Fest published in Great Britain 0 1955by Acoul, member cl te Hodder Headline group 438 Bustos Rood London NWI 8H © 1995 Norman Fairclough [Allright reserved, No part ofthis publcaion may be reproduced or ransm.ted La. any ie ny mena, letrocaBy ct mechanical, ncn phokoocprng, se ing orany information wore retieval jem, out either Er peralation 1 tang fom the poblisne ora cence dermiting rested c25ying In “TG ingdor such canes ave ssued by the Copyright Licensing Agency: avenhar Cour Rd. Landen Wie SHE, rts Litrary Casing i Pubition Dato ‘Acatalogue ent for ns boc aval am the Bish Libray trary of Cares Cataloging n-Pablation Data Foiniough, Nogran, 141— ‘Meda dscoursttNerman Fareloug, pat Anludes Ubliogrsphicl references (p, 206) and inde. ISBN 6-340-49002-.— IBN 0-310-6809-6 TP iMiss media end anguoge. 1 Tle pedis 193 mnB—ae0 5.17879 ar son 9340 509896 (Pb) TaN 3a 652204 (He) , 78910 98 99 00 Cl 02 Compositin by Poe Phtosetieg, Chatham Ket ‘rine ane Loe in Gre atin by Redes Boks, Towra, Wisse CONTENTS Acknowledgements Note on transcriptions 2 Media andianguage: seting an agenda Approaches to media discourse Linguisticand sociolinguistic analysis Conversation analysis Semioticaralysis Critical linguistics and social semiotics Van Dijk: the ‘social-cognitive’ model Cultural-genericanalysis Desiderata for acritical analysis of media discourse Communication in the mass media ‘The properties of mass communication ‘The economics of media‘The polities of media Practices of media text production and consumption 4. Critical analysis of media discourse Theory of discourse ‘Aralysis of communicative events ‘Analysis of the order of discourse ‘A sample critical discourse analysis 5 Intertextuaity and the News Discourse types Discourse representation in media texts Genericanalysis ot discoursetypes Analysis of discourses in texts 6. Representations in documentary and news Presencesand absences in text: presupposition Representations in clauses Combination and sequencing of clauses 7 Icentity and social relatioris in media texts ‘Medicine Now High Resolution The Oprah Winfrey Show Today 8 Crimecontch UK The Crimewatch format Genericanaiysis Voices Discourses: official and lifeworld Between eakers isindicated by a squate bracket MEDIA AND LANGUAGE: SETTING AN AGENDA Four events too< place in roughly the first half of 1994, while I was working on this book: Silvio Betlusconi’s Forza alia won the Malian gereral election, in the UK Tony Blair was elected leader of the Latour Party, between one and two million Hutu refugees fled from Rwanda into Zaire in the space of a few days, and Rupert Murdoch made a week-tcng trip to Delhi. It was generally recognized that Ferza Italia was a media creation (Berlusconi founded ‘he party in January, it won the election in March) and that Berlusconi's victory was largely the result of his control of the -talian media — he owns three television =hannels with a 40 per cent share of the audience, a atonal newspzper, and Italy's biggest publishing company. Long, before the Labour leadership contest even officially opened, most of the British media had already chosen Tony Bla r as the successor to the late John Smith, Blair’s campaign was crchestrated 3y Labour's own ‘spin doctor’ Peter Mandelson, and his attractiveness as a media personality was seen (whatever his other virtues) asa major qualifica~ tien for the job. In mid-July the civil war in Rwanda, which had received patchy coverage before, suddenly became the lead item on2 Media and language: setting an agenda television news (and in other media) fer days on end, with extensive, shocking coverage of suffering and death amongst the massive numbers of Hutu refugees. And Murdoch’s visit to Deihi was linked tohis acquisition of access lo five satellite television channels beamed at2.5 billion people in fifty countries ~ more than two-thirds of the ‘world’s population. The ecmmon there of these eventsis the power of the mass media, The power of the media to shape governments ‘and parties, to transform the suffering of the South (rooted in ex- ploitation by the North) into the entertainment of the Nerth, to beam the popular culture of Norh Amenca and westert. Europe into Indian agricultural commun ties which still depend pon bullock- pewer. The power to influence knowledge, beliefs, values, secial re ations, social identities. A signifying power (the power to repre- sent things in particular ways) which is largely a matter of how lan- ‘gage is used, but not only thal: what made Rwanda ‘good television’ fora short period in July 19% was above all the availability of high- quality film of the appalling human saffering “This book has several objectives. The firstis to set outa framework for analysing media language which readers can use for themselves io pursue their own inte-ests in mass media. | hope to persuade readers with a background in language studies of the articular fas- cinations associated with analysing media language. And | hope to persuade readers with a background in media studies of the vale of analysing mass media linguistically and in terms of discourse (I use ‘discourse’ for language use seen in a particular way, as a form of discoursal nature of the pawer of the media is one good argument for doing so. Sut | must stress that the approach to language adopted here is a novel one, which links in well with issues which have been widely taken up in recent media studies, such as -ntertextuelity, genre mixing, and identity. ‘A second objective is to argue a particular case: I hcpe to convince readers that analysis of rredia language should be recognized as an important element within research on contemporary processes of social and cultural change, a theme which is attracting growing inter- est in the social sciences. I have in mind, for instance, research on a claimed transition from ‘modern’ to ‘postmodern’ society or ‘rom ‘high modern’ to ‘late modern’ society, research on shifts in cultural values (e.g. in the direction of indiv dualism or a ‘promotional cul- ture’) and the constitution of social identities, on “detraditionali- zation’ and changes in power relations and authority relations, and so forth (see, for example, Beck 1982, Featherstone 1991, Gid:ens ‘Media and language: setting an agenda 3 1991, Lash 199C, Wernick 1991). Given the focal position of the mass reedia in contemporary social systems, there can be little argument about their relevance to the study of sociocultural change. What will beless obvious to most social scientists, and more contentious, is that analysis of the language of the mass media can make a substantive contribution to such research. I hope to establish this in this book ~ and my argument isagain dependent upon a rovel approach to lan- ‘guage analysis which rejects the arid formalismof past approaches. A third objective, as I have already implied, isto Fighlight the linguistic and discoursal aatu-e of media power. Isha be foccsing upon the language of what we might call public alfairs media — news, documentary, magazine programmes, dealing with politics, social affairs, science, and so forth. Many of my exemples are tasen from the British media ~ the press, radio and tele- vision - in the period 1992-3, and there are also some from the USA and Australia, in the course of the book I shall refer to quite a number of samples of media language, and I want to begin here with four short examples which will give readers a sense of some of the main cancerns of the 500k, and provide a basis for the more theoretical dis- cussion later in this chapter. The first is from the begirning of an edition of the BBC current affairs programme Panorama, concerned with the reprocessing in Britain of nuclear fuel from overseas (BBC, 10 August 1992). The reporter, John Taylor, is pictured facing the camera, leaning against the rail ofa launch, with the ship referred to in the text at anchor in In the coming week this ship, the Shikishimi, will put to sea to guard a deadly cargo on a dangerous voyage around tte world. ts cargo wil be plutonium, one of tke world’s mast toxie substances, and the raw mater- jalof nuclear weapons, It will herald the start of an international trade in plutonium centred around Brtish Nuclear Fual's reprocessing, plant at Sellafeld. Critcs sey each shipment could be a floating Chernobyl Tonight Parorana asks: is the plutonium business worth the risk? This extract is followed by the usual Penerama opening sequence induding the programme logo (a revolving globe) and signature tune, and a sequence of images representing nuclear risk (including the explosion cf a nuclear bomb, and someone testing for radio- activity with a Geiger counte:). Apart from the last sentence, which conteinsa question (isthe plu- fonium business worth te risk’), the extract ccnsists of declarative sen- tences — statements, (I shall use as little Ingnistic terminology as4 Media and language: setting av agenda possible, and the terms | lo use are explained as we go along.) The Fist three sentences are sta:ements about what will happen in the future. Despite the fact that future events are contingent on many things and therefore uncertain, theseare firm, categorical staterrents that is the effect of using the auxilary verb will - ard there is no {qualification or ‘hedging’ (na ‘probatly’ or ‘maybe'). These categori- fal statements are part 0: how a relationship between the reporter dnd the audience, and social identities for reporter anclaudience, are tstablished at the outset af txe programme, The reporter is projected ds a figure of authority, someone who knows (has ‘the facts’), and Someone who has the right to tell. The authoritativeness of the lan- page works together with the authoritativeness of the image ~ a well-known reporter directy addressing the audience on-camera = and of the delivery, whic! is measured, emphatic (the reporter using, jnovements of head and hands to support vocal emphasis) and seri- Gus, The audience is projected as receptive, waiting to be told, wanting to know. ‘But this is only part of thestory, for reporteriaudiene identities and relations are more complex. In addition to the knowledgeable reporter informing the interested citizen, there is an element ~ more mured in this example than the next one ~ of the media artist entertaining the viewer a¢ consumer. This s evident in certain rhetorical, attention- grabbing, features: the direct question at the end, the melapher of @ Jovi Chemaln which links reprocessing. to the nuclear atuse cébre of Shernobyl in a witty and memorable phrase, [tis also evident in the Shoice of genre: the decisior to represent the issue of the “internztional trade in plutonium’ as a narrative, a story, about a projected voyage of fan individual ship ~ no: something that has happened (as in most Stories) Eut something tha: is expected to happen. This story, with pictures of the actual ship, makes fora more dramatic and entertaining Recount than a description of the planned trade in general terms within du expository genre, wh ch might have heen selected In any representation, ou have to decide what to include and what to exclude, and wkatto ‘foreground’ and what to background’ In this case, certain dleta'ls which you might have expected to be back- grounded or excluded altogether - on the grounds that they are Commor knowledge which a Panorana audience mightbe expected to share — have been foregrounded: describing the cargo as denily and the voyage as dangers, mentioning that plutonium is one of the world’s most toxic substances and the rw material of nuclear wenpors. This detail generates a sense of alarm, underlined by the reporter's delivery which stresses the words duly, dangerous and tox‘c. Wt is Media und language: setting un agenda 5 sensationalist. it alsc helps to build up a negative, critical view of the trade early in the programme, as indeed does representing it asa trade ard a business ra:her ‘han, say, asa transfer betwen countries. Notice also that the trade is centred around the reprocessing plantat Sellafield Sbre), rather than, sey, iunolving Sellafield, or tence Sellafield anc Japan. The sentence beginning Critessay - is interesting from this point of view. Given shat the programme has apparently already joined the critics, pethaps the role of vties say isa ‘modal’ one, to mitigate and disclaim responsbbility for a damning juclgement by attributing it to unspecified athers. The indirectness ard implicitness of the critical stance towards the ‘trade’ perhaps shows tension and trade-off between the evennandedness required of the reporter n his more traditional info-mation-giving, authori- tative role, and the more sensationalist demands upon the reporter as ertertainer. Tension between the objectives of giving information ard entertaining is widespread in the contemporary media, This brief example shows how analysis of the language of media texts ~ by which I mean whatis said in broadcasts as wellas what is written in the press - can illuminate three sets of questions about media output: 1. How is the world (events, relationships, ete) represented? 2. What identities ae setup or those invalved in the programme or story (reporters, audiences, ‘third parties’ refered to or nterviewed)? 3 What ralafianshing are cot up behwane thoes involved (op reporter-audience, expert-audience or politician-auelience rela- sionships)? a met | shall refer from now on to mpresentations,idertities ane relations. A useful working assumption is that any part cf any text (from the ‘media or from elsewhere) will be simultaneously representing, set- ting up identities, ard setting up relations. : My second example comes from an edition of the ITV current affairs programme This Week entitled ‘Vigilar te!’(10 September 1992), which dealt with vigilante groups in Britain enacting their own justice where they perceive the law to be ineffective. The progremme opens, with a ‘trailer’ which gives brief versions of the vigilante stories to be ccvered, followed by the usual This Week opening visual sequence and signature tune, then the programme ttle ‘Vigilante! imposed on a still picture ofa sithouelted man carrying wha: appearsto be an axe handle. My extract comes after this. On theJeft | have given a rough representation of visual images in the extract, and on the right the language (reporter voice-over)6 Media and language: setting an ngenta IMAGES LANGUAGE Pictures of hills and valleys, [As the coalmines of South, sound of choir Wales fall silent, the blackened hills and valleys grow green again. I's a picture of peace. But in the village of Penwyn, in July, an ugly scene was played out following the violent feath of an elde-Iy spinster. When two teenage girls from the neighbourhood were charged with murder, a mob of several hundred local people converged on the houses where the parents of the accused lived. (Long pause filled with shouting.) The dead woman's complaints of harassment had apparently gone unheeded, The crowd wore enraged by reports she'd been so brutally hilied that she could only be Groups of people converge om house, shouting Crowd in front of houses gestures and shouts Missiles picked up and karaxon Minds, sours of eating identiied by her glass, ewe shoting and fingerprints. (Lang pause cheering filled with shouting.) A : shower of missiles drove the families from their homes ‘The police coul-t do nothing but help them to safety. This extract takes one step further the tendency in the earlier one for reporter and audience identities and relations :o be on the entertainer-consumer mocel. The genre is past-event narrative, and the story is told through a combination of words and what the pro- gramme identifies as a filmed reconstruction of the incident. ‘The extract, and indeed the programme as 2 whole, is on the borderline between information and entertainment, and between fact and fiction. The visual narrative of the flm, in which the crowd is played by actors, is dramatic fiction. Media and language: setting an agenda 7 ‘The images have primacy over the words in the sense that the events related happen first visually (e.g. we see a missile thrown before we hear slicwer of mssiles). (See Barthes 1977 and van Lee- uwen 1991 on variable relationships between words and images.) The linguistic account provides an interfretation of the images, identifying the people in the crowd, the house and its inhabitants, bul also shifting between narvating events and providing setting and background for them, often in the same sentence. An important part of this is providing explanations of the crowd's behaviour. There are ako epparent inconsistencies between words and images. The images show, first, groups of angry-looking people walking purposefully along shouting, then a crowd of angry people shouting and gesticulating in front of the lighted window of a house, then some of them hurling missiles at che window, and glass breaking. Responsitility for the violence is cleer and unmitigated in the film. In the linguistic account, responsbility is less clearly attributed, and is mitigated. There are just three clauses simple sen- fences) which recount the incident itself. What is interesting is both the way these a-e formulated, and the way they are posi-ioned in the aecount. The first (an ugly seere was played ox) is vague atout who did ‘what to whom, the third (A shower of missles trove the families from their hares) transforms the action of throwing missiles into an entity, a shower of missiles, end does not indicate who actually did it. Only in thececond fa mcbaf ur 808) the crowd represented as actually taking action, and then it is ‘con- verging on’ (which implies a cortirolled action that does not entirely square with the behaviour of a ‘mob’) rather than ‘altacking’ the hoase. What I'm suggesting is that the linguistic account is rather restrained in blaming the crowd. True, it''s referred to damningly as‘a mob’, but two sentences later it is referred to more neutraily as ‘the crowd’, What is significant about the positivaing of these event clauses is that they are separated by background explanatory clauses. This both slows down the story and reduces the impact of the violence; it also mitigates the actions of the crowd by framing them with a great deal of interpretative, explanatory material. ‘There is, in short, aa ambivalence in the representation here which accords, 1 think, with an ambivalence in the programme as a Whole: it does not wish -o defend unlawful violence, but it presents the vigilantes as normally decent people frustrated by the ineffectiveness of the law. The notion of ‘good television’ perhaps feours the image of frightening violence in the film, which is8 Media cnd language: setting an agenda unambivalent, but which can be partly ‘balanced!’ by mitigating lan. guage. Once again, there 's2 tension between information and enter ‘einment. My next example is from a programme in a BBC education series on engineering, calied The Works. Produced in collaboration with the Engineering Training Authority, the series was designed to ‘show engineersin a creative ligt, mainly to secondary-school pupils The programme, entitled “Stig pery When Wet (BBC2, 1 September 1992), Js concerned with liquids. “he extract comes immediately after the series opening sequence, wich is done in a ‘pop video’ style, with a fast-changing sequence of technical and scientific images accompanied by loud synthesized music. A liquid: a substance that can change its shape, but cannot be ‘expanded or compressed. These properties give liquids « special rart to play in the triumph of technology. Half the weight of this massive aireraitis liquid, mostly kerosene, butalso water, hydraulicoil, engine bil, toilets, detergents, booze, and ofcourse passengers, who are also two-thirds liquid. Isa mitacle it can fly at all. But without fluids, it wouldn't work, “he language here is preduced by an unidentified reporter in voice- over. Itisaccompanied by highly complex interlockingimages, music and sound effects which give the programme a style which is quite different from traditional forms ot television scienos. Duriny the course ofthis short extract, there areimages of: a drop of water falling in slow motion into a puddle, what appear to be blow-ups of water molecules, liquid pouring into a vat, oil pouring into a glass, part of an engine rotating at high speed, foothpaste being spread on to a jothbrush, a hand ‘painting out’ the rotating engine to reveal an aircraft taking off. At transitions between these images, they are superimposed upon one another in several cases. Most of them are accompanied by appropriate sound effects, and through most of the sequence there is music. The overall result is noisy, fast-moving, bewildering, and certainly attention-grabbing, an unusually enter- taining form of broadcast science, providing a different resolution of the information-entertainment tension from that of the last example. ‘The extract also illustrates ano:her, related, tension, between publican private: scierce and technology are part of public, institu- tional life, as indeed is the whole business of producing television programmes — but those >rogrammes are received and consumed Overwhelmingly in private contexte, in the home, within the family. Dulic ila and nrivate life involve different wavs of using language, ‘Media and language: seiting an agenda 9 and we find this tension realized in a combination. within the extract, of private and public language. The private element is actually most sinking in features of the extract which are not apparent in the tran sctiption: accert and delivery. The reporter has a Tyneside accent Thisisanaccent whichis morecommonamoag characiersin broadcast drama than amongst political, science or education broadcasters; foe ‘most people, itisassociated with privateliferather than publiclile. The e“fect here is to weaken the boundary between ‘he publicand the pri- vate, mixing the public world of science and technology with a voice from ordinary ‘ife. The defivery is also str-kingly conversational in rhythm, intonation end stress. The mixturecf publicand privateisalso evidentin the transcription. The language ir part hasa semi-technical character: Lerms like substance, properties and luis are part of scientific vocabulary, and the provision of formal definitions (like the definition ofa liquiel at the beginning) isa scientific but notan ordinary language practice. Notice, however, that thereisno specialist vocabalary which areasonably well-educated person might not understand, Bul there is a/s0 some conversational language: booze, wouldn't work, n a text, elements that are con- structed beforehand and elsewhere, This links ideology to the pres- ‘ence of other, prior texts within a text (see Chapter 5}. Ideclogies are also implicit in the naturalized ways of organizing rarticular types of interaction (e.g. the ways talking turns are organizec in interviews). To show that meanings are working ideologically it is necessary to show that they do indeed serve relations of domination in particular cases. A useful methodological principle is that the analyst should always ask of any text whether and how it is working ideologically, but expect answers to vary: ideology is more of an issue for some texts than for others. Exploring whethera rarticularimplicit proposition or aset of proposi- tions are working ideolegicaly is one issue within a general set of ques- tions that can be asked wenever one representation is selected over other available ones, or whenever identities or relations are constructed Media and language: setting an agenda 15 in one way rataer than another. The questiors are (a) what are the social origins of this option? where and who does it come from? (uhose representation is it, for instance?) {b) what motivations are there for making this choice? (c) what is the effect of this choice, including its effects (positive or negative) upon the var ous interests cof those involved? itis possible -o assess the importance of earticular representations, relations or identites for relations of domination without getting involved in questions about truth. The question of whether a taken- for-granted proposition helps produce or reproduce relations of demination is independent of judgements about its truth or falsity Nevertheless, critical analysis cannot be indifferent to questions of truth (Dews 1987, Norris 1992), whether itis a matter of how reports falsify by omitting part of what was done or said (Herman and Chomsky 1988:, ora matter of false ideologica! presuppositions. For ‘example, ifa text presupposes that women ate less intelligent than men or black people than white people, itis an important part of the analysis to point out that the ideological assumption is false Some readers may be persuaded of the case ‘or investigating, ques- tions of power and ideology and the tensions between publicand pri- vate and information and entertainment ir the mass media, but not s2e the point of doing so witha focus upon language. and particularly with a focus on whet may sem irrelevant finedetail of the language ‘ofa rather small number of texts. [tis true that analysis of language tend: > get very detailed about very few icate, Dut thai points w the need to see language analysis as one of a range of types of analysis which need to be applied together to the mass media, including com- plementary forms o* analysis which can generalize across large quan- tites of media output (e.g, forms of conten: analysis as well as forms ‘of cultural and sociological analysis). But anelysis of language has ceitain advantages over other forms of aralysis. The tensions and ‘contradictions | have referred to are manifest in the hetsrogeneity of {exlual meanings and forms. Texts provide usually temporary and short-lived ways of resolving the dilemmas into which peop!e are put by the tensions and contradictions which frame those texts. Textual analysis can give access to the detailed mechanisms through which social contradictions evolve and are lived out, and the sometimes subtle shifts they undergo. One objection that some media analysts may have to language analysis is that it pts undue emphasis on the analysis of texts. The ‘rend in media studies has been away from analysis of texts and towards analysis of reception of texts by audiences (Allen 1992,16 Mextia and language: setting an agenda Comer cial. 1990), though there are signs of a partial return towards texts (Brunsdon 1990), This wasa reaction against analyses of media texts which postulated meanings and effects, including ideological effects, without taking eny account of how texts are actually received by audiences. Media reception research has suggested that texts do not have unitary meanings, but are quite variously inter preted by different audierces and audience members, and may be quite various in their effects. { fully accept the importance of recep- tion stucies for understan-ling meanings and effec-s, But reception studies sometimes lead to a disregard for the text itself, which I do not accept. ft strikes me as self-evident that although readings may vary, any reading is a product of an interface between the properties of the text and the interpretative resources and prec:ices which the interpreter brings to beer upon the text. The range of potential inter: pretations will be constrained and delimited according to the nature of the text (Brunsdon 1990). Uf this is so, text analysis remains a central element of media analysis, though it needs to be comple- mented by analysis of text reception as well as by analysis of text production Language analysis, shen, can help anchor social and cultural research and analysis in 2 detailed understanding of the nature of media output, But only language analysis of a particalar sortis cap- able of making such a con:ribution A rather arid, farmalist analysis, of language, inabstraction from social context, still tends to dominate tianytepaetmante i linguistics That eart af sppraach eannothe the basis for effective interdisciplinary work on the media. My view is that we need to analyse media language as discourse, and the linguis- tic analysis of media should be part of the disccurse analysis of media. Linguistic analysis focuses on texts, in a broad sense: anews- paper atticle is a text, but so too isa transcription ofa radio or tele- vision programme. But discourse analysis is concerned with practices as well as texts, and wit both discourse practices and sociocultural prac- tices. By discourse practices T wat, fol instance, the ways in which texts are produced by media workers in media institutions, and the ways in which texts are received by audiences (readers, listeners, viewers}, as well as how media texts are socially distributed. There are varicus levels of sociocultural practice that may constitute parts of the context of discourse practice. {find it helpful to distinguish the ‘situational’, institutional and ‘sccietal” levels ~ the specific social goings-on that the discourse is partot, the institutional framevwork(3) that thediscourse occurs within, and the wider societal mattis of the discourse. Discourse analysis can be understood as an attempt to Media and language. setting a agenda 17 show systematic Inks between texts, ciscourse practices, and sociocultural practices. A detailed explanation of this view of discourse analysis will be found in Chapter % Let me say a litle more about what is meant by fext in this framework. A frst point is that 1am using the word as itis often used by linguists, for both spoken and written language ~a transcription of a broadcast sa text as well asa newspaper article. Second, in the case of television it makes sense to include visusl images and sound e“fects as parts of texts, and to see linguistic analysis as port of what has recently been celled ‘social semiotic’ aralysis (Hodge and Kress 1988, Kress and van Leeuwen 1999). Also, written texis in contem- porary society are increasingly becoming visual as well as linguistic tents, not only in the sense that newspapers, for instance, combine words with photographs and with maps and diagrams, but also because consicizrations of layout and visual impact are increasingly salient in the design of a written page. Third, the framework takesa ‘multifunctiona’ view oftexts, drawn from the ‘systemic’ theory of language. Halliday (1978) argues that what he calls the ‘ideational, ‘interpersonc!’ and ‘textual’ functions oF language are always simultaneously at work in any text, and even in any particular sentence or clause. This ties in with my suggestion calier that representations, relations and identities are always simal- teneously at issue in a text: the ideational function of language is its faction in generating representations of the word the inferper- ig of language in the conati- tution of relations, and of identities, (The textual fanction relates to the constitution of texts out of individual sentences - this will be discussed latern Chapter 6.) The value of sucha view of texts is that it makes it easier to connect the analysis of language with funda- mental concerns of social analysis: questians of knowledge, belief and ideology (representations the ideational function), questions of social relationships and power, and questions of identily (relations and identities ~ the interpersonal functior). Represemiations are a long-standing concern in debates about ‘sias, manipulation, and ideology in the media, but identities and relations have received less tion, The wicler social impact of media is not just todo with how they selectively represent the world, though that is a vitally impor- tent issue; it is.also to lo with what sorts of social identities, what versions of ‘sell, they project and what cultural values (be it con: stumerism, individualism ore cuit of personality) these entail. And it ist do with how social relationships are defined, especially social Fehtionships between the mass af the population who constitute18 Medin aud language: seting ars agenda audiences for the most pofular media output and people like politi cians, scientists, church leaders, and broadcasters themselves. Another and related strength of a systemic view of text is that it sees textsas sets of options. A text selects particular aptions from the systems of options ~ the povential - vailable. On one level, these are selections amongst avai able language forms, from the lexical anc grammat cal potential: one word rather than another, or one gram- matical construction rather than another (e.g, a passive rather than an active sentence, or a ceciarative rather than an interrogative or an imperative sentence - se2 Quirk et al. 1972). But these formal choices constitute choices of mean ng, the selection of options from within the meaning potential - how to representa pasticulareventor state of affairs, how to relate to whoever the lextis directed at. what identities to project. And these chcices are in turn linked to choices at a different level: what genres to draw upon in producing (or inter- preting) atext, what discouses to use (see below). Sucha view of text encourages analysts to be sensitive to absences from the text ~ the choices that were not made but might have been —as well as pres- encesin i as well as to weigh presences against possible alternatives e.g, howelse might this have been put?). One shoul-inot, however, be misled by the language of ‘choices’ and ‘options’; this is a framework for analysing, tre variability of language and its social determinants and effects, and self-conscious linguistic choice is 9 relatively marginal aspect of the social processes of text production and interoretation Tohiould alsu mention ere an important aspect o- the analysis of ‘discourse practice’ in the ramework for discourse analysis ske:ched out above: interlexiual analysis, This will be explained in Chapter 4 The term discourse is wicely and sometimes confsingly used in various disciplines (Fairclough 1992a, Foucault 1978, van Dijk 1985). {tis helpful to distinguish fwo main senses, One is p-ectominant in Language studies: discourse as social action and interaction, people interacting together in real social situations. The other is pre- dominant in post-structuralist social theory (e.g. i the work of Foucault: 2 discourse a5 a social construction of reaity, a form of knowledge. My use of the lerm ‘discourse’ subsumes both of these, and indeed sets out to bring them together. The first sense is most closely associated with the interpersonal function 0: language, and with the concept of genre (see Chapter 5, pages 85 7). The second sense is most closely assocated with the ideational function of lan- guage, ard with discourses notice that in addition to being used as an abstract noun for this general view of language in social use, Media ad language: setting anagenda 19 discourse is used as a count noun (@ discourse, several discourses) as a category (alongside ‘genre’) within the intertexcual analysis of texts (see Chapter 5). In the discou-se perspective on media language which I have sketched out above, the analysis of texts is not treated in isolation from the analysis of discourse practices and sociocultural practices. However, since this book is about media language, the jocus will be on texts rather than practices. Also, the focus will be on linguistic aspects of texts, rather than other semiotic aspects such as visual images in telev sion, 1 shall, however, be alluding throughout, though selectively, to the inte-connection between the texts that are in focus and other dimensions of the framework Chapters 2 to 7 will present a view of media discourse and a framework for analysing it, and Chapters 8 and 9 will deal with case- studies of particular types of media discours2. Chapter 2will review some of the mos: important previous work cn media discourse, and provide a set of desiderata for a satistactory critical analysis of the subject, Chapte-s 3 and 4 sketch out a social theory of media iscourse, with an account of communication in the mass media in chapter 3, and a description of the critical discourse analysis, framework which I use in the book in Chapter 4, Chapier 5 is con- cemmed with inte-textual analysis of media texts, understzod both in temis of how media texts transform and embed within themselves other texts, and in terms of how they draw upon ard combine together available discourses and genres. Chapters 6 and7 deal with the linguistic analysis of media texts, with Chapter 6 focusing upon representational aspects of texts, and Chapter 7 focusing upon aspects of texts that have to de with relations and identities. Chapter Bisa case study of one television programme, Crimewatch UK, and Chapter 9 is a study of political discourse in the media,APPROACHES TO MEDIA DISCOURSE ‘My rain objective in this chapter is to give a selective account of pre- vious work Uimedia discourse. Let me emphasize that this will cover orly one part of the literature I shall be drawing upon in this book: I shall also be using material irom medie studies, social theory, and elsewhere. Nor will the chapterattempt an exhaustive account of the media discousse literature; I shall focus upon work wich | have founc particularly fruitful in developing my own analytical framework. I ciscuss the following approaches in turn: linguisticand. sociolinguistic analysis, conversation analysis, semiotic analysis, critical linguistics and social semiotics, social-cognitive analysis, and cuctural-generic analysis. Separating the approaches in this way is helpful for presentational purposes, but n fact there isa great dealof crass-fertilization between them, and many analysts combine them (In describing these approaches, I shall sometimes use terms which are not fully explained until Chapter 4. If these are unfamilizr, reeders may find it helpful to return tc parts of this chapter after reading Chapter.) The chapter concludes with a set of desiderata for an adequate critical discourse aralysis of media discourse, compiled Conversation analysis 21 on the basis of the review of approaches, which sets the scene for the preseniation in Chapter 4 of the framework I shall use in the rest of the book. Linguistie and sociolinguistic analysis Ways in which language is used in the medi may be of interest to linguists for their cwn sake, as evidence, for insiance, of particular types of grammatical st-ucture cr particular intonation patterns, For exampe, newspapzr headlines rave distinctive syntactic properties which make them z grammatica oddity, and have long attracted the attention of linguists (Mardh 1980, Straumann 1935). Media language has also been analysed sociolinguistically, notasly by Bell (1991), Bell's work is unusual in that he is a practising journalist as well as a sociolinguist. A number of the studies he has carned out use linguis- ticand sociolinguistic analysis in ways which illuminate the sociocul- tural analysis of news media, and I shall refer to them again in Chapter 3. But cuch of his work is tysical of ‘variationist” sociolinguistics in focusing upon correlations between variable linguistic features and variable aspects of social context. In Bell (19843, for example, he shows how the degree to which word-final- conscrant clusters are simplified in the language of radie reporters (giving, for instane2, Wes’ Coas' soa! as a pronuncation of West Coast coal) veries between dif‘erent New Zealand radio stations according tothe main occupational profilesof their audiences (whether they are mainly manual, skilled, office or professional workers), The strength of this work is its attention tc linguistic detail, to the form and “exture’ of texts. (Ise the term ‘texture’ to refer broadly tothe ‘form’ as op>osed to the ‘sontant’ of texts ~ see Fairclough 1992.) But this element in Bell's work operates with a rather narrow conception of © yocial aspects of rredia, and does not attempt to show systematic linkages between language and sociocultural context - Conversation analysis ‘Conversation analysis has been developed by a group of sociologists - know as ‘ethnomethocologists’. Ethnomelnacology is an inter- Dreta-ive approach to sociology which focuses upon everyday life as 4 skilled accomplishment, and upon ‘methods’ which peosle use for Producing it (Garfinkel 1967). Some ethnorrethodologists take a22, Appmaches to media discourse Particular interest in cor versation and methods tha: people use for Producing and interpretingit (Atkinson and Heritage 1984). Conver- sation analysts have coricentrated mainly upon informal conversa- tion between equals (e.g. telephone conversation}, though more recent work has given attention to institutional types of discourse (Button and Lee 1987), incliding media discourse. To illustrate the approach, | refer to studies of media interview ‘carried ovt by Heritage (1983), Greathatch (1986) and =tutchby (1991). Heritage focuses upon the ‘formulations’ used by interviewers in the course of news interviews. This is oe of his examples: wr: Would you be happy tosee Prince Charles become King of Wales? aw: Well I couldn’ I~ you krow J just couldn't care tupperice who ‘comes King and who do'tlike (0.5) iNT: You don’t think itrakes any difference to you ‘A formulation (such as the interviewer's second contribution here) is a widely used device interviewers use to summarize what inter- viewees have said. Formulations typically stress certain aspects of what has deen said rather than others, and often elaborate what has been saicl by drawing out its implications. That happens here: the interviewee didn’t say that it made ro difference to him, but he did arguably imply it. Heritage sees formulation as a technical device which interviewers use to manage interviews within the constraints under which they are forced to operate. One constreint is the ores- ence of a listening audier.ce: formulations ave a way uf ensuring the audience is constantly kept in the picture by clarifying what inter viewees say, drawing out implications, etc. Another is the require- ment on interviewers to maintain a ‘stance of formal neutrality’: atternative formulations provide a covert means of eveluating what is said, making things easier or more dificult for interviewees, pushing the direction of the interview one way rather than another Heritage's view of properties of news interviews emphasizes technical solutions to instit. tional problems. This is a valuable per- spective because it showshow discursive practices are rooted in insti- tutional structures and practices (one could fruitfully extend this ‘tack’ to the political economies of institutions ~see Chepter 3). But it isnot adequate on its own: to make sense of contemporery interview- ing practices, one needs to recognize how they are shaped by, and help shape, wider social and cultural shifts. Heritage emphasizes the normative side of news interviews, what news interviews have in common - their ‘tacit ground rules’. But news intetviewr is not a uni- tary gente: there is considerable, culturally patterned, variation not Conversation analysis 23 only historically (2953 interviews were generclly very different from 1993 interviews) but also in contemporary broadzasting, depending, upen the mediurs, type of programme, and particular style of the interviewer. Greatbatch (1986) gives limited recognition to this vari~ ability. One of the ground rules of interviewing, rormatively, is that interviewees should confine themselves to answering questions, but as he points out they con't always da so: sometimes they answer the question and then introduce topics of their own, sometimes they introduce topics of their own first and then answer the question, sometimes they don’t answer the question at all. One of Greatbatch’s examples is: tyr: D'you quite lke him? iu: Well er l- think in politics you sve: i it’s avta question of going about liking peoole or no:t, it’s question of deafing with people. ‘And e:r I've always been able to deal perfectly well with Mister Wilson and er ~ indeed he has with me. ‘The interviewee (ext) does not answer the interviewer's question, but ins by denying its relevance, says what he thinks the relevant ques- Web, and lke abcut tha. However, Cena considers such examples as violations of the cule that interviewees should confine © themselves to answering questions: what he is interested in is when interviewers sanction stich violations, and when they tolerate them, Whet this violational view misses is that some types of news interview are now /ouiiuely seen as vecasivns where interviewees talk about thee ‘own topics, subject to the weaker requirement that they at east coher enfly link them to the interviewer's questiors. This is not violative ‘behaviour but part of aculturally significant shift ingenre whose further rarvfications have bees analysed by Tolson (1991 -see the dscussion of his work in the section on cultural-generic analysis below). © Conversation analysis actually shares with linguistic and socio- linguistic analysis strengths in the detailed description of organ- izational properties of media language. It hasextended th resources 1 of descriptive linguistics through its analysis of the organization of 5 interaction (turn-taking, topiccontrol, formulation, etc.), though at “the same time it ignores many of the features which a linguistic ~ description would attend to. The focus is very much upo relational “aspects of conversation ~ the achievement of interaction - and ques- “fans of representation and associated linguistic features are given “» telatively little attention. It is also resistant -o linking, properties of talk with higher-level features of society and culture — relations of Peveer, ideologies, cultural values.24 Approaches to media discourse ‘Semiotic analysis By contrast, semiotic analysis does treat analysis of texts asa key component of cultural anélysis of media, [ refer specifically here to Hartley's important stusly of news discourse (Hartley 1982, see also Fiske and Hartley 1978). Hartley's focus is upon the semio! and conventions which urderlie both linguistic and visual aspects of news stories. Analysis of visual codes attends to different modes of presentation on televis or ~ the ‘talking head’ (newsreader >r cor- respondent looking directly at the camera), use of graphics and still photographs, various types of ‘actuality’ or film “eport (film with voice-over, the ‘stake-out’ with the reporter ta king directly to camera, the ‘vox pop’ with a member of the public talking to an unseen reporter) — as well as the framing of pictures, camera movements (pans and zooms) ard the sequencing of shots. The assumption is that chaices among options availazle within visual codes ~ including technical options relating to the camera-work ~ carry social meanings (see also Tuchman 1978). Hartley analyses a range of language-related cedes and conven- tions, including categorizction of storiesinto.a smal number of major topics, the effect of news values (as an ‘ideologizal code’) on the treatmertof topics, the assumption of consensusanc the handling of dissent, audience address ~ the operation of broadzasters as ‘media- tors’ who translate news into the common-sense terms of audiences, use ol aconversationai-cornmunicctive style, the stcucturing of ness slories. A focus typical of semiotic analysis is upon ideologically potent categories and classifications which are imp icit in news texts, and upon alternative or competing categories which are absent, ‘suppressed’, For instance, it is a common observation that news stories are personalized: the category of individual persorality is widely evoked in news siories, whereas the category of social (and especially class) subject 's correspondingly supp-essed. Or again, many oppositions which appear on the surface of a text— for instance between government and unions, management and strikers, western allies and foreign dictators ~ can be assimilated to an under lying opposition betweer ‘us’ andl ‘them’ (One very important achievement of this work is establishing that analysis of textsis a significant partof socioculturalanalysis of media, by linking properties cf texts to ideologies, power relations and cuk tural values. This general objective is taken up in critical approaches to linguistics and discourse analysis, which operate however with a linguistically grounded conception of text. An obvious limitation of Critical linguistics and social semiotics 25 semiotic analysis in comparicon with the linguistically oriented approaches (linguistic, sociolinguistic, critical linguistic, social- cognitive and culcural-generic analysis) is that it Soes not systemati- cally attend to detailed properties of the texture of texts Critical linguistics and social semiotics ‘Critical linguistics’ is a type of discourse analysis which was developed by a group based at the University of East Anglia in the {1970s (Fowler et al. 1979, Hodge and Kress 1979), Media discourse is one of its main concerns (Fowler 1991, T-ew 1979, 19796). Critical linguistics is based upon ‘systemic’ linguistic theory (Flali- day 1978, 1985). :t brings to analysis of media dscourse systemicist views of the lext already introcluced in Chapte: 1: the view of the text as multifunctioral, always simultanecusly representing the ‘word (ideational function) and enacting socal relations and identi- ties (interpersonal function); seeing texts es built out of choices from within available systems of options in vocabulary, grammar, and so forth. Discourse is seen as ’a field of bath ideological pro- cesses and linguistic processes, and... there isa deterininate rela- tion between these two kinds of process’ (Trew 1979b); specifically, the linguistic choices that are made in texts can carry ideological meaning, Some of the most revealing analyses concern representation and the ideational function, how events and the people and objects involved in therr. are represented in the gracimar of clauses (simple -seniences). The basi: premiss is that coding events ia language ‘entails choices among the medels ~ the dis-inct process and parti- tipent types - which the grammar makes avaiable, and that such choices are potential'y ideologically significant. For example, on a BEC Radio 4 Today programme (11 March 1993) the following "comment was made about ‘cheap’ Russian ‘ish being ‘dumped’ on ‘the British market: ‘the funny thing is it’s not transferring itself to “the consumer at terribly low prices at all’. This might have been © worded as, for instance, ‘the dealers involved in the distribution of the fish are overcharging the consumer’, cadirg the pricing of the “fish as an acticn process with a responsible agent (the dealers) Instead, we have the distribvtion of the fish coded with an action _ process verb (trinsfer) used reflexively, and the process of pricing is __Hansformed into a state (at rerribly low prices) Responsibility ancl26 Approaches to media d’scourse agency are elided. If there were a systematic tendency in news reports for such choices of process and participant types to leave agency and responsizility unspecified in this way, one might (depending upon the wider sociocultural context) see those choices as having ideological meaning. See Chapter 6, pages 109-16 for more detail. 1 suggested that in the above example pricing was transformed from a process into a stat2, This sort of transformation is a ‘naminal- ization’, changing a process into a nominal (ie. nourlike) entity. ‘Another type of transformation is the shift of an active sentence into a passive (e.g. from they are dumping fisk on the market to fish is being dumped on the market). The argument is that transformations such as nomindlization and shifiing into the passive may be ideolbgically motivated. For example, both allow the actor, the responsible agent, tobe omitted and, as have just suggested, systematc elision ar back- grounding of agency may be an ideologically significant feature of texts. Trew (1979a, 1979b) has done some particularly fruitful work on “discourse in progress’ in newspapers - the transformation of mates jal from news agencies and other sources into news reports, and the transformations a story undergoes from one repo:t to another, or from reports to in-depth analyses to editorials, overa period time. He refers to the coverage af police shootings in Zimbabwe in 1975 in ‘The Times. The headline of the first report (RIOTING BLACKS SHOT Di SLICE AS ANC LEADERS MEET) idetilies the police as agentbutin an informationally de-emphasized position in the middle of the headline, wher2as the ‘rioting’ of those shot is foregrounded (being placed at the beginning) RIOTING ELACKS SHOT DEAD BY POLICE AS ‘ANC LEADERS MEET Eleven Africans were shot dead and 15 wounded when Rhodesian. police opened fire on a crowd of ebout 2,000 in the African Highfield towrship of Salisbury this afternoon, (Trew 1979a: 94) In the lead (first) pare graph, an agentless passive is used (were shot dead and agents of opened fire on « rioting crowd, rather tha as the ones who shot dead the people In an editorial, the event is transformed into The rioting and sad loss of life in Salisbury for whick ‘factionalism’ is said to be responsible - the police as responsible agent is elided. These are part of a mere complexsseries of transformations over time _ wounded}, end the folice are explicitly present only a5: Critical linguistics and social semiotics 27 which background police responsibility, and which are ideological a well as linguistic processes: they assimilate problematic events to preconstructed ideolcgical frames for representing political relations in southern Africa. The linguistic processes involve rewordings as well as grammatical changes ~ notice loss of life replacing shot dead. Such ideological linguistic processes are also orocesses ofstruggle, in ‘which choosing lo represent an event in one way may also be refus- ing orepresenti:in other currently available ways. For further devel- opment of this concept of transformation, see Hodge and Kress (1979, 1988, 1992). See also the discussion of transformations of texts across ‘intertextual chains’ of discursive practices in Fairclough (1592). Critical linguistics emphasizes the role of vocabulary choices in processes of categorization. For example, a szudy of gender discrimi- fation in media reporting might consider how differences in the vocabulary used to refer to women and men assimilates people to pre-existing categorization systems of an ideologically powerful sort. ‘Arewomen, for instance, systematically represented in terms of their family roles (as ‘wives’ or ‘mothers’) or in terms of their sexual inter- est to men? It is fruitful to combine such questions with analysis of process and participant types: what sorts of participants in what sorts of processes do women/men predominantly function a5 ~ for instance, are bo:h ecually likely to function as actors in action pro- cesses? and where they do function as actors, what perticular cat- egeties of pro ( stance, $f sereaming, ox debating and veting?). See Fowler 1991 chapter 6 for an -anclysis along these lines. ~ “Aclause which coces an event (ideationally) in terms ofa particular type of process will aso assess (interpersonally) the truth or probabil- ity of the proposition so encoded, and the relationship between pro- ducer and addressee(s). The concept of ‘modality’ is used in a very general way to cove: features of texts which ‘express speakers’ and writers’ attitudes towards theiiselves, towards their interlocutors, and towards their subject-matter’ (Fowler et a. 1979: 200). Choices of ‘pronouns, mocal auxiliaries, speech acts, and many others, are included within modality. The limitations ‘of critical linguistics have been quite widely "discussed, ever, by those involved and their sympathizers (Fowler BW, Kress 1989, Richardson 1987), In terms of the text-practice distinction | introduced in Chapter 1, the focus is upon text and (especially in the case of Trews) productive practices, but texts tend to __ be interpreted by the analyst without reference to the interpretative