Which news values apply in the story? Give a range of examples and make specific reference to theory including Galtung and Ruge and narrative ( Levi-Strauss). Consider the role of ideology.
Published on 11th of November, 2017, in this news article, a teacher has been suspended and could face the sack after he ‘accidentally’ called a transgender pupil a ‘girl’ in class when the student identifies as a boy.
We can already see that in this news article, there is a value of Negativity being used, this is because bad news is always highly more rated than good news, because it's more exciting and interests the readers more, it's more exciting than good news. Stories about death, tragedy, bankruptcy, violence, damage, natural disasters, political upheaval or simply extreme weather conditions are always rated above positive stories such as royal weddings or celebrations. Bad news stories are more likely to be reported than good news because they are more likely to score high on other news values, such as threshold, unexpectedness, unambiguity and meaningfulness. In this case, the teacher has been suspended and could lose his job, which is a tragedy for him, and thus, makes it interesting for the readers.
Further, there is use of Unexpectedness in this article, because the man here is only seen to be mispronouncing the student's gender pronouns, and because of that, he may lose his job, and that's quite unexpected because in a way, it's harsh for the teacher and maybe not deserve to lose his job if it was just an 'accident', it was even reported that he was reduced to tears because teaching was his life. However, it also raises an issue as he is a hypocrite; 'He said he had told senior staff carrying out the ‘misgender’ investigation that his private belief was that it was not wrong to call a person born a female a girl' and that he felt like he was being forced to call the pupil by his gender pronouns, because it meant that it'd interfere with the human rights.
We can also identify Personalisation here, where people are interested in people. News stories that centre on a particular person, and are presented from a human interest angle, are likely to make the front page, particularly if they involve a well-known person. Some people claim this news value has become distorted, and that news editors over-rate personality stories, especially those involving celebrities. In this case, we have a teacher, who is on the brink of getting fired, from this, the readers could perhaps take some advice from this article e.g to respect pupils and call them by their preferred gender pronouns.
Finally, we can identify Proximity, which means stories/articles that involve people from their own countries or stories that are close to people geographically. So, in this article, it is obvious that this took place in London, and it's beneficial because the people who live there will receive the most coverage out of this article, whereas people who live somewhere else, they wont get the full coverage.
In conclusion, I think that the ideology that should be considered here is respect, some people are so big on respect that, well, result to people losing their jobs due to one small mistake of not respecting something they were not aware of, such as this teacher here. The school was clearly big on respect of the LGBT - Transgender community, and so they thought they had to take drastic measures as someone's preferred gender pronouns were ignored. What I think overall is that, the school may have gone a little too far with pressing charges against the teacher because it's not what he deserves, he made one small mistake, but even though he is a hypocrite at the same time; 'although I did not intentionally refer to the pupil as a “girl”, I do not believe it is unreasonable to call someone a girl if they were born a girl.’ he should have at least deserved some small element of punishment.
An ambitious essay Neila and you clearly understand the article. You apply the news values well with some pertinent examples taken from the article. I'd have also liked to see some image analysis included. You could have made more explicit reference to theory such as Levi-Strauss on gender, and you could have considered that the Daily Mail might be presenting this story as a vehicle for indignation amongst its readers against political correctness. C (Vanessa)
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