Language Of News Media, The

Description:
Written by a linguist who is himself a journalist, this is a uniquely informed account of the language of the news media.In Western countries we hear more language from the media than we do directly from others in conversation, and within the media, news is the primary language genre. The aim of this book is to explore this influential language, to ask what the patterns of media discourse tell us about wider linguistic issues and what they also reveal about news and the media.Allan Bell emphasizes the importance of the processes which produce media language, as stories are moulded and modified by various hands. He stresses it is indeed stories that journalists and editors produce, not articles. These stories have viewpoint, values and structure that can be analysed. He is concerned too with the role of the audience in influencing media language styles, and in understanding, forgetting or misconceiving the news presented to it.Based in the frameworks of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis, this book draws together a growing research literature and informs it with the author's own immediate observations and experience as both journalist and researcher.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures and Tables. Editor's Preface. Introduction and Acknowledgements. 1. Media and Language. 1.1. Why Study Media Language? 1.2. Media Language Research and the disciplines. 1.3. Themes of the book. 2. Researching Media Language. 2.1. Universe and sample. 2.2. What's news: defining genres. 2.3. News outlets. 2.4. News outputs. 2.5. Pitfalls, shortcuts and the wrong way round. 2.6. The media react to research. 3. The Production of News Language. 3.1. Many hands make tight work. 3.2. Producer roles in news language. 3.3. The news assembly line. 3.4. Embedding in the news text. 4. Authoring and Editing the News Text. 4.1. Constructing the news text. 4.2. How news is edited. 4.3. Why edit? 5. The Audience for Media Language. 5.1. Disjunction and isolation. 5.2. Multiple roles in the audience. 5.3. Audience embedding. 5.4. Communications as audience. 6. Stylin' the News: Audience Design. 6.1. Style in language. 6.2. Style and audience status in the British press. 6.3. Audience design in New Zealand radio. 6.4. Editing copy for style. 7. Talking Strange: Referee Design in Media Language. 7.1. Taking the initiative. 7.2. The referees. 7.3. Television advertisements as referee design. 8. Telling Stories. 8.1. News stories and personal narratives. 8.2. News values. 8.3. News as stories. 8.4. The structure of news stories. 9. Makeup of the News Story. 9.1. The lead. 9.2. Headlines. 9.3. News stories and actors. 9.4. Time and place in the news. 9.5. Facts and figures. 9.6. Talking heads. 10. Telling It Like It Isn't. 10.1. Approaches to media miscommunication. 10.2. Misreporting: the climate case change. 10.3. Misediting international news. 11. (Mis)understanding the News. 11.1. Recall and comprehension. 11.2. The public misunderstand climate change. Notes. References. Index.