Subliminal Messaging in Multimodal Newspaper Editing. The Case of the 2008 US Presidential Election on the Front Pages of the "New York Times" and the "Washington Post"

Subliminal Messaging in Multimodal Newspaper Editing The Case of the 2008 US Presidential Election on the Front Pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post Anna Bianco Abstract The front page of a newspaper generally contains what its editor considers to be the most important “news of the day”. The front page is known to be a multimodal setting for a whole series of headings, subtitles, articles, reports, news flashes, photographs and other images that are placed together in apparently random fashion. The readership knows little about this layout structure that goes much beyond a general awareness that the most important news is “carried” in a top/central position on the page with large-print headlines, whereas the less important topics are below to one side (and sometimes centrally) in a smaller type size. Specialists in news reading and writing, for their part, know that there is much more to a page and that the multimodal choice of similar topics and related structures also constitute what is known as “newsworthiness”. A few other studies have also looked at the “less important” items reported on the front page and have shown that even unrelated items are actually carriers of the same message or theme as the main items, though without the readers being consciously aware of what is going on. These “unrelated” news items or “implicit topics” are in fact non-casual subliminal messages chosen and designed by the editorial staff as an intrinsic part of the theme of the page as a whole. This paper therefore intends to explore how subliminal messaging was actually used by the New York Times and the Washington Post during last year’s US Presidential election campaign. The conclusions to be drawn about this sort of editorial manipulation and subjective reporting, especially during key ideological moments like political elections, will hopefully provide enhance our critical awareness and further debate.