered into a set of re-tweets of interest to the web page author) is counted as a sub-set of web blogging. BP is not the sole topic of these Twitter digests, but they serve to maintain the story and set it in the context of a world view, which is a subject of my later analysis and discussion.
The web blog, alongside newspaper letters, is one of the main sources of 'voice' (Blommaert, 2005) for non-professionals and victims, and as such, is an important inclusion in my study of representation.
113 4.4 Media genre type
In Section 3.6.1, p95, I proposed a categorisation of news media writing genres, and I use this below to show the pattern of genres in my full data sets.
27th April 2010 27th April 2011 27th April 2012
No of texts % No of texts % No of texts %
News report (written) 117 69 24 26 13 42
News report (TV and
radio) 7 4 1 1 1 3
Financial report 34 20 38 40 2 6
Spoken interview (TV
or radio) 3 2 3 3 0 0
Feature article 0 0 0 0 2 6
Editorial or opinion
piece (print/online) 6 4 13 14 3 10
Arts review 0 0 1 1 5 16
Letters 0 0 3 3 1 3
Business or market
report 2 1 11 12 4 13
Total 169 100 94 100 31 100*
Table 4.4: BP oil spill texts by genre 2010-12
* note that low numbers make percentages indicative rather than firm findings
Table 4.4 shows how the genres to which the selected texts belong change over the three years of the data. In 2010, 73% of the texts are either print or TV news reports, with the remaining 27% being largely financial reports (27th April was quarter 1 results day). By 2012, news reports have reduced to less than half of the texts (45%). There is an increase over the years, by proportion, in business and market reports, feature articles and in arts reviews of various kinds. Chapters 5 to 7 will show a full analysis of the genres as exemplified in my data.
To establish a context I give below a few brief illustrations of how news media genres are represented in my full data sets.
114 News reports
In 2010, the news reports on the BP oil spill (73% of texts) are mainly progress reports that discuss announcements by BP concerning the victims and the work being carried out to stop the oil escape, which was still uncontrolled and unpredictable at this stage. As well as quotations from press releases and news conferences, other input from eyewitnesses and experts in the fields of oil drilling, the environment and food industries are evident. By 2011, only 27% of texts are news reports. Directly-related news stories deal mainly with the progress of compensation and legal action. However very many of the news reports cover stories that are not directly-related to the BP oil spill, but concern other events or companies, where the BP oil spill is mentioned in a minor capacity. For example Text 46/94 (2011) deals largely with the new Chairman of commodities trader Glencore and his contentious remarks about women employees. It also mentions that Glencore had appointed Tony Hayward as a senior independent director, but notes that 'his reputation has been shredded by the Deepwater Horizon disaster.' Text 14/31 (2012), reports that an oil spill in the Yellowstone River has created a need for fish testing. Laboratories, however, are still 'backed up processing specimens collected in the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico'. As well as written news reports, the 2010 data set includes a number of television or radio news reports. Even more than reports in newspapers, television news focuses on 'breaking news'. It is therefore unsurprising that while seven of the texts in 2010 were transcripts of television interviews, this dropped to one in each of 2011 and 2012, as the story moves from the immediate explosion to longer-term issues such as compensation.
Financial reports
In 2010, financial reports account for 20% of texts, and in these, the news of BP's first quarter results competes with the ongoing news of the oil spill. April 27th 2011 is again results day, and the first quarter results become the main story in texts mentioning the BP events, accounting for 40% of items. The spill is mentioned (this is more or less the first anniversary) but in the context of Quarter 1 results. By 2012, only 13% of texts about the BP events fall into the financial reports pages.
Spoken interviews
Of the six spoken interviews in the full data sample, four are 'Fair Disclosure' interviews in which annual company earnings are discussed in conference calls and are presented in transcript by Nexis. These did not all concern BP solely, but BP was mentioned in all. The
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other two, both in 2011, are an interview with Michael Greenberger (of the Center for Health and Homeland Security) and a transcript of a speech made by Assistant Attorney General Tony West at the University of Chicago Law School. Both make reference to BP only in passing, in the first case as an instance of a crisis to be dealt with at a national level, and in the second as an example of a large litigation case.
Feature articles
As described earlier, the feature article is unlike either the news report or the evaluative piece.
Its defining 'rhetorical act' (Bhatia, 2004:59) is primarily descriptive, with some evaluative elements. This media genre appears only twice in the entire dataset, and this is in the form of travel features, both, coincidentally, dealing with New Orleans and both written in 2012 (Text 18/31 and Text 22/31). Both use the theme of the city's 'renaissance' in the wake of a series of disasters (one shared with the rest of the US – the financial crisis, and two that were much more localised, that is Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill). One of the items goes even further back in time and scope:
The nearly 300-year-old city has had to rebound from centuries of disasters including fires, plagues, hurricanes and most recently, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
(2012, Text 18/31)
One writer uses a personal narrative approach, comparing New Orleans with her home town of Sarasota, and the other uses an impersonal observer approach. In both cases, the tone is largely descriptive, with the 'point of closure' at the end, as is typical of the genre.
Editorial or opinion pieces
This genre includes opinion or comment pieces, which are argumentative and persuasive in rhetorical purpose. The texts in this category in the sample are of two main types –
editorial/journalistic comment and blog comment. Over the three year span, the proportion of editorial or opinion pieces increases strongly to 2011 and remains at a similar level in 2012, indicating a shift in focus from reporting to commenting on and evaluating the events.
Comment tends to be presented as more impersonal in quality papers, as more personal and emotional in the popular press, and often as highly-charged in internet blogs, as two example titles from 2012 exemplify: 'Should we kill the politicians before they kill us?' (Text 20/31) and '"Crucify them": the Obama way' (Text 21/31). How 'more impersonal' and 'more personal' commentary are variously constructed is a topic for attention in the detailed analysis chapters.
116 Arts reviews
The purpose of the arts review genre is to inform the reader about and comment upon particular items of art, fiction and non-fiction literature, and so on. This genre does not appear amongst the 2010 texts, and is represented by only one text in 2011, but by 2012 five of the 31 texts in the data set are of this kind. This is commensurate with the length of time many artworks (in the broadest sense) take to complete, but might also suggest that there is a length of elapsed time deemed 'appropriate' or 'decent' for works of this nature to appear, and also indicates that a process of assimilation may have taken place, that it takes an amount of time for the wider significance of events to be understood, and this is necessary for a work of art to have resonance. These texts imply a move of the representation of BP events from being part of the world of 'reality' to having an alternative existence in the world of artistic representation. Examples of works referred to in the data are films, books (both fiction and non-fiction) and documentaries.
Business or market reports
Business or market reports have in common that they represent events from the sole perspective of their effect on the business world. They can be argued as a genre, in Bhatia's terms, as they have purpose and audience in common, yet stylistically they can be rather different. They can range from somewhat resembling news reports to offering summaries, evaluation and commentary on diverse business-related events. Business reports account for only 1% of the texts in 2010 but increase to 12% and 13% in 2011 and 2012, as writers are able to gain better insight with time into the implications of the BP events for the oil and gas industry as well as for wider business practice. Examples in this data set are a web piece on petrol price rises (2011, Text 18/94), a report on offshore drilling (2012, Text, 38/94) and a report in Campaign on 'Building brands through behaviour' (2012, Text 5/31).
Business or market reports have in common that they represent events from the sole perspective of their effect on the business world. They can be argued as a genre, in Bhatia's terms, as they have purpose and audience in common, yet stylistically they can be rather different. They can range from somewhat resembling news reports to offering summaries, evaluation and commentary on diverse business-related events. Business reports account for only 1% of the texts in 2010 but increase to 12% and 13% in 2011 and 2012, as writers are able to gain better insight with time into the implications of the BP events for the oil and gas industry as well as for wider business practice. Examples in this data set are a web piece on petrol price rises (2011, Text 18/94), a report on offshore drilling (2012, Text, 38/94) and a report in Campaign on 'Building brands through behaviour' (2012, Text 5/31).