The News Values of the Bild Front Page

The Bild is a highly controversial German newspaper. Being controversial potentially has an effect on the news values. That’s why I want to analyze the news values of its front page.

Opening the Bild homepage, the first feed is about a girl who lost her parents at the Berlin attacks. Including the LKA gives the article a reference to police, thus state, appearing to be critical of institutions. This story fits into the news value of continuity as these news are a consequence of the losses of family members in Amri’s attack. Moreover, the story is highly personalized and meaningful as the attacks were directed against the German culture, thus having an immense cultural proximity. Also the picture chosen by the Bild shows the family being happily together which makes the reader even more emotional and shocked about the story. On the other side of the picture a mug-shot of the offender can be seen. The guy who is the reason why these family portraits can never be taken again. A composition of pictures which, understandably, leaves the reader at a high emotional state of grief, anger, and pity. Looking at the article itself, the Bild plays with the created personalization, saying that the daughter even got a bill from the hospital to look at the corpuses of her parents, thus creating an ambiguity within the reader between institutionalized bureaucratic behavior and the feeling they have build up right from the beginning. This causes anger and a lack of understanding in the addressee.

Looking at the time of editing the story, it is striking that there is a time span between the event taking place and the publishing of the story. This offers the Bild time to look for these tragic stories which warm up the reader’s emotions felt after the attack.

The Bild directly shows with its first news feed that its main news value is personalization. Focusing rather on feelings than facts, it is in my opinion correctly called controversial.