A Study on the Headlines of News Program 20:30 From The Rhetorical Point of View

The purpose of the study is to examine the figures of speech in the headlines of the news program 20:30, which is one of the most attractive and popular programs of the national media. This qualitative research conducted based on the Shamisa's rhetorical techniques division, through content analysis and purposeful sampling. For this purpose, news headlines for one month were collected, which contained about 218 news stories from 2016-12-21 to 2017-01-19. The findings indicate that in 158 news titles (75%), rhetorical figures have been used, and only 25% of them were without rhetorical figures. Metonymy (20.25%), simile (12%) and oxymoron (11.39%) of the most used and hyperbole (63%) and allusion (63%) were the least used in news stories. Other findings include the use of slang in the news program 20:30 as a rhetorical technique to empathy with the audience. Also, the figures have been used in 2.75% of news headlines had unclear semantic relationship and made the sense difficulty. In addition, the findings showed that the rhetorical figures in the headlines were used not only for informiation, but also to shape messages or directing the audiences’ perspectives.