Investigating Media Discourse

Taking a closer look at spoken interactions in the media, including chat shows, interviews with celebrities, political interviews and radio phone-ins, this book draws upon radio and television extracts from around the English-speaking world, including high profile interviews with Tony Blair and George W. Bush.The main theoretical framework used in the book is influenced by Erving Goffman, where the media encounter is viewed as a three-way participation framework involving the broadcaster, interviewee and audience, all of whom shape the interaction. From this viewpoint, the interactions are analyzed to illustrate how interactions are managed, how pseudo relationships are established and maintained and how 'others' are created.Bringing together the methodologies of discourse analysis, conversation analysis and corpus linguistics, this book looks at the media extracts from a variety of perspectives in a practical way. The result is a wide range of sources, looked at using an eclectic range of methodologies and leading to numerous insights that any one of the methods could not have achieved alone.

Anne O'Keeffe is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the Department of English Language and Literature, Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland