The Language of News Media

Written by a linguist who is himself a journalist, this is a uniquely informed account of the language of the news media. Based in the frameworks of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis its concerns are with the notion of the news story, the importance of the processes which produce media language and the role of the audience.

Allan Bell has been both making and studying media language for many years. He has worked as a journalist and editor in a daily news service, weekly newspaper and monthly magazines. He has researched media language in several countries, especially New Zealand and the United Kingdom. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand combining his research there with work as a freelance journalist and media consultant.

List of Figures and Tables	p. vii
Editor's Preface	p. xi
Introduction and Acknowledgements	p. xiii
Media and Language	p. 1
Why study media language?	p. 3
Media language research and the disciplines	p. 5
Themes of the book	p. 8
Researching Media Language	p. 9
Universe and sample	p. 10
What's news: defining genres	p. 12
News outlets	p. 17
News outputs	p. 22
Pitfalls, shortcuts and the long way round	p. 25
The media react to research	p. 30
The Production of News Language	p. 33
Many hands make tight work	p. 34
Producer roles in news language	p. 36
The news assembly line	p. 44
Embedding in the news text	p. 50
Authoring and Editing the News Text	p. 56
Constructing the news text	p. 56
How news is edited	p. 66
Why edit?	p. 75
The Audience for Media Language	p. 84
Disjunction and isolation	p. 85
Multiple roles in the audience	p. 90
Audience embedding	p. 95
Communicators as audience	p. 98
Stylin' the News: Audience Design	p. 104
Style in language	p. 104
Style and audience status in the British press	p. 107
Audience design in New Zealand radio	p. 110
Editing copy for style	p. 122
Talking Strange: Referee Design in Media Language	p. 126
Taking the initiative	p. 126
The referees	p. 127
Television advertisements as referee design	p. 135
Telling Stories	p. 147
News stories and personal narratives	p. 148
News values	p. 155
News as stories	p. 161
The structure of news stories	p. 169
Make-up of the News Story	p. 175
The lead	p. 175
Headlines	p. 185
News sources and actors	p. 190
Time and place in the news	p. 198
Facts and figures	p. 202
Talking heads	p. 204
Telling It Like It Isn't	p. 212
Approaches to media miscommunication	p. 212
Misreporting: the climate change case	p. 216
Misediting international news	p. 224
(Mis)understanding the News	p. 230
Recall and comprehension	p. 231
The public misunderstand climate change	p. 238
Notes	p. 248
References	p. 254
Index	p. 269
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The Language of News Media

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Table of Contents

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