Purveying affect: Canadian newspaper coverage of the Diana Spencer and Karla Homolka chronologies

This thesis examines two major news chronologies in Canadian newspapers to see if through selective emphasis and language use they have been constructed to prompt affective response in readers. Key categories of longstanding press mechanisms to purvey affect are scrutinized within the material: creating a sense of intimacy with the news protagonist; sexualizing story content; and depicting the content as comprising scandal. Following respected Canadian broadsheets on the ostensibly contrasting stories of Diana Spencer and Karla Homolka, this work employs a discourse analysis to seek patterns of text-embedded affect prompts which correspond to press practices of some two centuries. It strives to contextualize the presence of these through the academic literature of sociology, communications theory and psychology. The effort brings into a contemporary and mainstream Canadian news media context practices more fully described in American and British press histories and associated more closely with the sensationalism of tabloid reporting.