Legitimizing strategies used by the Guardian in Julian Assange’s issue

ABSTRACT

Legitimization is a tactic for someone to force or influence softly their ideology to others. Legitimization is conducted for those who work on media to overcome what the others assume about certain information, legitimizing strategies are a perfect instrument for those who work on media to characterize and shape the news. This becomes the starting point of this research, which concern with the linguistic aspect of legitimization in written form.

The objectives of this study are to describe the way text’s producer uses external and internal coherence in characterizing the news of Julian Assange. This research was conducted by using descriptive qualitative method since the data of the news are in natural setting which means the researcher does not give treatments. The legitimizing analysis is limited to the headline of Julian Assange issue published on April 17th.

The findings show that the tactics used by the text’s producer is to convince the readers that their news has high quality and validity by using two kinds of coherences, external and internal coherence. The types of internal coherence which is found in this news are repetition of key words, synonyms, additives conjunction (and), adversatives conjunction (but), temporal and causal conjunction (since). The external coherence is presented in this news via epistemic modal markers such as modal “will” as definiteness and possibility “may” as uncertainty and “would” as possibility and uncertainty marker. Moreover, to strengthen their truth assertion, the guardian also uses types of evidentiality such as general knowledge (global audience, global viewers and adjective allegedly which means everybody says) and visual perception (appeared, revealed and views). The text’s producer uses internal coherences to reflect and express their opinion to the readers via logical connectors. In contrast, the guardian uses external coherences to overcome the reader’s assumption by using strong evidence and giving opinion.

The researcher suggests the next researchers who are interested in analyzing mass media especially newspaper to pay attention in analyzing the use of each word and sentence by news maker in characterizing the object of news. Therefore it will help them to find the idea of news maker toward their object of news.