Confirmation bias in the newsroom: the interweaving of an argumentative and a word-by word linguistic analysis

As a social-cognitive phenomenon, confirmation bias has stronger effects in the context of emotionally charged arguments, or with arguments linked with deeply rooted beliefs. When journalists have to promote the interpretation of an emotionally charged issue rather than another, they adopt specific rhetorical and stylistic strategies aimed at supporting a certain viewpoint. Starting from the idea that semantic and expressive levels of argumentation should not be seen as separate instances, this paper investigates the argumentative and stylistic choices that journalists adopted in a case of Swiss-German tv journalism concerning youth aggressiveness. Firstly, we will analyze the journalists' newsroom decisions based on their anticipated audience uptake, and secondly, we will analyze their subsequently printed articles. We will carry out an argumentative analysis, using Pragma-Dialectics (Eemeren van 2004) at the interactional level and Argumentum Model of Topics (AMT) (Rigotti & Greco Morasso 2010) at the inferential level. For the micro-analysis considering the stylistic choices we will use Caffi & Janney (1994)'s emotive devices and Caffi (2001; 2007)'s mitigation devices. Results show that the interweaving of a word-by-word linguistic analysis fits well with the argumentative analysis: the first one enables us to grasp specific standpoint indicators, and the second one enables us to reach the reasoning level, also revealing us the implicit premises via AMT.