News Discourse

The history of English news discourse is characterised by intriguing multilevel developments, and the present cannot be separated from them. For example, audience engagement is by no means an invention of the digital age. This collection highlights major topics that range from newspaper genres like sports reports, advertisements and comic strips to a variety of news practices. All contributions view news discourse in a specific historical period or across time and relate language features to their sociohistorical contexts and changing ideologies. The varying needs and expectations of the newspaper producers, writers and readers, and even news agents, are taken into account. The articles use interdisciplinary study methods and move at interfaces between sociolinguistics, journalism, semiotics, literary theory, critical discourse analysis, pragmatics and sociology.

Newspaper coverage of world events is presented as the unbiased recording of `hard facts`. In an incisive study of both the quality and the popular press, Roger Fowler challenges this perception, arguing that news is a practice, a product of the social and political world on which it reports. Writing from the perspective of critical linguistics, Fowler examines the crucial role of language in mediating reality. Starting with a general account of news values and the processes of selection and transformation which go to make up the news, Fowler goes on to consider newspaper representations of gender, power, authority and law and order. He discusses stereotyping, terms of abuse and endearment, the editorial voice and the formation of consensus. Fowler's analysis takes in some of the major news stories of the Thatcher decade - the American bombing of Libya in 1986, the salmonella-in-eggs affair, the problems of the National Health Service and the controversy of youth and contraception.

The issue of socio-economic inequality has become an increasingly important question for journalism and the academy. The 2008 economic crisis and the years of austerity which followed exasperated class and regional division and as an even greater economic shock emerges from the aftermath of the Covid 19 pandemic, the role of journalism and the wider media in the production and reproduction of inequality assumes greater importance. This edited collection includes eight chapters examining instances of where inequality is examined in the media, for example coverage of Thomas Piketty, precarity, corporate tax rates and race-, class- and gender-related issues, in order to address the following questions: Does journalism treat the issue of inequality in a satisfactory fashion? Does journalism challenge powerful interests, or does journalism play an ideological role in the reproduction of structures of inequality itself? How do increasingly poor working conditions of journalists impact on the coverage of inequality? The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Critical Discourse Studies journal.

Now reissued and retypeset, this canonical book explores the role of language and images in newspaper, radio, online and television news. The authors introduce useful frameworks for analysing language, image and the interaction between the two, and illustrate these with authentic news stories from around the English-speaking world, ranging from the Oktoberfest to environmental disasters to the killing of Osama bin Laden. This analysis persuasively illustrates how events are retold in the news and made 'newsworthy' through both language and image. This clearly written and accessible introduction to news discourse is essential reading for students, lecturers and researchers in linguistics, media and journalism studies and semiotics.

The Discourse of News Values breaks new ground in news media research in offering the first book-length treatment of the discursive construction of news values through words and images. Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple combine in-depth theoretical discussion with detailed empirical analysis to introduce their innovative analytical framework: discursive news values analysis (DNVA). DNVA allows researchers to systematically investigate how reported events are "sold" to audiences as "news" (made newsworthy) through the semiotic resources of language and image. With an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach, The Discourse of News Values analyzes authentic news discourse (both language and images) from around the English-speaking world through three new case studies: one that analyzes newsworthiness around the topic of cycling/cyclists; another that analyzes news values in images disseminated by news media organizations via Facebook; and a third that focuses on news values in "most shared" news items. Introducing readers to the possibilities of both DNVA and corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (CAMDA), The Discourse of News Values brings together corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis in a stimulating and unique book for researchers in Linguistics, Semiotics, Critical Discourse Analysis and Media/Journalism Studies.

In this timely and important study Martin Montgomery unpicks the inside workings of what must still be considered the dominant news medium: broadcast news. Drawing principally on linguistics, but multidisciplinary in its scope, The Discourse of Broadcast News demonstrates that news programmes are as much about showing as telling, as much about ordinary bystanders as about experts, and as much about personal testimony as calling politicians to account. Using close analysis of the discourse of television and radio news, the book reveals how important conventions for presenting news are changing, with significant consequences for the ways audiences understand its truthfulness. Fully illustrated with examples and including detailed examination of the high profile case of ex-BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, The Discourse of Broadcast News provides a comprehensive study which will challenge our current assumptions about the news. The Discourse of Broadcast News will be a key resource for anyone researching the news, whether they be students of language and linguistics, media studies or communication studies.

As a country in transition, Chinese news discourse has quite distinctive characteristics, and more so given the power of state media in society. With China’s engagement in world affairs and its massive Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) now in place, Western media coverage of China has dramatically increased. Against this backdrop, news dissemination and discourse demonstrate a need for academia to give perspectives with interdisciplinary approaches. Chinese News Discourse presents original research from academics in China and the West, showing theoretical, methodological and practical dimensions between news media and discourse. The book focuses on Chinese news discourse by examining what new modern features it demonstrates in contrast and comparison to news discourses in other countries in the coverage of such hot topics as the BRI or the 70th Anniversary of the Founding of the People’s Republic of China, just to name a few. This book is a useful resource for scholars and students of discourse, language, media and communication studies, as well as translation studies.

Grounding in English and Arabic News Discourse explores the discourse notion of grounding (viz. the foreground-background structure), and examines it in the various structures that occur in short news texts. A text-level approach to grounding and the differentiation between several core concepts relating to the various textual and non-textual structures, distinguish the book from other approaches in the field. A corpus-based analysis focuses on sentence-initial expressions and examines the grounding-signalling function of several markers in both English and Arabic. The analysis captures constraints on the occurrence of particular markers, and the extensive illustrative examples explain the strategies that writers employ to cope with problems of recasting grounding-values in news texts. The author also shows how the failure to signal appropriate grounding-values is likewise associated with the failure to deliver the appropriate type of text. Grounding is a relatively unexplored area of investigation in Arabic (text)linguistics, and the study identifies a series of previously unrecognized language features, highlighting the discourse pragmatic function that syntax serves. The book will be invaluable to researchers and students of discourse, pragmatics, contrastive rhetoric, and communication. It will also be of interest to all those involved in translation and intercultural studies.