THE USE OF VIDEO MODALITY IN BBC AND CNN TOP NEWS

The article highlights the main peculiarities of the videos which are an integral part of the contemporary online news articles and offer a fertile ground for the exploration of meaning making processes. The majority of top news articles analyzed within the scope of this study make use of videos as their key structural component. News videos are designed to deliver information quickly and effectively in a short and engaging format. The main pragmatic functions of the video abstracts are to illustrate the events, to support evidence to the facts, to explain or interpret the data, to appeal emotionally, to persuade the audience, to encourage some actions, etc. From a compositional perspective the videos as texts are a combination of visual, audio and textual elements. The relations between different modalities within the videotext reveal the correspondences between the verbiage (words, phrases, sentences) and visual depictions of the information transmitted via video modality. The descriptive qualitative approach was employed to analyze the data presented hereby.