Toward a definition and classification of human interest narratives in television war reporting

Abstract: In response to the recent academic interest in the role of narrativization of the news as a way to increase readership, and the tendency to prioritize human interest items which create community and inspire solidarity among readers, the present study explores a corpus of American and British Iraq war news items and investigates how the element of narrativity is interlaced with that of human interest. In attempting to characterize the nature and role of such ‘human interest narratives’, the authors propose the notion of a cline that progresses from predominantly narrative items to prevalently human interest items, with a central category of items combining aspects of both. The news stories belonging to the three categories that compose the continuum display different structural and content features. The study also explores the ways in which the narrating voices are constructed by the two broadcasters investigated (BBC and CBS) and comments on the different journalistic styles. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]