Newspaper coverage of world events is presented as the unbiased recording of `hard facts`. In an incisive study of both the quality and the popular press, Roger Fowler challenges this perception, arguing that news is a practice, a product of the social and political world on which it reports. Writing from the perspective of critical linguistics, Fowler examines the crucial role of language in mediating reality. Starting with a general account of news values and the processes of selection and transformation which go to make up the news, Fowler goes on to consider newspaper representations of gender, power, authority and law and order. He discusses stereotyping, terms of abuse and endearment, the editorial voice and the formation of consensus. Fowler's analysis takes in some of the major news stories of the Thatcher decade - the American bombing of Libya in 1986, the salmonella-in-eggs affair, the problems of the National Health Service and the controversy of youth and contraception.
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
