On the 3rd February 1998, a US fighter plane cut through the cable of a ski lift in the Italian Alps. The result of this was the death of 20 people, 10 men, 9 women and one child. The tragic event was widely reported in the press.
I will compare two different articles, one from The Mirror, and one form The Times. The mirror is a tabloid, and The Times in a broadsheet.
The main differences between a tabloid and a broadsheet are that in a tabloid the news is a summarisation of the event it covers where as in a broadsheet the article goes into indebt information about the story. Each report gives the reader facts about the event. In the Mirror we learn that prior to the accident a couple had their luck by missing that cart, Neil Harmar and girlfriend Stacey O'Donnell commented 'Thank God we did' when told that they would have been among the dead if they had caught the cart.
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3 view drawing of an EA-6B used for recognition
Insignia of ,In The Times report we are given much more information, which is what we would expect from a broadsheet. We were told that Official said that the cable car, which can hold 40 people, had been taking the skiers-most of them German- up the 6,000ft mountain when the disaster happened at 3:25 pm. 'If it had happened in the morning the car would have been packed and the dearth toll would have been even higher' one said.
The language used in each report is quite different and each report has a different effect on the reader.
In The Mirror the following words were used to describe how the victims died: 'Plunged 300 ft to their deaths', 'smashed through the roof', 'left dangling perilously', 'screamed down the valley'. These words are all cleverly used...