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STAGE 1 – TASK 1.1A PRE- TUTORIAL READING

“Woman Bites Cop” – the life and times of the hard news report [For referencing: White, P.R.R., unpublished course notes, “Woman Bites Cop”, UNSW Bachelor of Media 2012]  P.R.R. White 

Introduction There is an old saying amongst journalists that while there is ‘no story’ in ‘Dog Bites Man’, the reverse, ‘Man Bites Dog’, definitely IS the stuff of headlines and front pages. The point, of course, is to stress that to for an event or issue to be an appropriate, or at least obvious, subject for reporting in the news media, it must contain some element of novelty or the unusual. In September 2000, some intrepid New York Post reporters found themselves a prime example of ‘man bites dog’ , though in this case it was, more precisely, ‘woman bites man’. The story ran as follow.

LADY WRESTLER BITES: COP ByLARRYCELONA,WILLIAMJ.GORTAandBILLHOFFMANN

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  NICOLE'S WWF SNACK-DOWN? Female wrestler Nicole Bass was arrested over the weekend following a brawl in Little Italy. Photo by: Dave Allocca/DMI

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Strapping lady wrestler Nicole Bass was down for the count and behind bars last night after pulling a Mike Tyson and biting a cop during a wild melee in Little Italy, police said. The world-champion bodybuilder, who is 6-foot-2 and weighs 230 pounds, was charged with assault for allegedly sinking her teeth into the thumb of Police Officer James Secreto. "The officer was trying to break up a fight between Nicole and another party, and she went berserk and chomped down on his hand," one law enforcement source said. "Maybe Tyson can get away with it in the ring, like he did with [Evander] Holyfield's ear, but you don't do that to a New York City cop." Two years ago, the amazon athlete made headlines when she agreed to take a DNA test after shock jock Howard Stern questioned whether she was a woman. The test proved she was. The bizarre bust-up in Lower Manhattan unfolded at 10:30 p.m. Saturday at the annual San Gennaro Festival. Police said Bass, 36, her husband, Robert Fuchs, 52, two friends and one of their kids were walking at Mulberry and Kenmare streets when a man accidentally bumped into the child. A heated argument broke out and erupted into a shoving match. Secreto noticed the fight at the packed intersection and rushed to break it up. That's when, cops say, Nicole made like a shark and bit down on Secreto's thumb.

If convicted of second- and third-degree assault, the outspoken ironwoman, who lives in Middle Village, Queens, could go to prison for up to three years. Also arrested and charged with third-degree assault were her husband and a relative, Jennifer Fuchs, 31, of Middle Village; John Rut, 30, of Massapequa, L.I.; and Alexander Ronaye, 21, of Queens. Wrestling fans were split on Bass' arrest. "It's typical. It would be just like her," Natasha Rodriguez, 14, of Manhattan said at the WWF Cafe in Times Square. But John Martino, 21, of Locust Valley, L.I., insisted: "She's a good wrestler and a very nice person."  (NewYorkPost‐September18,2000) 

In composing their report, in deciding which information should go where and which aspects of the ‘story’ should be emphasised, these journalists have followed patterns or principles of text organisation which have now become standardised or conventionalised across the news media. The precise nature of these principles is our primary concern in this set of notes. But let us first compare this news item with a report from a time before this contemporary journalistic mode had been established. It is an account of another ‘remarkable’ disturbance of the peace and comes from an Australian newspaper of the 1830s. Incident in St George St. On Tuesday evening, about the hour of eight o'clock, a puncheon of rum in the bonded store at the back of the Gazette Office burst, and the intoxicating stream found its way through the drain into St. George street, the invigorating cry of 'grog ahoy' was immediately raised, and pots, pans and buckets were put into instant requisition for saving the precious liquid, which by this time had obtained the consistency of pea soup; some who had not the convenience of utensils stretched themselves on mother earth and lapped up the beverage, until they became incapable of rising; others were staggering off in various directions scarcely capable of maintaining their equilibrium, and even a batch of children were seen quaffing the beverage with much gout. A bacchanalian scene ensued, and the conservators of the peace were required to put it down. (The Sydney Gazette, 1831) Clearly the two texts represent different approaches to reporting or to ‘story telling’? They are indicative of a significant transformation in the way journalists construct their new reports which has taken place over the last century or so. By comparing the two reports, we can gain an insight into just what is so distinctive about the modern news report. Some obvious differences between the two texts immediately present themselves. The Sydney Gazette would appear to have a rather simple textual architecture – it begins at the beginning, so to speak, and then proceeds, step by step to the end. It starts by setting the scene, by indicating the time and place in which the events took place and then outlines the sequence of events in a chronological series.

The modern new report has a rather more complicated textual architecture. Clearly this text is not organised as a chronological sequence. Rather, the report casts the reader directly into the midst of the action without preamble or prelude. It opens by describing the crisis point or climax, the biting of the policeman by the ‘lady’ wrestler, and then moves immediately to the end-point of the incident, her imprisonment. In the process, the incident itself is evaluatively characterised as a ‘wild melee’. The body of the report then progressively elaborates on this opening, providing more and more detail as the text unfolds. Thus, the reader is informed (1) of the name of the police officer, (2) that the police officer had been attempting to break up a fight between the wrester and another party (3) that the incident occurred at 10.30 pm in Lower Manhattan, and so on. Something of a conclusion or wrap-up to the account is provided by the comments of the two fans. Via their statements, the report steps back from the sequence of events itself and shifts the focus from recount to evaluative assessment. The story ends with the fans passing opposed judgements on the wrestler’s character. This modern textual framework is known in the journalistic training literature as the ‘inverted pyramid’. According to this account, such reports begin with what is most important and end with what is least important. For example, most important (headline/lead) less important even less important least important Figure 1: inverted pyramid Here is a typical account from this literature, The most popular structure for news stories is the inverted pyramid. In the inverted pyramid, the information is arranged in descending order of importance. The most important material is placed at the beginning of the story, and less important material follows. Succeeding paragraphs explain and support the lead.1 (from http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENGjeh/BeginningReporting/Writing/storystructure.htm, accessed Oct 27 2002) It should be stressed that this ‘inverted pyramid’ model has been developed as a teaching aid for a particular context, the training of journalists. There it typically operates as a kind of ‘rule of thumb’, as a guide for inexperienced journalists. As a result it is probably unfair to expect it to operate in the same way as the carefully formulated analytical categories which, hopefully, we work with in language and text analysis studies. Accordingly I won’t be adopting the ‘inverted pyramid’ as an  1

It should be noted that there is something of a debate among those concerned with journalism training about this supposed ‘inverted pyramid’ structure. Some hold that it poses major problems for comprehension or at least for retention of information by readers and argue that alternative structures should be adopted. See for example an article by Don Fry on the American Society of Newspaper Editors web site at http://www.asne.org/kiosk/editor/99.mayjune/fry1.htm (accessed Oct 27 2002). Accordingly, there is something a movement away from this structure among journalism trainers. Nevertheless, this structure is still very widely seen as the ‘standard’ for modern hard news reporting.

analytical construct and will be employing the term ‘headline/lead dominated’ to refer to this type of structure. Nor will I spend too much time subjecting it to close linguistic scrutiny or critique. Nevertheless, it is of some interest and relevance for our current purposes because it does provide an insight into how journalists think about their own work. Accordingly, in following sections I will investigate at least some of the assumptions which underlie the notion of the ‘inverted pyramid’. In particular, I will be interrogating this notion of ‘most important’ and ‘least important’. To return, then, to our preliminary comparison of the two news items. To the degree that these two reports are typical of the journalistic conventions of their respective eras, it would seem that news reporting has undergone a major transformation over time.2 One of our concerns in what follows will be with seeking to understand what is at stake communicatively and rhetorically in this change. That is to say, we will be concerned with what communicative effects are possible with the modern structure which were not possible with the older chronological recount. In this context, I should perhaps once again make mention of what the journalistic training literature has to say on this subject. It has become something of an ‘accepted wisdom’, especially amongst writers of north American journalistic training texts, that the change was triggered by the American Civil War3. The following account is typical, During the American Civil War, an entire news story took too long to transmit across wire via Morse code. So, field reporters wired their stories starting with primary information first, a more efficient way to get important facts to press. The story was supported with as many lesser important fact as was possible during one telegraph transmission. In written form, this evolved into a news style referred to as the Inverted Pyramid, which stands as a standardized method for writing news stories. (From the ‘Web Reference’ web site, http://www.webreference.com/new/webnotes2.html accessed Oct 27, 2002) As far as I am aware, no-one has actually provided any concrete evidence in support of this proposal (though see Mindich for a more thoroughgoing investigation4). That is to say, there has been no study comparing and contrasting news reports immediately before and immediately after the Civil War. My own informal study of reports from the New York Times in the decades immediately after the war provides  2

For an detailed account of this transition from chronological recount to the modern. lead-dominated, non-chronological news story, see Feez, Iedema and White 2008 3 Some accounts simply put it down to the development of the telegraph and don’t make the link with the Civil War. For example, the Dayton Daily News’ ‘Journalism 101’ site states, ‘Putting the most important facts at the beginning of the story was developed in the mid-1800s when reporters began to use the telegraph to transmit stories back to their newspapers. Because the telegraph lines were unreliable the reporters found that their narrative style of journalism would get cut off by a dropped line. They then began to push the important facts to the top of the story and provided detail as the story unfolded. If a line failed they would have given the paper the most important information first.’ (From http://www.activedayton.com/ddn/nie/journalism/inverted1.html accessed Oct 27 2002) 4 An interesting variant on this hypothesis has been put forward by Mindich, who argues that the innovation came, not from a news organization, but from the War Department at that time. He does provide evidence that War Department dispatches were printed entire by most newspapers. According to Mindich, this suggests that journalists borrowed and publicized forms from other "professional communicators" at a time when business, military, and political bureaucracies were forming. (Mindich 1998)

counter evidence. In that period chronologically sequenced reports predominate and it is not until the turn of the century, some 30 years later, that the modern mode of textual organisation begins to appear. If the American Civil War was, in fact, the trigger, then it would remain to be explained why this new mode persisted once the war was over, and how it was that this north American mode came to be taken up by journalists in Great Britain and in other parts of the then British Empire. I turn now to considering this headline/lead dominated structure in more detail.

The generic structure of News A point of clarification – Event Stories and Issues Reports There is one point which needs to be clarified before we can begin this discussion. It is possible to divide news texts into two sub-types: what I term ‘Event Stories’ and ‘Issues Reports’. (Note, however that these terms are not typically used by practicing journalists – they don’t make such a distinction. Rather they refer to both types of texts simply as “stories”, “articles” or even as “yarns”.) The Event story, with which we are concerned in this unit, describes what happened in the event of some action or happening - typically some accident, natural disaster, act of violence, crime, economic setback and so on. The Issues Report, in contrast, is grounded in a communicative event and acts typically to describe the criticisms, accusations, demands, warnings, discoveries or announcements of some authorised source such as a politician, community leader, lobbyist, professional expert or scientific researcher. These communicatively-based items have been labelled ‘Issues Reports’ to reflect their role in describing the communicative activity, the public controversies and debates which are triggered when some newsworthy event or state of affairs acquires the status of ‘issue’.5 Issues Reports will not concern us in this unit – since they don’t act to describe a happening or activity sequence, they are one of the basic elements of story telling and therefore are not candidates for membership in the family of narrative texts. The two types of report are exemplified below. The first, an ‘Event Story’, describes a newsworthy happening — the associated set of violent actions and events which followed the testing of a nuclear weapon by the French Government in August 1995. The second, an ‘Issues Report’, is grounded, in contrast, not in any material action or happening but in the statements made by a prominent British judge. The report describes her comments in support of gay couples as parents. [Event Story] BOMB RAGE Riots sweep Tahiti RIOTERS carved a blazing trail of destruction through the paradise island of Tahiti yesterday in a wave of fury sparked by French nuclear bomb tests. Tahiti airport was left a smouldering wreck after more than 1000 protesters attacked riot police, drove a mechanical digger through the terminal and set the building alight.  5

It is noteworthy that many journalistic training texts fail to note the difference between the two types, perhaps a reflection of their commonality of textual structure, although Harold Evans in his highly influential training journalistic training text, Newsman’s English [sic], does make the distinction, applying the label, ‘Statement/Opinion story’ to the communicatively based report.

France sent in tough Foreign Legion troops as riots spread to the nearby capital, Papeete. Protesters looted shops, set a perfume store on fire and stoned an office building and the Territorial Assembly building. Opposition to nuclear testing swept around the globe just a day after France exploded the first of up to eight bombs at Mururoa atoll, also in French controlled Polynesia. Demonstrations included one by more than 10,000 people in Chile. The riots in Tahiti are believed to have involved independence activists and trade unions. Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans said yesterday: ‘France has really reaped what it has sown.’ (Telegraph Mirror [Sydney], 8/9/95) 

[Issues Report] Gays can bring up children - judge Head of family law division boosts equality for homosexuals while attacking 'hypocrisy' of divorce Clare Dyer, Legal Correspondent Saturday October 16, 1999 - The Guardian Children can be successfully brought up by gay couples, England's top family law judge, Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, declared yesterday. Holding her first press conference at the high court in London since taking over two weeks ago as president of the court's family division, the 66-yearold judge said: "We live in a different world to that when I started in the law. "I was, when I started, surprised and dubious about the stability of children living in a family with two parents of the same sex. But over the years research has shown that for some children, that is the best that is available for them. "Consequently it would be quite wrong when looking at the welfare of the child not to recognise that different children will need different types of parents. We should not close our minds to suitable families who are clearly not within the old fashioned approach." Dame Elizabeth is the first woman to reach such a high rank in the judiciary and was previously the first to sit in the court of appeal. Before her elevation to the appeal court she spent her judicial career in the family division, where she was noted for her commonsense and humanity in dealing with children's cases. In the 1970s and early 1980s women who left their husbands to live with a lesbian partner had difficulty gaining custody of their children. But following research in Britain and the US which found that children brought up by gay partners were no more likely than others to grow up gay or to be teased at school, sexual orientation was seen as much less important than other factors such as the bond between mother and child. In recent years gay individuals living with a same-sex partner have been allowed to adopt, and lesbians who have had a child together using donor sperm have been granted co-residence orders.

Dame Elizabeth, who is married with three grown-up children, said: "Clearly children are also adopted these days by unmarried single parents. Unmarried single parents do adopt children and children can be very lucky in cases where it happens, to have these people as adopters. She described the present system of divorce as a "hypocritical charade", in which couples can get a quickie divorce and avoid a two-year wait if one partner charges the other with unreasonable behaviour and the other does not contest it. She said she favoured "no fault" divorce and wanted it brought in as soon as possible. But she understood why the government had shelved part of the family law act, which would have abolished fault-based divorce, because the legislation had "major problems". Mark Harper, family law partner in the London law firm Withers, said: "The judiciary have become more and more aware of the different types of families they have to deal with. There have been various studies which show that children brought up by lesbians don't suffer in any way. "There are also several decisions of the courts sanctioning children being brought up by lesbian mothers. It's good the president of the family division is following that change in the law and reflecting changes in society." Another family law solicitor said: "I'm surprised and delighted because I thought she was very much of the old school." Angela Mason, executive director of Stonewall, welcomed Dame Elizabeth's ...