Language and Journalism

This book is an indispensable "cutting edge" book for students and researchers of journalism studies seeking a text that illustrates and applies a range of linguistic and discourse-analytic approaches to the analysis of journalism. While the form, function and politics of the language of journalism have attracted scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines, too often this analysis has reduced the work of journalists to text-characteristics alone. In contrast, this collection is united by the principle that journalistic discourse is always socially situated and the result of a series of processes – produced by journalists in accordance with particular production techniques and in specific institutional settings – and as such, analysis requires more than the methods offered by linguists.

The contributors to this book draw on a range of the most prominent theoretical and methodological approaches to media discourse – including Conversation Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, the APPRAISAL framework, Multi-modal Analysis and Rhetoric – in making sense of the language of newspapers (national, local and minority press), television and online journalism. Written in an engaging style by distinguished academic authorities, this book provides a state-of-the-art review of the subject.

This book was published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

John E. Richardson is a lecturer in the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. His research interests include structured social inequalities, racism in journalism, readers’ letters, (critical) discourse analysis and argumentation. His most recent book is Analysing Newspapers: An approach from critical discourse analysis (2007, Palgrave).