A Cross-Cultural Discursive Approach to News Values in the Press in the US, the UK and Italy: The Case of the Supreme Court Ruling on Same-Sex Marriage

On June 26, 2015, the US Supreme Court ruled on the Obergefell v. Hodges case that led to the recognition of same-sex marriage in all fifty States, declaring it a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment. The event received huge media coverage and soon became a major topic of animated discussions on digital media platforms. In this context, our investigation will focus on the cross-cultural representation of the main actors and events concerning the US Supreme Court ruling in leading US, UK, and Italian online newspapers. In line with Bednarek and Caple’s (2012a, 2012b) approach to the analysis of media discourse, our analysis focuses on the discursive construction of newsworthiness (Bell 1991; Bednarek and Caple 2012a, 2012b, 2014, 2017; Caple and Bednarek 2016; Bednarek 2016a, 2016b) in the textual elements of the selected news stories. Our findings have confirmed Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke and Roberts’ (1978) claim on the cultural nature of news values, the analysis of which can be seen as a suitable instrument to draw a cultural ‘map’ of the social world. Indeed, our investigation has identified how different cultures tend to highlight different sets of news values in reporting a news story that has cross-culturally impacted on the different value systems of the countries represented in our corpus.