“My God, it’s like New York all over again”
It is more vague than the other article but from the fact that it is a quotation you can understand that someone is comparing the incident to September 11th. By comparing it to something as huge as 9/11 it creates a panic in the reader that makes you read on.
The photographs in the ‘Daily Express’ take up the bulk of it, a style typical of a tabloid article. There are two photos. One photo is a long distance shot of the Pirelli Tower and the other is of people running amongst debris. The photos are in black and white but the faces of the people stand out against the dark background. From the caption, we learn that the people in the photos are fire fighters and plain-clothes officers. The caption reads:
“DEVASTATION: Fire fighters and plain clothes police officers race to the area after impact yesterday”
Writing the word devastation in capital letters draws attention to it. It also dramatises the photographs. There is one photograph, which takes up about a third of the article in ‘The Times’. It is a close up of the part of the Pirelli Tower that was hit by the plane. The caption says of the photo:
“The gaping hole left in Milan’s Pirelli Tower after a single-engined plane crashed into it”.
The caption from the broadsheet is a lot more informative than the caption in the tabloid. ‘The Times’ caption isn’t attempting to over-dramatise the photograph, it just states the facts of the photo.
The point of the ‘Daily Express’ article is to put the incident across in a dramatic way. The present tense of the writing, the sense of action in the photographs and short ideas in the text are all typical of a tabloid. The broadsheet has a factual photograph, longer ideas in the text, and more political information.
The ‘Daily Express’ article uses simple language. It uses a lot of verbs, for example ‘plane smashed’ and ‘smoke billowed’, to panic people. It also keeps referring to September 11th in more attempts to panic the reader. It uses a clever technique of building up tension and panic in the reader then, in the second to last paragraph it comes to an anticlimax. After the article has told all about terror threats and people jumping from windows and explosions, they tell you that the whole thing was a terrible accident. In the article they interview civilians, trying to make the reader sympathise with those involved, it reads:
“Terrified eye-witness Persivale Matteo said last night ‘Everybody feared it was another terrorist attack’”.
The quote reinforces the terrorism aspect and calling the man ‘terrified’ reinforces the sense of panic. This article uses more opinion than fact. Over a third of the writing is the opinion of passers-by.
The language in ‘The Times’ article is a lot more sophisticated. It has more writing than the ‘daily Express’ and talks in a lot more detail about the political repercussions of the events in Milan.
“the Italian prime minister convened an emergency defence and security meeting”
“The New York and Frankfurt stock markets dropped sharply”
‘The Times’ presents the report in a less dramatic way. Focusing instead on the factual events. This way of presenting the information is typical of a broadsheet. The sentences are mostly complex, unlike the ‘Daily Express’ article, which uses mostly simple sentences. There is only one person interviewed for this article and it is a police officer, who says:
“The pilot of the Rockwell had sent out a distress call at 17:50, just before the crash”
Interviewing someone like a police officer means that they gat a factual view rather than opinion, and this echoes throughout the article.
I think that ‘The Times’ article reports the article best from the point of view that it gives a clear factual report of the event. However, I think that the language and techniques used in the ‘Daily Express’ article are much cleverer. They use dramatic language and over-zealous opinions to build tension; it also uses present tense to create a sense of urgency. The over-dramatic style and bulk of photos are typical of a tabloid newspaper.
