Public apologies and Press Evaluations

This paper is concerned with the representation of public apologies in the media and the way the apologies are framed and evaluated. Using a series of corpora from written and spoken sources, namely, the SiBol corpus comprising c.300,000,000 words of UK broadsheet newspaper texts, a corpus of White House briefings (c.1,500,000 words) a TV news corpus (c. 600,000 words) and an ad hoc search-word-generated corpus of tabloid newspapers in their online form with apology as the search term (circa 194,000 tokens). Using the CADS methodology a number of preferred patterns of representation were found which evaluate public apologies, mostly negatively, through a number of parameters: timeliness, sincerity, spontaneity and what might be called the humiliation factor