| Abstract: |
People's speech can be misrepresented in the media in many ways, and such misrepresentation is often disputed in court. As an example of misrepresentation of speech, this paper examines an Australian court case, in which newspaper articles featuring a Christmas cruise were decided to be misleading and defamatory. By analysing the news articles, the transcripts of the witnesses’ testimonies and the judge's decision, this paper investigates how people's speech can be misrepresented in news reports. After summarising the strategies which the applicant (the cruise company) and the respondent (the newspaper) adopted in court to disprove/prove the accuracy and credibility of the reported speech in the news articles about the cruise, examples of speech presentation in one of the articles are analysed from a linguistic perspective. In identifying misrepresentation, the court attempted to reconstruct the anterior speech events and negotiate the meanings of the key expressions, which appeared in the reported speech and were expected to have occurred in the anterior speech. The court proceedings show that the accuracy and credibility of the reported speech are closely related to the factual evidence. The analyses of the court transcripts reveal how the meanings of the key expressions in the original speech events can be modified through recontextualisation of the reported speech. Misrepresentation of speech can also be a product of an interaction between the textual structure of media discourse and untruthful speech presentation. |