
Newspaper Headline Language: Burnley say sorry over plane shame
This headline is taken from the Times newspaper (June 23rd 2020) and reports on the story about a plane that flew over Manchester City’s ground on Monday night against Burnley with a sign (or banner) that showed the phrase ‘White Lives Matter Burnley’. The message clearly was a disrespectful response to the Black Lives Matter campaign and the club immediately distanced itself from the banner, while their captain, Ben Mee, in his post-match interview was very clear in his condemnation of the incident.
There are some typical features from a headline employed in this example. First of all, there are no articles used in the headline (‘…over the plane shame’), while there is some form of assonance which is when words have similar sounds with their vowels such as in the example, ‘plane shame’. It is fairly clear that the newspaper also disagrees with the incident as it uses a strong word ‘shame’ to describe what happened.
Vocabulary
a disrespectful response: lacking respect; being impolite
distanced itself: To show that they do not agree with the idea
condemnation: To strongly disagree with something
assonance: When similar sounds occur in different words (similar sounding vowel sounds for example)