Language in the News

Acknowledgements Xl 1 Introduction: the importance of language in the news 1 2 The social construction of news 10 Bias or representation 10 News values 12 Stereotypes 17 Social and economic Jactors in news selection 19 3 Language and representation 25 The linguistic background 26 Anthropological linguistics: language, culture and thought 28 Functional linguistics, variation, social semiotic 32 Social semiotic in news discourse: an example 38 Discourse and the reader 41 4 Conversation and consensus 46 The 'public idiom' and the Jormation oj consensus 46 Consensus and contradiction 48 Categorization and conversation 54 Oral models in the Press 59 5 Analytic tools: critical linguistics 66 Linguistic tools 68 Transitivity 70 Some syntactic transformations oj the clause 76 Lexical structure 80 Interpersonal elements: modality 85 Interpersonal elements: speech acts 87 Copyrighted Material x Contents 6 Discrimination in discourse: gender and power 91 Personalization 91 Discrimination 93 Discrimination and power 105 7 Terms of abuse and of endearment 110 Rambo and the mad dog 112 Postscript 119 8 Attitudes to power 120 Ideological roles of the Press 120 The dominance of the status quo: hospital patients as powerless 124 ~w~o. 1~ 9 A Press scare: the salmonella-in-eggs affair 146 Press hysteria 146 Participants 151 Chronology 153 Some aspects of hysterical style 160 10 The salmonella-in-eggs affair: Pandora's box 170 What am I? 170 Pandora's box: generating and equating new instances 174 'What am P' revisited 178 Closing Pandora's box: what are you going to do about ~? 181 Blame the housewife 186 The persistence of paradigms 202 11 Leading the people: editorial authority 208 12 Conclusion: prospects for critical news analysis 222 Notes 235 Index