Appraisal as co-selection and media performativity: 5G technology imaged in German news discourse

Abstract This article views appraisal as co-selection patterns of target, source and evaluative parameters and investigates the ways in which news discourse retells news stories and reproduces truthful reality. We combined the corpus-assisted method and quantitative/qualitative analysis of the data, i.e., 904 sentences which were extracted from the corpus of German 5G news reports by selecting the top 5 items from each of the noun keywords lists of the three subcorpora of economics, politics and technology news reports. It was found that the German media restage the necessity and desirability to promote the development of German communication facilities/technology through international cooperation, particularly Germany-Sino cooperation. In addition, a hesitant image was evoked as to the high-profile 5G development in Germany with an awareness of the potential security risks and economic losses. On the intersubjective dimension, our findings suggest that journalists make full exploitation of different dialogistic positioning strategies for closing down or opening up the dialogic space to a greater or lesser degree. More specifically, they tend to acknowledge and endorse the positive/negative attitudes attributed to the non-authorial voices towards particular targets in the fields of economics, politics or technology. A future comparison with the genre of news comments or editorials would deepen our understanding of the performativity of media.