Woman allegedly assaulted by suspect in Eliza Fletcher case speaks out: ‘I’m angry’
A headline is key to setting up expectations for an article. It presents a thesis for what the article will be about, and the angle that the author is writing from. Authors use many tactics to persuade their intended audience, one of which being adjectives. For example, even if the piece is meant to be purely a report and not an opinion, if the author interviews someone and adds that they “slam their fist on the table” or “their face turns red as they face me”, they clearly want to depict that person as angry and possibly irrational. The details an author includes or excludes says a lot about what they want the reader to think.
The article I chose is titled “Woman allegedly assaulted by suspect in Eliza Fletcher case speaks out: ‘I’m angry’”. The article is a report of Alicia Franklin’s assault, and her anger over the fact that the police took so long to process her rape kit that Eliza Fletcher ended up being assaulted and killed by the same man that Franklin was assaulted by. It was published online on abc news on September 21st, and has five authors. Originally it was published by Good Morning America. The impression I got from this piece is that the authors don’t belong strongly to any discourse community. If anything, the discourse community they belong to is the one that many talk shows do, in which they try to grab people’s attention and write quick and easy to read articles that don’t polarize anyone. For example, they could have written about the fact that Alicia Franklin is a Black woman who wasn’t given priority by police, but Eliza Fletcher’s case was a top news story. Even in the title of this article Alicia Franklin is called “woman” whereas Eliza Fletcher is stated by name, which demonstrates that the authors felt that no one knew or cared about Alicia Franklin, but Eliza Fletcher would catch people’s attention. They also could have written about failures by the police system, especially in the cases of Black people. However, they simply stated what Franklin said about her assault, giving no further context. While not every article has to be an opinion piece or an in-depth commentary on the issues within the police system, there seemed to be some topics that they could easily have mentioned in one or two more sentences, and they chose not to. This is likely because Good Morning America isn’t a very provocative show, and they don’t want to bring up anything that will polarize part of their audience. Although they clearly didn’t want to present any distinct message, through not mentioning the issues clearly at play here, they are sending a message about what they deem as important and worth writing about.