Employing emotive words in news writing is one of the most common strategies in today’s newspaper reporting. Emotive words are usually used in writings to evoke readers’ emotion on the subject. It is important for a reader to be aware of this phenomenon so they would not be easily manipulated by provoking news articles. However, in Malaysia where the news media is still being controlled strictly by regulations and ethics, are emotive words the commonly employed strategy by journalists? This study intends to discover the usage of emotive words in news reporting in Awani News. The data for this study are the ‘viral’ news articles on one of the social media, Twitter. The tweets with mass number of engagements were taken and the article from the link attached with those tweets were analysed. From the analysis, the researcher found that generally, Awani News was able to keep their objectivity in reporting the news article but not in the headlines. However, there were also some instances where the news channel used emotive words heavily in their news reporting. Out of 14 news articles analysed, there were 13 headlines that contained emotive words/phrases and 32 emotive words/phrases within the news articles. But, the employment of emotive words in the news articles is not even as there are news articles that have 9 emotive words/phrases and there are also news articles that do not contain any of them.
Emotive Language in Online News: The Case of Awani News Channel