News As Discourse

First Published in 1990. This book presents a new interdisciplinary theory of news in the press. Against the background of developments in discourse analysis it is argued that news should be studied primarily as a form of public discourse. Whereas in much mass communication research the economic social or cultural dimensions of news and news media are addressed the present study emphasizes the importance of an explicit structural analysis of news reports. Such an analysis should provide a qualitative alternative to traditional methods of content analysis. Also attention is paid to processes of news production by journalists and news comprehension by readers in terms of the social cognitions of news participants. In this way news structures can also be explicitly linked to social practices and ideologies of news making and indirectly to the institutional and macro-sociological contexts of the news media.