Quoting political candidate TV interviews: An analysis of Taiwan`s four major newspapers

Abstract

Quoting and transforming interviews into news reports is an essential skill for journalists. This study investigates how interviews are quoted in news texts. It focuses on televised mayoral candidate interviews during the Taiwan metropolitan elections in 2010 to explore-qualitatively and quantitatively-how Taiwan`s four main newspapers quoted those interviews and changed the meaning of words. It analyzes quotation forms used in headlines and text body and identifies how news texts change meanings by omitting oral stress, modals, and question-answer pairs; by altering personal pronouns and adversarial questions; and by re-arranging quotations and newspaper layout.